How to Master Classroom Management

To keep you and your students sane.

David Weller
3 min readNov 3, 2021

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Contrary to popular opinion, they don’t make the class boring, they actually free up energy and time for the fun stuff.

Routines are your best friend because they:

  1. Save you from having to re-invent the wheel every time you do something.
  2. Help even the slowest student know what’s coming next and feel confident.
  3. Help your classroom and behaviour management like you would not believe.

Imagine two teachers; Teacher A doesn’t have any routines, but good Teacher B does.

Teacher A

Teacher A does things differently every time. Not a lot, but enough that he has to explain to the students how to do things, so the students are forced to use some of their limited reservoir of attention to listen to instructions for the boring stuff. All this takes time in class. The students often get it wrong too, especially the younger learners and the lower level learners. This leads to more time wasted in correcting them. The students start to misbehave as their attention wanders.

Teacher B

Teacher B has a routine for all those routines. When she starts a new class, she takes some time to explain her routines…

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David Weller

Lessons, stories and visuals to develop your language teaching and learning. 20 years in education, 3 books, and a twice-monthly newsletter.