Compliance is basically having students do what you tell them to do, but how do you achieve that? You build it. My first few classes with new students will always start with teaching classroom commands / rules. These commands I turn into a compliance sequence by getting the students to act out the commands and reward them with points and praise the students who are most compliant. You can have the students stand up, sit down, be quiet (finger on lips), hand up, hand down

Let's look at our home entertainment setup in China. Renting in China you often have a TV included with the apartment or you can negotiate to have one before you first rent a place, so buying a TV isn’t generally a worry. That is where the convenience ends. Back home I’d have a TV box, which I can use to watch free channels, paid cable and streaming services like Netflix. However, in China I can’t do that not without the hassle of setting up a work around for the Chinese

A points system is one of the most valuable classroom management tools and ESL teacher has. I split my class into teams based on the rows and get them to give me a team name based on a theme like fruits, animals etc. I use a tally system as it's easy to alter but you could do stars, smiley etc. A points system has many benefits; Firstly, it's fun! Kids thrive on healthy competition. It can be as means to encourage students with extra points for longer answers or more pa

The most effective classroom management is proactive not reactive. How can you be proactive? One way is your choice of teaching material. Firstly, your materials (ppts, songs, stories, games etc) should be appropriate for your students’ age and graded to their English level. Next, you need to choose materials that appeal to a child’s eyes, so it should be bright, colorful, fun, funny and even cute. Take a look at the day-to-day books, tv, movies and songs these childre

Students can be disruptive for a multitude of reasons from boredom to attention seeking to special needs there’s no one way to deal with disruption so here are some strategies I use. I’ve found the most effective way to deal with disruptive students is peer discipline. I use a points tally reward system so If a student from a team is disruptive I will deduct a point from the team. Normally, the students from that team will let the disruptive student know that they don’t wa