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Teaching Tips: Classroom Management 
 
Managing large classes is a challenge that many teachers face. An additional challenge 
is to motivate students and keep them interested in English. The following suggestions 
are aimed at helping to overcome these challenges. 
 
 
General suggestions for managing large classes 
 
• Tell students where to sit in class so that friends are separated. Friends often sit 
together and spend class time chatting. Changing the seating arrangement from time 
to time gives students a chance to interact and practice with different classmates, 
keeping the interactions fresh and interesting. 
 
• Vary student pairings and groupings. 
 
• Work with students at the beginning of the school year on understanding and 
responding to classroom directions in English. Make sure students can form pairs and 
groups quickly. 
 
• Establish class rules early on and enforce them. Make sure students know what is 
expected of them in your classroom and be consistent. Acknowledge and encourage 
students frequently. It can be helpful to have students make a list of rules with you at 
the beginning of the year. Students will thus feel invested in the rules, and will be 
more likely to follow them. 
 
• Always try to have more activities than necessary for classes. Read the lesson plan 
for that lesson. Note all the suggested activities and prepare any extra worksheets for 
that lesson. Planned activities sometimes turn out to be uninteresting or otherwise 
inappropriate for your students. If students are uninterested, they will be more likely 
to chat with friends and become unruly. For this reason, always have extra activities 
ready to replace any that need to be discarded. 
 
• Vary the way you do activities to avoid being predictable. Vary between whole class 
work, individual work, group work, and pair work. In this way, the class will be more 
interesting, and students will get a chance to work with different classmates. It is 
best to avoid lengthy individual or pair oral practice in front of the class, since most 
of the students will not be involved and will lose interest. 
 
• Model tasks rather than explain them. Speak English as much as you can in class. 
Encourage students to guess the meaning of new words and sentence patterns. In this 
way, students can immediately see what has to be done and can spend more class 
time practicing the target language. 
 
 
 
 
 
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General suggestions for pair and group work 
 
Pair and group work can be an excellent way of ensuring that all students get a 
chance to practice the new language. Pairing or grouping also provides a chance for 
 
 
 
you to work with students individually without stopping the whole class. However, 
pair and group work can raise classroom-management concerns.© Cambridge 
University Press 2010 Photocopiable Classroom Management 2 
 
 
 
The following are some helpful tips to ensure successful pair and group work: 
 
• Make sure that the majority of students are familiar with the language before having 
them work in pairs or groups. If students know the language, they are more likely to 
complete the task successfully, thus increasing their motivation and participation. 
 
• Confirm that students know exactly what to do to complete the activity. 
Demonstrate each activity with volunteers once or twice, and then check students’ 
understanding by having them tell you how the activity should be done. If students 
know how to do the task, they will be able to concentrate on the language and not 
waste time asking each other what to do. 
 
• Match pairs and groups according to ability level and personality. In many cases, 
pairing stronger students with weaker ones is beneficial. The weaker students get the 
help they need and may more readily ask a classmate questions that they would not 
ask the teacher. The stronger students are challenged by having to explain the 
material. Pair or group shy students with extroverted ones as well as disruptive 
students with well-behaved ones. In this way students will encourage one another to 
speak more or behave better, and the burden of classroom management is shared 
with the students. 
 
• Adapt the grouping procedure suggested in the Student’s Book to suit your needs if 
pair work activities are not feasible in your class due to a large number of students or 
desks that do not move. Different groupings include dividing students by rows and 
having them work together or dividing the class into two equal parts. 
 
• Not all activities need to be completed by every student. For those activities that 
do not require that all students finish them, stop the activity when fifty to sixty 
percent of the students have completed it. If some students have to sit and wait for 
others to finish, they will become bored and start chatting with friends. It is also 
beneficial to have additional activities that the faster students can work on. 
 
 
 
 
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• Appoint one student to be a language monitor to remind group members to speak 
only English during group work. 
 
 
Each teacher’s teaching situation and teaching philosophy is different. For this 
reason, it may be necessary to modify the suggestions above to make them 
appropriate for your needs. In addition, you may want to try a few of the suggestions 
in the same class and note which ones work and which ones do not. Keeping a log of 
this can be very useful. Lastly, sharing classroom-management issues and solutions 
with other teachers is an excellent way of learning from others’ experiences. Peers 
are a wonderful resource.