In all schools, no matter what the subject is or how the classes are formed, there will always be classes that will be more difficult to teach than others at your school for a variety of reasons. Furthermore, inexperienced teachers are often the victims of well-behaved classes because students love to find a teacher’s “soft spot”.
So, as Head of Department, discipline within your classrooms is one of your responsibilities.
Below is a set of various strategies you can adopt to help teachers with a difficult class in a way that appears to be random to students. They include:
-
Give a talk about your expectations for the class at the beginning of the year.
-
Walk slowly around the room from time to time, especially when the teacher informs you that a difficult lesson is about to occur.
-
Go to class to examine the students’ workbooks and comment on how they are organizing their books. This process should occur in many classes to disguise why you are in that class.
-
Give a special lesson to add interest to the class, but to demonstrate to the teacher a particular technique that you both agreed you should demonstrate to that teacher.
-
Take a difficult group from class to catch up with them or something special. This allows the teacher to learn more with the rest of the class. As the director of the curriculum in your subject area, this gives you the opportunity to meet more students and the teacher is less stressed.
-
Send special needs students to a specialist teacher to catch up on work.
-
Remove rioters from class with work to a place where you can easily supervise them. You can also interview each student, discussing the consequences of their behavior if it continues.
-
Introduce relief teachers to their classes.
-
Roaming around the respite teacher’s room to make sure student behavior is acceptable.
Make sure the teacher knows what he is doing and why. They may not be very happy, but the teachers working on both sides of that classroom would appreciate having a quiet classroom by their side. So the problem is not just about helping the teacher with the difficult class, but about helping to create the best learning environment for all students and the best teaching environment for each teacher.