Class management is the wide variety of skills and techniques that teachers use to keep students organized, orderly, focused, attentive, on task, and academically productive during a class. In the class for the goal of all the students to behave and properly self-regulate in the classroom. For my personal teaching experience the greatest difficultly I had when teaching in the classroom was classroom management. This was largely due to having so many diverse classes with different ages of students and finding my own personal way to teach. I found myself teaching the same way the homeroom teacher taught and this was hard because it was not personalized to my way of teaching.
One of the personalized things that I brought into the classroom was how to get the students attention when the lesson was to start?
During my practicum I used Edutopia to come up with ways to grab students attention. Edutopia had some great ideas for getting students attention, http://www.edutopia.org/groups/classroom-management/737576. After going over the site a couple times I came up with the idea to use a musical triangle. The triangle was in the tune of D, which I have been told is very soothing and relaxing for adolescence to hear.
In the classroom I routinely used the triangle in all my classes. The students seemed to really like it and even ask the TTOC to use it on our TTOC day. The reason that this work so well was that the student knew the expectation that when I asked for their attention they had to listen for the instructions. When I would use my voice it did not caryy over the students talking in the classroom so sometimes not all the students would not hear that I was asking for their attention. With the triangle I could ring it or better yet have a student ring it. Since the triangle makes sound vibrations several second long it give the students time to complete what they were working on and then pay attention to the teacher. I feel like this would be a good tool to add to my TTOC kit for September. When I get my own class I will find what works best for the students and possibly use a different non-verbal signal to get students attention.