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This unit was about managing a class while teaching. The chapter went over many things including the differences between individual, pair, and group work, seating arrangement, discipline, teacher talk time vs. student talk time, the uses of eye contact and more. I have learned some of these things prior based on personal experience with teaching. However, there are three main things that I personally learned and think will be useful in the future. The first is seating arrangement. I normally teach in a classroom with separate tables for groups of 4 students. Recently, I've realized that students can get quite noisy at times and now I know why. As stated in this chapter, because each group feels like they're part of a small group as opposed to the whole class, it creates discipline problem sometimes as they become too noisy. I'm interested in trying a couple different seating arrangements to see the affect it'll have on future classes. Though with an average class size of 40 students, it will be impossible to pull off the horseshoe and circle arrangement. The second thing that I found useful was discipline. All my classes are team teaching classes because I am an ALT in Japan. Discipline is usually left to the Japanese teacher of English in charge, so I have very little experience in discipline. However, some of the things mentioned in this chapter is useful even if I'm not in charge of discipline as I can maintain some order and deal with small discipline problems myself. For example, I can use eye contact more skillfully to get the attention of students or using my voice more effectively to get attention. Perhaps, even using names skillfully can help maintain order. Lastly, the third thing is more of a reminder of something that I have learned in a previous unit which is thinking about the role of the teacher in the classroom among different activities. For example, I tend to hop around the groups a lot while group work or pair work is going on trying to gauge progress or just to listen in to see what everyone is saying. As this unit stated depending on what kind of activity is going on, like reading, it's better to sit down and make the atmosphere more relaxed for students. As such, one of my goals in my current lessons is to give more space to students while they do activities.
