Minimizing the Chaos through Cooperative Classroom Management

An experienced teacher trainer describes her first week with a large class of Moroccan teacher-trainees: group work that was too loud to hear, impossible to monitor, and dominated by a few voices. Her answer was not less group work but more organisation - and handing part of the running of the class to the pupils.

The heart of the article is a way of giving every group member a colour and a job, so that every pupil speaks, the volume stays down and the talk stays in English.

1. Collect a card from every pupil on the first day, with the name they want to be called. Use the cards to form mixed groups of four.
2. Mark the cards with a letter for each group a pupil has been in, so that new groups can be formed quickly without repeating old ones.
3. Give each group member a colour - red, orange, yellow, green. Calling out a colour ("All the greens, stand up") gets an answer from every group without anyone volunteering.
4. Attach a job to each colour: red keeps the group on topic, orange keeps the volume down, yellow keeps the talk in English, green makes sure everyone takes part. Rotate the jobs each week.
5. Let the class decide the expectations and the consequences - for example, a pupil who keeps slipping out of English stands for two minutes. Because pupils set them, they are seldom needed.

Colours solve a problem every Sri Lankan teacher has met: the same few hands going up. When "the yellows" are asked to report, every group has to produce someone, and the quiet pupil has been warned in advance.

The language monitor works even with weak classes if two phrases are taught first: "How do you say ... in English?" and "What does ... mean?" Pupils can then stay in English while asking for the English.