The Human Resources and Development Committee (HRDC) of the Department of Engineering held a webinar on Effective Classroom Management on Tuesday 09 Nov 2021 at 12.00 PM. The hour-long live session on the MS Teams was led by Mr. Joy Arulappan, Lecturer from the English Language Center, UTAS-Al Mussanah.
The webinar focused on some of the simple and practical classroom practices that have the potential to bring about qualitative transformation to the tertiary level teaching. The session commenced with highlighting the classroom, students and the teacher as the three pillars of teaching and learning and the level of micro management of the three. After a brief introduction to the heterogeneous and mixed ability nature of classrooms, Mr. Joy enquired about the possibility of teaching all students during a given class. Following a short interaction with participants, the presenter drew their attention to the Pareto Principle put forward by Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923). The rest of the webinar then was spent for the discussion of some specific classroom management exercises aimed at effectively achieving as many learning outcomes of lessons as possible (at least eighty percent!) using minimum efforts (twenty percent!).
The activities were grouped as pre-teaching, while-teaching and post-teaching. Some of the exercises included writing (a brief) lesson note/plan, arriving/logging on to the class well in advance, sharing the targeted lesson outcomes with students, having clarity about the lesson stages, generating interest through varying the lesson tasks and providing feedback after each stage of the lesson.
The strategies for questioning during the lesson were also discussed along with the importance of echoing and correction of students’ works. The webinar concluded with a few tips for group tasks and the pivotal place of consistency in every lesson delivered.
The webinar was organized by Mr. Karthikheyen Shanmugham, HRDC Member of Engineering Department, who welcomed the Head of the Department Mr. Abdul Hamid Al-Hinai, Head of Section (M & I) Dr. B. Vijayaraj, Head of Section (E & E) Mr. Mohammed Sajjid Ali, Head of Section (C & A) Mr. Ammar Arif and other staff members, and introduced the guest speaker to the 71 participants.