In our case our angels do not even notice the teacher in the class. They are walking around the classroom, exchanging notes and opinions on yesterday’s film. At this point the teacher is getting a little bit nervous and tries to calm them down in a louder voice, ‘This is not a playground, please stop talking’. They lower their voices but of course it is not enough to conduct a lesson.

I am certain that every teacher has experienced a similar discipline problem. And I am more than sure that every teacher has been trying to figure out how to handle this everlasting problem. Is there any solution which can bring success in achieving discipline and order  in the classroom? I  have read  about six different books about the discipline problem. There are many more but after the sixth one, I  decided to stop reading someone else’s advice. Obviously, it was helpful and I use some of the ideas from time to time. I just came to the conclusion that theory is one thing and practice is another.

Armed with theoretical solutions from books and things which my more experienced friends have advised me, I felt ready to deal with any possible sort of discipline problems. At least that was what I thought. It did not quite work as I supposed it would.

I have two classes, one of  31 and one of 28 students in a secondary school - a first year group and a second year group. When they are divided into smaller groups of 12, there is a chance to achieve something during the class. Hell starts at the moment when they connect their powers together in one group.

I tried some of the methods which  worked in two or three classes but after that it came back to ‘normal’. I was getting  desperate.  During one lesson I asked them to take out a piece of paper and write a short pop-quiz from the previous class, thinking that this form of punishment will teach them to behave a little better. Unfortunately for me, but fortunately for them, most of the quizzes were excellent. In a way it made me happy. It was a sign that they were intelligent kids with a little problem with their big mouths which could not shut up.

I knew that I had to use their talkativeness to help me to teach, and them to learn English. This is when I got some material which turned out to be a miracle.

I conducted the following: I informed the class that we were not going to have an English class but I would like to talk to them about their group. I have to mention that I had been talking to individual students and small groups of students and every time everybody was blaming somebody else for their behaviour. This was also a sign for me that such a discussion would succeed. All of them started listening carefully. I told them that our goal was to come up with some solution how to overcome the problem of self-control. I asked them to divide into groups of four and on a piece of paper make a list of things which would help us with our problem.  To my astonishment they started listing different points. After about fifteen minutes I collected the lists. It was very pleasant to see that they actually wrote some ideas:
 

- keep the class separate
- change the teacher
- the teacher has to encourage students to behave better
- introduce some games to relax the atmosphere
- more interesting way of conducting the class
- playing soft music
- the teacher should be peaceful and calm
- change the position of the desks (horse shoe)
- close scrutiny of the problem, there may be two or three students who are responsible for this disorder
- try to find out why the students are not interested in the subject