Every teacher needs to quiet a noisy classroom at some point, and the louder the noise, the harder it is for the teacher to gain the attention of the class. A loud class not only makes teaching difficult and information near impossible to pass, it also causes and stress and frustration on the teacher.

Even the best-behaved and high-achieving classes can occasionally be too noisy, and, while classroom noise can mean productive learning is taking place among students, here are some tips to help you keep the noise to an acceptable level. Note that some methods may work better than others depending on your grade level, teaching style, personality, or the personality of the class itself–down to who shows up to school that day and who doesn’t.

1. Help the students understand. Explain to them the importance of keeping a quiet classroom and being immediately responsive when you signal for the classroom to be quiet. Make them visualize the impact their noise and lack of attention will have on them in the future - from repeated years to being fired at their jobs in the future. A little scare tactic never hurt anyone.

2. Don't allow the noise get out of control. Once your students become very loud like we mentioned earlier, you would have to take extreme measures to get them under control. You'd find it best if you begin to control the noise while in its infancy.

3. Use a timer. Find a way to display a timer for all the students to see. Explain to them that once the timer runs down to zero (set it to 5 or 10 seconds) everybody is expected to be completely silent. In the absence of a timer, you could count down manually instead.

4. Enlist the students' help. You should not try to assume control of a noisy class without enlisting the cooperation of your students. You could ask for suggestions from the students about how to manage the noise. Let everybody come to an agreement and hold them by their words.

5. Peer pressure. This ties into the previous point about enlisting your students' help.Get two or three well-behaved students to write down a list of the noisy students. Assign some sort of punishment for those whose names appear on the lists. The more the number of lists on which a student's name appears, the more punishment they will serve. That's the stick. For the carrot, have it so that the two or three best-behaved students for the day (or week), get to write the names of noisy students the following day (or week).

6. Model the noise level you want from your students. If you speak softly, your students will emulate you and respond in soft tones too, however, if you speak in a loud voice or shout over the noise, you will dramatically increase the noise level in your class as they will see it as a permission to speak loudly too.

The points above should help you maintain a level of decorum in your classroom.

Do you have other methods of controlling your classroom? Let us know in the comments below.

Source: Exercise Book, the BlueBic blog.

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