* Explain how to establish and maintain a safe and supportive learning environment. 2. 3.1 * Explain how to promote appropriate behaviour and respect for others. 2.3.2 * Explain how to establish ground rules with learners to promote respect for others. 3.3.2

“Good classroom management depends a lot on how you establish the ground rules at the beginning of a course. Students need to know what you expect from them and what they can expect from you during the course. They need to know where the boundaries lie and what will happen if they step over the boundaries.” (http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/language-assistant/teaching-tips/establishing-ground-rules)
Ground rules are useful strategy to help set the expectations of how a …show more content…

Where it can work well is with students who might find it difficult to speak up in front of a group of people they do not yet know. Therefore, a method which involves verbal suggestions charted up by the teacher would preclude those less confident students. What can work well is to split the students into smaller groups to work together, either in pairs, or slightly larger groups. Flip chart paper is often a good tool to use for this method. The advantage with this method is that a more confident student, can, and often does in my experience, do the charting up, and the quieter student is more likely to participate. However, the teacher should use this to an advantage towards establishing a safe and supportive learning environment, by observing what role the students take in this exercise, to look at how the initial roles within the group are. The kinds of roles that can be taken in are discussed in Belbin’s Team Roles theory and has nine roles based on people’s likely behaviours within a team: Shaper, Teamworker, Resource Investigator, Monitor Evaluator, Plant, Completer-Finisher, Implementer, Co-ordinator and Specialist. (https://moodle1.carnegiecollege.ac.uk). This can help the teacher to establish how to provide a supportive learning environment by starting to indicate where some students may need more help to fully participate in the learning environment. My preferred method would be to split the larger group into small