Essay about How to Creating a Positive Atmosphere in Your Classroom. Introduction

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According to Rogers cited in Coetzee, Van Niekerk, & Wydeman (2008), classroom climate is the tone that the class experiences in normal daily life. The classroom is essentially a group of learners brought together for the common goal of learning. The attitude of the class depends on the attitudes of the individuals in the classroom, as well as the educator’s attitude. The educators’ role is to use their knowledge, skill and behaviour to create an effective and positive learning environment in their classroom (Coetzee, Van Niekerk, & Wydeman, 2008). Coetzee et al (2008) postulate that the educator can develop a positive classroom environment by: distinguishing the features of a classroom as a learning environment, discussing stages for …show more content…
Educators can create a predictable learning environment where there is a balance between difficult and easy task (Coetzee et al. 2008). They can provide instructional support and model the tasks that learners are supposed to complete. Large section of work can be broken into manageable pieces, and can be shared between the educators or different groups in the class. Learners can be encouraged to take control of their learning through participation and decision-making (Coetzee et al. 2008). All of these recommendations are simple teaching strategies that are inherently used in OBE systems, and can be put in place by the educator. They are the implicit skills embedded in your daily curriculum that result in the promotion of intrinsic motivation. Perhaps a more complex strategy is, eliciting specific behaviour from the learners, which leads to the development of intrinsic motivation, through explicit methods.

According to research, there are four general requirements that need to be met in order to change learner behaviour and motivate them to learn; these are attention, relevance, confidence and satisfaction (Keller, 1987). The first requirement is to get the learners attention and keep it. Keeping learner attention presents the greatest challenge: here the key is to ensure that learning tasks are challenging enough. Thereafter the educator needs to ensure that the work presented is relevant to the learners, this