Classroom Management

Describe

This week’s class reading was focused on classroom management.  Classroom management is a critical part of being an effective teacher.  Our job is to teach kids.  Most teachers get into the profession for the love of young people, the chance to make a difference in our future, and a love for a specific discipline.  No teacher sits at the forefront of a career choice and says, “I’d love to repeatedly say be quiet, and stop hitting each other, for a living”.  The fact of the matter is that without efficient classroom management strategies these requests will be a mainstay in our classrooms.  One of the big things from the chapter that I enjoyed learning was that the amount of time spent learning is one of the biggest indicators of success for a school (Slavin, 2010).  I felt like I already knew this, but seeing it in a researched setting was reassuring.  Some of the other pertinent points in the reading (for me) were the excerpts on maintaining momentum and starting the year out right.  In my own practice I found out that I didn’t start my first year out the way I should have.  Knowing this made reading this chapter much like walking through a haunted house, I knew it was going to be in there, I just wasn’t sure when.  Maintaining momentum was not something I felt like I struggled with until reading this portion of the chapter.  In order for students to truly learn we have to teach effective and engaging lessons (Slavin, 2010).  Part of these engaging lessons includes keeping a good flow and not allowing interruptions to throw us off course.  Starting out the year right is rather self-explanatory but its importance cannot be stressed enough.

Analyze

Classroom management is just as important, maybe even more important, than content knowledge.  If our classrooms resemble that of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s breakdown in Kindergarten Cop then we will never get the chance to show our passion and knowledge for the subject matter.  Two things from the chapter that truly sum up effective classroom management are prevention and clear rules (Slavin, 2010).  By having clear rules that do not allow for a lot of discussion and deviance it makes enforcement easier.  When we combine simple rules with effective enforcement we can arrive at prevention.  One of the hardest things to deal with is being in the middle of a school year and yet you are still addressing minor incidents that really only take away from instruction.  This type of prevention goes back to having a very productive first week of school.  I recently completed my first year teaching and I can’t wait to get into year two, simply for the management aspect.  Classroom management is all about being proactive instead of reactive.

Reflect

My first year in the classroom was…trying… to say the least.  I taught Read 180 at an inner city school.  Read 180 is designed specifically for students who read 1 to 2 grade levels below their current grade.  Needless to say there was more than a fair share of behavior issues.  The mistake I made was going from college senior to first year teacher.  Things like bathroom breaks and punctuality were things I just assumed kids could handle.  This assumption did not lead me to address these issues proactively at the beginning of the year, by the middle when they had become a problem I had no real way out.  I learned that kids desire direction.  They don’t always want to be told what you’re telling them to do, but they want to be told what to do.  Kids don’t hate rules, they hate rules that they don’t understand.  I feel like I made the most progress when I would explain rules and why they are the way they are.  Skipping is a great example.  I have explained to kids that if they are supposed to be in my class and are not and they were present to the class before mine then I have to write them up, not writing them up is not documenting that they are missing, and that could be negligence.  When I would explain rules to kids they would have little “aha” moments.  That type of reasoning combined with an effective first week is what I hope to employ to make my second year a much more controlled year than the first.