Classroom Management Revised

There are so many things you need to think about when trying to manage your classroom. As I talked about in my last post, I really want my classroom to be a warm, welcoming environment for my students. I want them to know and feel like they can talk to me about anything and come to me when they are having troubles in my class or others. In order to accomplish that goal, I think I need to use SLT a few ways. First I need to make sure that I teach to my students in their "language" so that way we are always on the same page. Misunderstanding between the student and teacher can lead to misbehaving, and that is what I don't want.

When teaching my lessons, I would of course need to use DLT and start teaching at the most concrete and basic level possible. Then once my students developed higher level thinking skills I could teach in more abstract terms as well as concrete terms.

I also need to make sure there is a good amount of student and teacher interaction since I will be the more knowledgeable peer in the classroom for the first part of school. If I am able to form a relationship with my students my ideal classroom environment will hopefully be accomplished, and my students will feel comfortable around me.

I also plan on walking around the room constantly when possible to make sure that my students are paying attention. By walking around and having my students pay attention, I am using CLT through keeping my students actively mentally engaged. If I can successfully keep my students mentally engaged, then I will be able to affect their schemes in some way. Ideally affecting their schemes would be in the form of a positive learning experience.

I also need to use CLT to manage my classroom by teaching in my student's Zone of Proximal Development. This way my students should not become bored or discouraged with the information that I am teaching to them.

I also want to motivate my students to want to be in class everyday. I could do this by not wasting their time with silly assignments and "time fillers." Doing so would be using BLT in my classroom. Of course I could use the system of rewards and punishments in order to manage my classroom, but I want to only use that system when completely needed. I really don't want to develop the relationship with my students where they depend on constant praise for good work.

Another thing that I think is really important to classroom management is allowing students to talk in small groups about their ideas. That way students can share their ideas, compare them with other ideas, and come up with new ideas as a group as well. This would again be using SLT in my classroom.

Overall, I am sure there are so many more things that I can do to manage my classroom. However, since i am barley a future teacher I think I will focus on a small group of management options before trying to control everything. Which is also exactly what I don't want to happen in my classroom. My class will be inviting, fun, and flexible, or at least I hope I can make it that way in the future.

Classroom management

This weeks blog is about classroom management. This is a weird topic for me because of the examples of classroom management that I have had in the past. In high school I had super strict teachers who liked to run their classroom on a schedule, but I also had teachers who were so relaxed and just went with the flow of how the day was going. On certain days I liked one over the other, or a mixture of both. Of course on the days I didn't feel like doing crap or accomplishing anything I liked the lazy classroom structure, but on other days that I really wanted to get work done I liked my teachers with schedules.

For my classroom in the future there are few things regarding classroom management that I really want to do. First, I really want to have structure, but I want that structure to be flexible. I do not want to have to plan out every little thing of the day, I want to be able to go with the flow if something comes up that needs to be addressed. I also want the environment of my classroom to be fun and inviting. I want to teach Psychology or Sociology, which are both fun topics, so that is exactly how my classroom should be. Now I know that leaves room for students to not take me or the class seriously, and I do not want that to happen. To manage my classroom I want to do a few things like my Practicum teacher as well. He almost always does in class assignments and doesn't assign much homework. I like that, because when I watch the students almost all of them seem like they are paying attention and actively mentally engaged which is great. He also calls on the students a lot and encourages classroom discussion which I also really like. I want to walk around my classroom and form appropriate relationships with my students as well. I had great professional relationships with some of my high school teachers, and those are the ones that have influenced me the most in deciding to become a teacher. So I really want to do the same for my students in the future.

Another thing that I will really need to watch in my classroom is nonverbals. I know that I am not always aware of what my facial expressions or body language say to other people, and my friends point it out all the time. I don't know if it's just that I am somewhat of an awkward person at times, or if I am truly not aware of what I'm doing at times. Regardless, I will need to learn to play close attention to that.

I know there are a couple more things that I could do to improve classroom management in my classroom in the future, but hopefully that is good enough for now.

Group Evals

So I typed out a paragraph for each group, and then somehow hit the wrong button and everything disappeared, so unfortunately retyping means they won't be as long.

The first group: I liked their use of DLT and concrete examples. They even had a PowerPoint and pictures to show us more examples and details. They allowed us to eat some of the food on our tables which was nice, and I liked their presentation. I don't have written down in my notes what the purpose of it was really, could have just missed it, or it could have been to teach us about the food groups. Anyway, overall I think they did a good job!

The second group: Everyone got riddles and were told to think of words that sounded the same but were spelled differently. It was cool to see how many words we would come up with like that, and some of the riddles were silly so that was nice to not have such a structured environment. I think they did a good job at keeping everyone entertained and involved.

The third group: This group read us a story and I really liked it. It was a story about a princess, prince, and a dragon. I had never read it before, and like that it wasn't the typical happy ending Disney book. They also talked about respect with us, and examples of disrespect in the story. I thought that if they were really doing the lesson with 3rd graders like we were pretending to be then they would have hopefully gotten their lesson of respect across. Great job!

The fourth group: This group had us sing the alphabet and play a game. The game had us up and moving which was nice and we got to work together in teams, so that was fun. On of the girls said that she had used this game with young kids, and I thought that was a great idea. If the game could keep college students involved, then I'm sure it would work with young kids who were learning their letters. This was my favorite group, because I thought that all of us could apply that same game to our classrooms either in that format or another that fit our subject area.

Overall, it was nice to have a more relaxed day in class, and I think everyone did a great job!

Presentation

Last class my group talked to the class about social norms. We picked this subject, because we thought it was a relatively easy concept that most of our classmates should already understand and be able to connect with. We chose to make videos and allow for some classroom discussion, both of which I thought went fairly well. The class seemed to enjoy our somewhat funny videos, and the overall participation was great. The thing that I didn't like was the time limit. We wanted to more into why social norms are so important in our society and other societies around the world. Overall, for throwing a quick presentation together and making awkward videos in the process, I think my group did a pretty good job. The other groups also did well, and I'm looking forward to seeing the rest of the presentations tomorrow.

Motivational Factors

Motivational factors are all around in the classroom. Throughout my internships and practicum so far I have seen quite a few examples. The first one that really sticks out to me is goals. I was in a 1^st and 3^rd grade classroom. At the beginning of the year, both teachers talked with their classes about what the classroom goals were. They talked through each one and modeled what each one would look like throughout the year. At first the teachers were a little easy on the rules, but as the year went on they got more and more strict. On the list of goals was another motivational factor, respect for the teacher. Respect for the teacher seems to be a big one in classrooms. I have also seen cases where home environment plays a role in how students behave during the school day. This is where teacher as student relationships come into play. One of my teachers that I was working with noticed that things were not great at home for one of her students so she formed a great relationship with that student. I know there are many more factors that play into the everyday classroom, but those were a quick few that I had time for  J

Something I do, but don't know why...

Something I do ALL the time and don’t know why would have to be when I  see a car that looks like someone else’s I know I check to see if they are the person driving it. I clearly know that my friends are not in town right now because they are all at different colleges, but for some reason I look anyway. It also never fails that when I notice it is not them I am somewhat disappointed, as if I expect them to come surprise me or something.  I love my friends, so it makes sense that I look for them, but really aren’t I smarter than that? I guess I could connect this by CLT maybe, but that could be a little shaky. My schema tends to tell me that my friends are still here, just like they were this summer. It also helps me recognize the same color and make of cars that they drive when I see them around, hence why I look for my friends when I see those specific cars. My schema hasn’t caught up to the fact that they are no longer here and won’t be back unless they visit until Christmas break.  Until it decides to catch up, I will probably still continue to look for them in those cars. Other than possibly connecting that to CLT, I guess I don’t really know how else to connect it to any of the other learning theories.

Thinking Out Loud

When Professor Kruse asked us to blog this week about how a friend would explain a topic we would someday like to teach I thought the assignment was easy. I decided to pick a broad subject hoping to get lots of information from my roommate. However, as I later found out picking my roommate who is working on a biology major might not have been such a great idea.

                I asked my roommate for 5 minutes of her time, and she willingly agreed thinking it was to talk about our normal subjects we tend to bitch about. However when I explained to her that I needed her to tell me everything she knew about sociology she seemed a little less interested. She explained to me that the only background knowledge she could go off of was what she learned back in high school. These were the things she recalled and could tell me about:

·         Studying serial killers and they way other people think their brains work

·         Studying different cultures

·         Sociology is related to psychology

·         Studying human behavior within a society

·         What people see as “norms” and how they make their lifestyles fit into those norms.

We could hold a pretty good conversation about those topics, and I think she used some of the learning theories we have talked about a little bit, obviously without knowing she was using them. The theory that jumps right out at me is CLT, because my friend used her schema and background knowledge to tell me about what she remembered learning in high school. She was able to connect the information she already knew with information that I supplied her with during our conversation. I think she also used SLT, but I could be stretching that a little bit. She really emphasized that sociology is studying how people interact with other people and everything else around them. She even knew some facts that I hadn’t learned in my sociology class, so she became the “more knowledgeable peer” at one point. Overall, she gave me some good information and key points that she remembered, but next time I think I will test these theories on someone else. Sorry roomie.