My Final Single Day Visit!

Today was the 6^th and final day of my day-a-week prac visits. It was also my first experience at teaching an official lesson! Luckily, it went better than I expected and the kindergartens exceeded my expectations. I did not go crazy attempting to manage the class and for this I can only thank the incredibly useful tips I have learnt from university. Below are the strategies I employed for classroom management:

•  I began the lesson with a review of the classroom rules which were in full view for the students to see throughout the lesson 
• Any students who were being disruptive were asked to sit elsewhere
• When sending students back to their seats, they were sent off in small groups at a time rather than the whole class transitioning together
•  Positive appraisals were given for any good work or behaviour

 Rudolph Dreiker developed a model which outlines the four outcomes of student behaviour – attention seeking, power, revenge and escape (Konza, Grainger, & Bradshaw, 2004) . Even when I am not teaching a lesson, I still find myself getting caught up trying to deal with these behaviours effectively. Below are Dreiker’s suggestions for appropriately responding to these behaviours:

-        Always ignore attention seeking behaviour

-        Do not engage in power struggles

-        Don’t allow yourself to be upset by students wanting revenge. Instead, find a way to convince them that they can belong if they interact positively with other students.

-        Avoid feeling as though a student is “helpless” and encourage any positive efforts. 

I did not have any major issues when doing my lesson today, but when I have taken on small groups I have found it a struggle to follow these suggestions. I acknowledge that this is something I need to work on and I believe it can only come with experience. We are all going to make mistakes when starting out, but it’s a matter of learning from them and doing the research to better yourself professionally. I cannot wait until the day I master these skills!

We won't always have a classroom that looks like this...But we can try!

References

Konza, D., Grainger, J., & Bradshaw, K. (2004). Existing models of behaviour management. In  Classroom Management: A Survival Guide (pp. 79-100). Social Science Press.

My Fifth Practical Lesson

Funnily enough, after my last post venting about the lack of ICT use in the classroom, the teacher this time used a digital reading book on the interactive whiteboard! I was very happy to see this and was even more pleased to see the students’ engagement with it. The story read was called “Jumping Beans” (derived from the Sunshine Online site at http://www.sunshineonline.com.au/) and contained text-related pictures which moved after the text was read as well as a highlight of the words as they were read. This lesson was by far one of the most successful I had seen so far in the classroom. Even the typical behaviourally difficult children were transfixed as they read along with the teacher and it noticeably helped with their comprehension as well as their reading skills. This is most definitely a fantastic tool I will be using as a teacher.

Another observation I made was the difference in the children’s behaviour when a casual teacher is taking over. The difference is tremendous. Due to other commitments my teacher was unavailable to conduct the “news” lesson this week. A casual teacher therefore took over for this lesson and she had a great deal of difficulty attempting to manage the children who decided it was time to do as they liked. One thing I noticed about her was that she did not hold a very strong presence of authority. It has been found that teachers often cause discipline problems themselves (Edwards & Watts, 2004) and I believe that the first step in being able to manage a class is making sure children know who’s boss.

Now classroom management is contained within Element 5: Aspect 5.1.5 of the Professional Teaching Elements (Demonstrate knowledge of practical approaches to managing student behaviour and their applications in the classroom) and it holds great importance. Once of the reasons for this is because a large proportion of teachers leave the profession within the first 5 years of teaching due to the stresses of classroom management (Wilhelm, Dewhurst-Savellis & Parker, 2000). This is a terrible statistic and one that needs to change urgently. I am certain that if teachers do the research and attempt to employ good management strategies this statistic will be greatly reduced. Below is a short YouTube clip which outlines four strategies for creating effective classroom management.

References

Edwards, C. & Watts, V. (2004). Discipline problems and their causes. In Classroom Discipline & Management: An Australasian Perspective (pp. 3-17). New York: John Wiley & Sons.

Wilhelm, K., Dewhurst-Savellis, J., & Parker, G. (2000). Teacher stress: An analysis of why teachers leave and why they stay. Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice, 6(3), 291-304. doi: 10.1080/713698734