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