Classroom Management Summary
After interviewing my coworker about classroom management, I was able to learn more about her take on the importance of how to successfully direct a classroom. Our textbook states "Classroom management stands out as a variable with the largest impact on student management" (Woolfolk pg 508). This explains that having a further understanding of your students and their skills can often prepare them for better success. Not only will students be more successful but it will also help with stress and exhaustion (pg 508). The goals of classroom management are access to learning, more time for learning, building relationships, and self-management. All of these parts working together will promote a complete classroom.
Not only must you have a space that works on a schedule but it must also promote a positive environment for your student. These environments must be engaging and allow creativity. “We know students need clear goals, and examples, practice and review, active participation, and the chance to form connections.” (Woolfolk 513). As mentioned in my interview and in the textbook, establishing routines and rules is very important. This gives students guidelines and shows them what the expectations are. Teachers should set these from the beginning of the school year and enforce them year round.
Classroom management creates a set of expectations used in an organized classroom environment. It includes routines, rules and consequences. Effective classroom management will set the way for the teacher to engage the students in learning.
Reflection and Interview
Becca has been teaching for 7 years. I work with her at Easter Seals, which is a Therapeutic behavioral school. She has worked in settings like this and understands the importance of classroom management and how students with special needs (and all students really) need routines and schedules. We started off by talking about her classroom philosophy. She explained how much she values and instills routines into her classroom. “If the child doesn't know routines you can't have expectations”. A few of her daily routines that she uses multiple times a day are quiet routines and line up routines. Becca has visuals placed all over the classroom. She says the importance of this is to limit verbal communication and to just show her students. She explained that she reviews the rules and expectations with her students frequently. She will review after breaks, long weekends, if a student misses a day, and as needed.
She begins the school year by planning activities to get the students to know routine, showing visuals, scavenger hunts to get to know the classroom, and simon says of daily and frequent routines. Another thing she and her staff will do in the beginning of the school year is reward often for positive behaviors to encourage those new routines they are establishing.
I learned about some of the routines she established daily and some she uses in the morning to get the day going. One of the routines is her hygiene and bathroom routine. She has students line up in the hallway with her students, use the bathroom, and doing their hygiene. Becca stated that this helps create a routine and get them ready for the day.
One of the questions I was interested in knowing, as a future educator, was how she handles negative behaviors. As someone who works in the same school as her, we deal with things differently but it's great to get feedback and learn how different people do things. She handles things on a very individualized basis because her students are all on IEPs. It's important to address things in an individual way. She keeps open lines of communication with her students parents as she said most of them probably deal with similar behaviors at home. One of the things that stuck out to me is to pay attention to why the behaviors are occurring and focus on that. Why are our students doing this? It could be for attention, because they need something, or a way of communication. In her class many students act out for attention or a way or retaliation.
Becca handles disruptive students in her class room by using a lot of cues and signals between the staff. She emphasized how important it is that her staff are all on the same page and when the student needs to be removed from the situation. She utilizes breaks in the hallway as a way for the student to calm down. Some of her students experience sensory overload and sometimes a break in the hall can really help them.
When it comes to rewards and token systems her classroom is going to start using a class Dojo. She agrees, like me, that reward systems are a great way to see a desired behavior. We both believe that they can be individualized and modified for each student. She has seen some great things come out of it. One of the things she mentioned was how they can always change, be taken away, faded, and brought back in. They aren’t long term and students NEED to learn to eventually live without them. That is our goal as educators!
My biggest take from my interview was that we need to establish routines and expectations with our students. It's very important that students have consistency but also know how to handle when things don’t always go the same. We need to make sure our students know we want and expect from them all the time so they can succeed. Another thing I learned is to always take care of yourself and leave your work at work!
Just one quick comment I want to make is about her use of token economies and how these are not long-term solutions. I really like that she sees systems like this as temporary measures and she tries to fade these. She makes a good point that when the students are home, it is very hard for the parents to maintain a token economy.
ReplyDeleteHello, I believe thats something we REALLY need to take into account using these systems. They are hard to transfer into households and can hardly be used there. As educators we need to work with the behaviorist and parents on what are some useful tools that the parents can use at home to help the child (and parents) when they are dealing with difficult behaviors.
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