Classroom Management
Kauchak’s book defines classroom management as all the actions teachers take to create an environment that supports academic and social-emotional learning. Developing good and effective classroom management skills is crucial for all teachers. Good classroom management procedures will give students and teachers a better learning and teaching environment.
Classroom management is important to everyone connected with education. New teachers often fear that students will not respect them. Experienced teachers usually cite establishing management as a major goal in the first few weeks of the year. Principals give low ratings to teachers who lack control of their classes. Teachers need to be aware of their role as classroom managers and how to enhance their teaching skills accordingly (Good & Brophy, 2006). Good and Brophy (2006) believe teachers need to plan everything about their class. They recommend teachers have a planned setting from day one. They suggest teachers should take in consideration their own personality and plan their unique approach to the following aspects of their classroom:
- Physical setting of the classroom: Teachers need to consider sitting arrangements and storage areas.
- Psychological climate: Teachers need to establish and maintain the emotional tone with the procedures of their classroom.
- Attendance and Opening procedures: Teachers wish to start the class in such manner that students feel comfortable and secure and at the same time are doing something productive and worthwhile.
- Seating arrangement and orientation in classroom: Teachers should inform students about work areas and materials.
- Class rules and system of discipline: Teachers should go over basic rules with their students.
- School rules: Students must follow certain rules that pertain to the school.
- Daily schedule: Teachers should explain daily classroom schedule to the students.
- Monitors/buddies: Many teachers use class member to help with numerous classroom chores.
- Miscellaneous needs: Students continually need help while working independently at their desks. They need to sharpen pencils, get drinks, go to the restroom etc. Routine procedures must be established for these matters.
- Traffic patterns: Students must be instructed on how to enter the classroom, how to leave when dismissed, what to do during drills and how to move from one area to another.
- Playground regulation: Students must know what the regulations are regarding behavior, use of equipment and length of time.
- Paraprofessionals. The duties of these classroom assistants should be may clear.
Teachers who approach classroom management as a process of establishing and maintaining effective learning environments tend to be more successful than teachers who place more emphasis on their roles as authority figures. Teachers are authority figures and will need to require their students to conform to certain rules and procedures. However, as Good and Brophy (2006) explained, “classroom management should be designed to support instruction.”
General Management Principles
Successful classroom management begins with goals. Teachers need to base their principles on the following assumptions:
- Students are likely to follow rules that they understand and accept.
- Discipline problems are minimized when students are regularly engaged in meaningful activities geared to their interests and aptitudes.
- Therefore, management should be approached with an eye toward establishing productive learning environment, rather than from a negative viewpoint stressing control of misbehavior.
- The teacher’s goal is to develop inner self control in students, not merely to exert control over them.
According to Good and Brophy (2006) some helpful teacher’s attitudes are: Plan rules and procedures in advance, let students assume responsibility, create a teacher student cooperation agreement, minimize disruptions and delays, plan independent activities as eell as organized lessons, maintain a safe and effective environment, recognize and reinforce desired behavior.
Now that teachers are aware of their responsibility as classroom manager and understands the classroom flows and has set a group of rules, it is important to build a strategy on how to keep the students’ good work. Here are some ways to reinforce desirable behavior and provide any on-the-spot instructions that may be needed according to Good and Brophy (2006):
Use positive language to cue desirable behavior: Learning is easier and more pleasant when we are shown what to do rather than told what not to do. Recognize and reinforce desired behavior: Students’ accomplishments should be rewarded not only with good grades, but also with verbal praise, public recognition, symbolic rewards, extra privileges or activity choices, or material rewards. Teachers need to specify desired behavior in positive terms, provide instruction and opportunities to practice routines, offer cues or reminders when procedures are to be followed, and monitor student’s compliance with expectations.
Coping with Problems Effectively
Problems may occur; however, teachers must be prepared to cope with them.
Dealing with minor inattention and misbehavior:
- Monitor the entire classroom regularly.
- Ignore minor fleeting, misbehavior.
- Stop sustained minor misbehavior. When minor misbehavior is repeated or intensified, or when it threatens to spread or become disruptive, teachers cannot simply ignore it. These techniques might help.
- Eye contact
- Touch and gesture
- Physical proximity
- Asking for responses
Dealing with prolonged or disruptive misbehavior: Teachers will have to call out students’ names and correct them. First demand appropriate behavior. Second students can be reminded of rules and expectations.
Conflict Resolution: Most misbehavior can be either prevented or handled on the spot. Higher-rated teachers concentrate on helping their students understand and cope with the conflicts or problems that cause their misbehavior. These teachers usually do not find it necessary to punish problem students, although they might include punishments as part of the larger solution strategy.
Finding out what problem behavior means: Remember surface behavior may be just a symptom of an underlying problem, and the symptomatic behavior may not be as important as the reasons that are producing it. The best way to understand students’ behavior is to talk with them about it in conferences during a free period or after school. Teachers should think twice before involving other adults, because this escalates the problems in the minds of all the concerned and labels the student as a “problem student”. The expected benefits of involving adults must be weighed against the damage that could result from such labeling.
Managing student’s behavior
According to C.M. Charles (1983) teachers are concerned about three kinds of behavior: 1- behavior that affronts a sense of morality, 2. Behavior that is defiant and aggressive, and 3- behavior that disrupts class work.
Here are some attempts at discipline mentioned by C.M. Charles (1983):
Kounin System: The teacher oversees the classroom and attention from students is obtained through motivation.
Neo Skinnerian Systems: Principles of reinforcement elaborated by B.F. Skinner, often referred to as systems of behavior modification or contingency management. They all operate on the same fundamental principal: if you reward people for what they do, they become more likely to do that same thing again.
The Glasser System: William Glasser System which emphasizes in continually stressing students’ responsibility. Establish rules leading to student success. Accept no excuses for bad behavior. When student misbehave direct them to make value judgements about their behavior.
Dreikurs System: Rudolf Dreikurs, an Austrian psychiatrist, did not view discipline as a procedure for stifling unwanted behavior, but rather as an ongoing process in which students learned to impose limits on themselves, to be responsible for their own actions, to respect themselves and others, and to take responsibility for influencing others to behave well.
Ginott’s system: Also, saw discipline as a developmental process to be accomplished over a long term. He referred to discipline as a “series if little victories” that win over the student and help the student behave acceptably and responsible.
Jones’s System: Psychologist Frederick Jones shared that limit setting is a procedure of formulating class rules and establishing boundaries that separate acceptable behavior from unacceptable. The boundaries for those rules are established and maintained most effectively through use of body language, a set of physical mannerisms.
Canter system Lee Canter, by training a specialist in child guidance, has put together an approach to school discipline called assertive discipline.
Effectiveness: teachers need something that works, that is a technique that suppresses and redirects misbehavior quickly without emotional confrontation, while maintaining positive working relationships between teacher and student. Rationale for discipline: Firm control is not inhumane. -Teachers have basic teaching rights. Students have basic classroom rights. With these facts’ teachers should determine that they will let no misbehavior interfere with their right to teach and their students’ rights to learn.
System for dealing immediately with misbehavior
- Clear identification of expectation… Class rules
- Enforcing limits on student’s behavior
Teachers need to build their own personal system of discipline. None of the systems mentioned above are a perfect fit for all teachers and all students all the time. What remains is for teachers to construct their own personal system of discipline, as to complement their personalities and philosophies while attending at the same time to realities of their students, schools, curricula, and communities.
Kauchak (2014) highlights the importance of creating a positive classroom climate and a community of learners. If all students can feel they can work together and help everyone learn in addition to feel emotionally safe, connected to their peers and teacher, the role of the teacher as classroom manager will be easier.
Kauchak (2014) says, “Creating a positive classroom climate and a community of learners will help your students learn to accept responsibility for their own actions, and disruptions and misbehavior will decrease, so you will have more time to devote to teaching and learning,”.
Sharing learned experiences among teachers
Creating a shared understanding of classroom management builds on the assumption that teachers have a subjective opinion concerning their role as classroom managers and that these opinions can form the basis of shared understanding. Berger Luckmann (1967) Fullan (2001) used teacher´s subjective realities as a concept to describe their personal understanding based on daily work. Teachers vary in their classroom behavior.
There is a need for teachers to share their experiences and learn from each other. Reflecting together with colleagues can help teachers to enhance their awareness of their behavior as well as their attitudes and beliefs through a process that creates opportunities for learning.
To ensure that new learning in the organization will be a guide to current and future actions, it must be recorded in written records.Creating a shared understanding of classroom management through teacher’s development and the implementation of a handbook describing agreed standards of classroom management,
Classroom Management Findings
Classroom management is one of the teacher’s biggest concerns. It is important that teachers learn from research-based sources, but also learn from first account experiences from other teachers. Teachers should try to get a basic understanding of good practices, from handbooks and textbooks but they also need to get in tune with their own personalities and build their own personal system of discipline. As Theodora Loupus (2019, November 5th, personal interview) , a long-life teacher said “Don’t reinvent the wheel. If someone is doing something that works, then ask if you can use it”. With that statement an important finding of this research is that all schools should have an updated handbook of good classroom management principles that all teachers can have access too, learn from it and add new experiences to it.
There is a very remarkable aspect mentioned in some books and an important lesson learned from the teacher’s interviews are “Communicating Caring”. Students need to feel that teachers care about them. Kauchak (2014) suggest learning students’ names quickly and call students by their first name, greet students every day and get to know them as individuals, use “we” and “our” instead of “you” and “your” in reference to class activities and assignments, use personal nonverbal communications such as eye contact and smiling and hold students to high standards.
Professor Ashley Wutke (2019, October 30th, personal interview), from Northampton Community college said that the following should be taken into consideration: “Show students that you care”, “Create a safe environment for your students”, and “Get to know your students.”
Lastly, because all teachers struggle with classroom management, Karl Eisenhart (2019, November 10th, personal interview), a professor at Arts Academy Charter Middle School shares what all books consider important about misbehavior, “Keep in mind that there is a reason behind bad behavior. It’s not an excuse, but if you understand the reason, it makes it a little easier to take”, says Eisenhart.
Some Final considerations about classroom management:
- Clear Classroom management: the teacher is a model for the pupil’s behavior.
- Relationship between teachers and pupils, have high expectation for all pupils, have confidence in the pupils.
- Relationship between pupils: stimulate positive contact between pupils, teach both disruptive and depressed pupils the social skills needed, teach pupils responsibility for one another.
- Give pupils beneficial task and training.
- Adjusted physical environment: Organize the environment to stimulate both concentration and the desired social contact.
- Continuous flow as the focus of the lecture.
- Rules and Routines: Use the time needed to establish rules and routines concerning life in class, establish good routines for transitions.
- Predictability be predictable and make sure that pupils who break the rules receive a consistent response.
- Evaluation, continuous evaluation of the pupils works as well as their behavior and from time to time allow students to participate in the evaluation.
- Disciplinary problems: Choose reactions in accordance with the situation and the pupils involved. Avoid confrontations inside the classroom, focus on the concrete situation.
- Parental involvement: continuous contact with parents, see the school from the parent´s point of view, ask parents for information that might help you deal with their son/daughter.
- The teachers in class: there should be collaboration and shared understanding among the teaches who teach in the class.
References
Harmin, Merrill & Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (1994). Inspiring active learning: a handbook for teachers. Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, Alexandria.
Thomas L. Good. Jere E. Brophy. (2007) Looking in Classrooms (10th ed). Allyn & Bacon.
Unni Vere Midthassel (2006). Classroom management studies creating a shared understanding of classroom management. Educational Management Administration and Leadership SAGE Publications BELMAS Vol 34(3) 365–383.
Kauchack, Donald P. (2014) Introduction to Teaching: Becoming a Professional, Florida, Pearson – Fifth Edition Dave Foley, Six Classroom Management Tips Every Teacher Can Use, http://www.nea.org/tools/51721.htm
