Educating Erin

It’s done (mostly!) I have had that assignment buzzing around in my head for weeks, and yesterday it all flowed out onto the screen and now my website is up and running! I suppose all those nights when Icouldn’t sleep for thinking about it and having brilliant ideas were worth it

You can see it at
http://ekbu42.googlepages.com/classroommanagementstrategies

The only thing left to do is for you - any feedback you can give me to make the website flow better, and any suggestions of classroom management strategies would be much appreciated. We’ve all got something to share so why not share it here?

Use these questions to guide your thinking as you read the website:

• Have you learnt anything new from my website or has it reminded you of something you think is particularly important to classroom management?
• Do you have any suggestions on the strategies I have discussed or do you have any others to add?
• Is the website easy to follow and well-presented?

I hope you enjoy reading it!!

As part of my investigation of classroom management strategies, I have been reading an thoroughly practical and useful book called How to Plan for Behaviour Development and Classroom Management: Maximising Student Engagement by Bob Cope (2007). I know its a long title, but to me all of the key words in the title sum up my developing ideas on classroom management.

Maximising Student Engagement
To over-generalise a bit - take away the boredom by engaging your students in the learning process and you take away so much of the issues you may have had to deal with. Its that simple.

Behaviour Development
Kids don’t automatically know how to behave, and they certainly don’t remember if you just tell them once. It is my responsibility as a teacher to not just teach my subject but to help students learn about life skills like groupwork and persistence. Imposing some rules and then punishing kids for not following them already seemed like a bad idea to me, but Bob Cope describes the impact of this rather well.

Some  very bad decisions from some of my teachers at uni this week (its a whole other story…when I’ve calmed down and gotten over it I may tell you about them) has really shown me what I, as a learner, value in a teacher. This is CLARITY and CONSISTENCY. I want to know what exactly is expected of me, and I want the teacher to be consistent with marking and expectations. The other major, major factor in effective teaching for me is that the teacher makes the learning engaging. I haven’t had much chance to work on this on rounds, but I do always try to be very consistent while on rounds. Clarity is something I think I need to work on, I think in part because I have been teaching to another teachers plans and wishes.

I guess after all that writing, the main things that I have drawn from Cope’s book is that preventative and proactive measures are essential in classroom management. I still must have appropriate consequences  pre-prepared (for consistency and clarity), but so many issues can be prevented from occuring with the right prepartion, both mental and physical.

Reference: Cope, Bob, 2007, How to Plan for Behaviour Development and Classroom Management: Maximising Student Engagement, 2nd Edition, Pearson SprintPrint, New South Wales

Its getting to the pointy end of semester again!! Where did all that time go? I feel like I have gotten so much out of this semester - I already felt like I could call myself a teacher, but now I think I know how I can become a good teacher! Formal avenues like the projects for EXE (more on that later), other uni subjects, and PD sessions have been stimulating my thoughts on my teaching philosophy, and providing lots of practical ideas. Informal conversations with other education students have also been invaluable.

As for the EXE projects, I haven’t had much feedback from the first one, but just doing it has shown me the kind of things I should chose to make the project both achievable and beneficial in terms of how I measure up to the VIT standards. I was originally going to look at Individual Learning Plans, but I think that would be better done in conjunction with practicum.

So I needed another topic. I went back to the audit I did at the start of the semester. I haven’t had much in the way of difficult behaviour in any of my teaching rounds, but as you can read under the Dancing category of this blog, I am starting to experience some difficult students. I have also attended a seminar on Student Behavioural Issues, and plan to attend several PD sessions at the Intensive PD Week being held at Deakin Uni in study week.

For this project I would like to draw all of this together, as well as do some more research, and achieve some measure of clarity and consistency in my classroom management strategies. I’ll keep posting on how I’ll do this, and what I learn!