This week it has become more apparent than ever how important it is to have good classroom managment. We have been asked to perform certain management tasks, video or picture document these tasks, observe our CT's performing these tasks, and reflect on our own performance. Since Cunningham and Allington's text said that “teacher read-alouds have been shown to be one of the major motivators for children’s desire to read", I chose to perform a read-aloud as my management task. The first thing I noticed about my read-aloud attempt was that there are no specific procedures or rules listed in my CT's classroom for me to refer to when the children get a little distracted or excited. And it is hard to control a classroom when you have no list of expectations to hold them accountable to during a specific activity. This being said, my first attempt at a read alound was far from perfect, and the kids were not as attentive or cooperative as I would have liked. The only light at the end of my tunnel was the reading we did for Classroom Management about building respectful, caring relationships with our students. In Elementary Classroom Management (Weinstein, Romano, Mignano Jr), there is a section about establishing and enforcing clear expectations for behavior. In this section we go over how to be fair, be a real person, and share responsibility with the students. After reading I gained some insight on how to handle my next 2 attempts at this same task. By the 3rd attempt I was able to just talk to the kids about my expectations, and let them know that I trusted them to behave and pay attention, and I also developed a little activity for us to do together during the reading to make sure that they would pay attention. We still have not reached perfection, but these relationships with our students are not just built over night. In all I think that the kids appreciated me just getting on their level and talking to them like a real person and letting them know that I had confidence in their ability to get throught the activity smoothly. We're just getting started, and I have such a long way to go, but the path in which I should travel gets a little more clear each week.
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"During an initial phase which usually takes the first three weeks of the school year, many routines, procedures, and concepts are introduced and established."(Denton & Kriete 2000, pg 151). We have made it through the first 3 weeks and are moving on to the new and exciting part of introducing content. The last thing to do before getting down to business is checking for benchmarks to see if our students have mastered procedures that will allow them to move effortlessly from task to task in the classroom, leaving every extra minute to be totally engaged in the content. In classroom management this week, our focus was on building relationships with our students and helping them build relationships with each other. I feel like in the classroom, these realtionships have already been established during the first three weeks of school, and now we can use them to our advantage to have some really good content related conversations in the classroom and everyone can be comfortable and open in these conversations. In Reading with Meaning (Miller 2013), chapters 2 and 3 break down the whole month of September describing how we should implement procedures and what strategies we can introduce to the students to increase literacy in the classroom, such as read alouds and think alouds. I have seen in my CT's classroom how the implementation of procedures and strategies give the students in our class more valuable reading time. And because these strategies have been shown and repeated all throughout the first three-five weeks of school, they can make connections and find the big idea effortlessly when reading. In Charlotte Huck's Children's Literature (Kiefer 2010), the different types of books, and which students benefit from which books was introduced. So the best connection I can make between coursework is that if we take the advice on how and when to introduce procedures in the classroom from Classroom Management, and give the children appropriate materials that will engage and challenge them as suggested in Children's Literature, then we can ultimately increase literacy throughout our classrooms. We should not give the students all the answers, but give them the tools to find them on their own. My CT's 3rd grade class is an excellent example of procedure and strategy mastery. I watch the students every day move effortlessly throughout the classroom, get prepared to transition from subject to subject, and use reading strategies like underlining text and circling unknown words in their homework without even noticing that they took that extra step. Now I'm ready to move on to the next step, whatever that might be!
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