This week I have really struggled with discipline in the classroom. I'm not yet responsible for maintaining order and function for all activities at all times, but I will be honest, I was getting slightly frustrated with the lack of authority that I had in the classroom. So instead of trying to evaluate what the students might be doing wrong, I decided to evaluate myself and what I was doing wrong. This seems to be the better approach. We read a chapter this week about Linda Albert's Cooperative Discipline, which I loved! Making students your partners instead of your pawns is much more productive. They are little people with little voices and they just want someone to make sure they are heard. Cooperative Discipline does this for them. This method allows the students to connect with others, feel that they belong in a classroom, and most importantly, they get to participate in creating a code of conduct. I think their participation in creating this code of conduct really gives them a sense of responsibility to be their best and to monitor the behaviors of their classmates as well. I learned from this piece of text (I would love to reference the text, but we were sent a copy to read which has no information on it other than Chapter 5) that students act out because they have a need that isn't being met. And then I remembered why I decided on this career path, because I want to meet the needs of children. Because I want to be that rock for some kids who may not have a support system to go home too. Behind every act of defiance is a story, and when I take this approach to viewing how difficult it is to line up my class for lunch, I can say to myself " what am I doing wrong, and what needs of the students aren't being met?" So in preparation for next week, I'm going to try to keep in mind a few thinks. First, Cooperative Discipline; I'm going to ask the students how they think the correct way to line up should look and what rules can they come up with as a class. Second, social cognitive learning theory from our child development class; learning can occur by observing others, so maybe I will pick one student who is behaving appropraitely and offer them praise, and then the class can observe and mimic that behavior and also receive praise. Third, account for cultural differences; until this weeks ESOL class, I had no idea how cultural differences could affect a child's behavior. In some homes or cultures, listening to authority is considered a sign of weekness and it's important that I recognise where these kids come from so that I can make my expectation clear. I'm so glad I was able to reflect on what went wrong this week and construct a plan for next week. In the future, in my own classroom, I hope I can remember how much I truly love the concept of Cooperative Discipline and can use it from the get go!
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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.
"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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