My classroom in New Zealand is home to nearly 30 students
ages 6-8 with only one teacher to control the group on an average day. In order
to keep her room under control Ms. Sturge exercises many elements of classroom
management. During mathematics all
the level 2-3 classes switch up into skill-levels so she has to manage those
students as well. With that many students keeping a track of assignments and
papers could be an issue but Ms. Sturge has worked out a system to keep each
child’s work organized and easy to grade and hand back. Each student has a notebook for each
subject and after they complete an assignment they glue it into the appropriate
subject’s notebook. They then hand in their books flipped open to the page they
worked on into an appropriate crate. At the end of the day, Ms. Sturge is able
to grade the work from each crate and hand it back to the students the next
day. I thought that her system worked really well for keeping track of paper
but also allowing for fast feedback to the students.
Because it is so late in the school year in New Zealand, the
students have become very used to Ms. Sturge’s directions so there is not a lot
of misbehavior amongst the class. She gives simple warnings to students by
saying their name. This grabs their attention and pulls them back to what they
should be focusing on. However, when a student is acting completely unruly and disrupting
other students Ms. Sturge asks him/her to move his/her name on the behavior
chart. I have heard of this technique done in other classrooms but for the
first time I saw the success of such a system. The student is forced to get up
and physically record the consequences of his actions and as a result has time
to think about what he/she was doing wrong. This system was far more successful
than simply telling the student to stop his behavior because it involved the
student and caused him/her the inconvenience of having to get up and move.
Finally, the last successful management element I saw in the
classroom was the classroom job system. Each week a pair (or trio) of children
were assigned to one of the twelve jobs listed on the wall. Jobs were done in
the last five minutes of the day and involved cooperation amongst students but
also got the classroom in order. This part of the day was taken very seriously
and was never skipped even if the bell had already rung. This made the students
take responsibility for their environment and structured the ending of the day.
Overall, while these strategies are not extremely different from those used by teachers in America, it was nice to see them in practice and being used so successfully!
In my British classroom, I saw similar strategies to the first ones you mentioned. There was a notebook for each subject as well and it made organization for the students and the teacher so much better. This type of management definitely helps the children transition better between lessons and it makes for less confusion. I really like this method of classroom management and it looks like it works well universally.
ReplyDeleteI think it is great that you were able to observe similar strategies being used, successfully, in a culture different from ours. I have definitely seen many of those strategies used in my pre pracs in the US. I was under the impression that management would not be any different at my school in Italy than in the US, but I was wrong about that. They were part of a culture so much more laid back than ours that I don't think discipline is necessarily a number one priority. That would be too form fitting and structured. I think it is interesting to see that in some cultures different than ours teachers function in a very similar way, while in other cultures different than ours they don't.
ReplyDelete