Management

The subject of classroom management techniques is nebulous, being so tied to personality and personal philosophy that it is nearly impossible to extract a universal description of effective practice. I do believe, however, that teenagers respond well to the responsibility that certain freedoms and adult treatment entail. The will of those students who want to be in school and learn to behave in a civil fashion naturally overcomes those who do not, at least in my experience, and my classroom reflects this relatively grown-up atmosphere. By not emphasizing a more negative discipline process and maintaining a cheerful yet rigorous approach to teaching I model and thereby receive a similar reaction in student learning, serious and fun all at once. For example, I do not typically require students to raise their hands before asking a question or leave their seats to grab a tissue. I am not in the business of training monkeys or programming robots, to be a bit colloquial; I wish for students to discover for themselves what is socially appropriate in a given context, since school is also a place to implicitly learn proper social behavior. If a student needs to ask a question concerning material, (s)he should not have to wait on me, and similarly, if a student has some small joke or observation to share, I can only encourage it if appropriate. When someone does or says something inappropriate, however, I first explian it as such - the difference between ignorance and deliberate maliciousness should be obvious to the teacher, and troublemakers can be deatl with more perfunctorially. In practice (and I stress this has only been my own unique experience), there are only a very few bad seeds in any classroom who desire a negative reaction from a teacher and misbehave on purpose; nine times out of ten, classroom issues are a result of either a student's unintentional ignorance of appropriate behavior or more often the teacher's over-reliance on the sanctity of the rule-which-must-not-be-broken. Student deserve the benefit of the doubt much more often than they get it, though a teacher must not be entirely naive. In other words, treat a student like a human being rather than a machine that must be incessantly silent and working, and that student will learn to act like a human being. The buttons below link to several .ppt files (Power Points) I created concerning classroom management, one before my first year of teaching and one after.

David Jones's Professional Portfolio

dlmjones@gmail.com