It seems like the past few days, I have had more
issues than usual with behavior from students. Particularly my focus class
(Honors English 2) has been disruptive during student discussion. We had a
fishbowl discussion the other day (similar to what we did in our methods class)
and I had multiple occasions where I had to give the stern look toward three individuals (on the outside of the circle)
who were constantly talking. Finally, I would have to say something, but it
still didn’t fix itself. Ultimately, they lost significant points from the
fishbowl discussion grade, but it has prompted me to reflect on classroom
management and potentially try out some new methods.
The National Education Association (NEA) suggests
giving particular focus to the problem
students. I feel that I have done that in regard to the “looks” that I give
them whenever they are being disruptive in class. However, they also suggest
potentially turning the discussion to them when they are being disruptive. For example,
if I were lecturing, they suggest calling on one of the disruptive students to
answer the question rather than a student who is being attentive in the
discussion.
However, the NEA also suggests that I should let
students choose their own seats. My mentor teacher and I have allowed the
students to do this since the beginning of the semester, but it has slowly
gotten worse rather than better. Some students do tend to behave better when
choosing their own seats (as the NEA mentions) however many of my students are
not behaving well. We have even tried moving individual people, but the
problems still persist. Tomorrow (Wednesday), we are going to implement a
seating chart that I designed specifically based on what I know about the
students and that I turned in to my MT for approval. I hope that it will
resolve some of the issues that we are seeing.
I do plan to have specific procedures in place in my
own classroom. I’ve been trying to use a hand signal (hand in air) to call for
silence among the students, but because it is a procedure they are not used to,
it has been somewhat difficult. I’ve been trying to teach them to start using
the procedure, but they are still slowly working toward it. I definitely
realize the importance of implementing the procedures on the first days of school (Wong and Wong) and
plan to do so in my own classroom come August.
Finally, I found another interesting strategy that I
might try with my Honors 2 class but that I definitely will be implementing
with my own classroom next year. An educator on the blog, We Are Teachers, suggests coming up with some sort of game to
implement at the beginning of class such as a sharing activity. They suggested
sharing what the students did over the weekend, but I might tailor it more to
what did you read this weekend or something along those lines. I feel doing an
activity like this or bellwork before breaking into the main lessons for the
day will help settle the students down and get their brains ready to think!
I would love to hear your stories about classroom
behavior issues that you have dealt with so far in your internship as well as
the methods that you have implemented to try and improve those behaviors.
Thanks for reading! J
References
5 Quick Tips for
Secondary Classroom Management That Actually (I Promise You!) Work. (2015).
Retrieved February 23, 2016, from http://www.weareteachers.com/blogs/post/2015/06/25/5-quick-tips-for-secondary-classroom-management
Foley, D. (2015).
6 Classroom Management Tips Every Teacher Can Use. Retrieved February 23, 2016,
from http://www.nea.org/tools/51721.htm
Wong, H. K.,
& Wong, R. T. (2005). How to be an effective teacher the first days of
school. Mountain View, CA: Harry K. Wong Publications.
