Return to homepage

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CURRENT SETTING 2 & 3

Class, Activities, Location/ Desks,

Judson’s Atmosphere

PHYSICAL ENVIRONMENT 3 & 4

Seating Arrangement, Office,

Aesthetics, Books

RELATIONSHIPS 4 & 5

Teacher-Student, Names,

Community/ Student-Student

GUIDELINES AND CONSEQUENCES 6 & 7

Guidelines, Rules, Consequences,

Goals and Expectations

ROUTINES 7 – 11

Roll/ Seating Chart/ Beg. of Class, Absences, Tardies,

Passes, Missed Work, Late Work, Messy/ Incomplete Work

Paperwork, Instructional Activities Preparedness/ Calendar,

Grading, Leeway, Policies, Dismissal/ Clean-Up

INCLUDING/INVOLVING PARENTS/GUARDIANS 11 & 12

Letter, Newsletter, Open House,

Internet, Social Functions

CLASSROOM MANAGEMENT BELIEFS 13 - 16

CURRENT SETTING

Class

• I am working with two blocks of 7^th grade language arts and social studies classes at Judson Middle School. These blocks are the first four periods of the day.
• There are a total of sixty students in the class that I will teach with Mrs. Hill- 32 students in block one and 28 in block two.
• For the most part, the students are pretty well behaved. There are a few students who stick out for their need to go out of their way for attention and we have been working with them on different ways to try and improve their behavior so that it doesn’t disturb the rest of the class.
• We have two IEP students, one on a 504 and TAG kids. Some accommodations are made for the IEP students and the girl with a 504. The TAG kids often do more of what we are already doing in class. None of these differences stand out in class.
• In our classroom, the atmosphere is pretty casual, there aren’t a ton of guidelines or rules and the students are given a lot of free time. The group activities work well for the most part but the noise level gets a little higher than my comfort level.
• I know almost all of the kids’ names in the classes that I will be teaching with Mrs. Hill.
• Language arts is integrated with social studies on a consistent basis. For example, the spelling and vocabulary tests that go over geography terms fall into the language arts grade book.
• It’s difficult for me to tell how stimulated students are by the tasks Mrs. Hill gives to them- it’s mainly worksheets and what I would classify as “busy work”.
• I plan to make the academic environment of the class more creative, stimulating and challenging. Mrs. Hill has encouraged me to try lots of different techniques so I know that I will be supported as I try to get our students more actively involved in learning.
• The students know what’s expected of them- if they work on their in-class tasks, they won’t have any homework. They also know that Mrs. Hill is being pulled in a lot of directions because of her role as activities director and that often activities take precedence over their classes.
• Overall, the students are attentive and hard-working, the teacher is very supportive of both the students and me and the atmosphere in our room is positive.

Activities

• Mrs. Hill is also the Activities Director. Due to this break in academic focus for the last two periods of the day, I am trying to work with another teacher, Mrs. Smith, in the afternoons.

· Mrs. Smith teaches a 7^th grade “Skills” block of language arts and social studies.

· “Skills” block is for students who have some catching up to do. They are all working on improving their reading/ writing or related skills so that they can rejoin the regular block in 8^th grade. If not, there is another Skills class in 8^th grade too.

Location/ Desks

• The classroom is located in first hall, down a couple of classes from the office, the student store and a back door. We have a lot of windows and delivery trucks for the kitchen back up right behind our classroom. It can be very disruptive.
• The desks are in traditional rows and they are set up in alphabetical order. (see attached photos)

Judson’s Atmosphere

• Judson Middle School has a really positive atmosphere. This attitude often overflows into the classroom.
• The Principal, Asst. Principal and quite a few other adults pop in and out of the classroom because of the many responsibilities that are attached to the activities realm at Judson. Therefore, students are comfortable with visitors and it doesn’t seem to phase them.

PHYSICAL ENVIRONMENT

Seating Arrangement

• I’d like to try a different arrangement for the desks in our classroom. I would like to arrange a U shape with two rows on either side and one row in the back.
• I don’t have a choice in the matter at Judson but in my future classroom, I’d prefer to have tables for my students, right now we have desks.
• There’s a rolling desk at the front of the classroom right now and another desk in back. Mrs. Hill uses the desk in the front and I use the one in the back.

· I plan to move the rolling desk often but I will keep the other desk in back of the room. I want to keep the kids guessing.

· I feel like I am aware of teacher movement and I don’t want to get too comfortable teaching from any one part of the room.

Office

• In our classroom, we’re spoiled because we have an additional room for our office off the back of our room. That’s where we have our computer, a bathroom and all of the little perks that go along with being the activities director at Judson Middle School.

Aesthetics

• Right now the room is pretty dry. It has some odds and ends up such as some African masks that are hanging, a couple of globes, student photos and a few Einstein posters but there isn’t a real flow or feel to the class.

· My first day at Judson Jayne asked me to decorate a bulletin board in the back of the classroom and I did an “Oh, the places you can go” world map with corresponding National Geographic pictures.

· The room could definitely use more “life” such as posters, plants and simply putting color backgrounds behind some of the existing “props”. I know that Jayne would be thrilled if I took on that project and I plan to do so before second semester.

• I also think that the classroom environment should be focused around the subjects the students will be studying in the class. My current room feels like a geography room, it doesn’t have much geared towards language arts.

· There are good style posters that you can get for helping students with writing as well as great grammar tips that help students remember some of the tricky rules that they are supposed to follow.

· I plan to have lots of maps and I would like to rotate the maps according to what we are studying. I don’t want to get too complicated but National Geographic has so many great resources and they have a lot of cultural maps that could help the students reiterate what they are learning in their books and other resources/ study guides.

Books

• I would like to have a lot of reading materials in my classroom. I will have National Geographic magazines, reference books, newspapers, quite a few atlases, and free-reading books. I think it’s important to have a reading resource corner in your room in addition to promoting library use. Often if you have a day for reading, the student forget their books and then they end up spending the whole period in the library searching for the perfect book. If you have those resources on hand, you don’t have to worry about coordinating a library time with the librarian, you can just have them read from the resources you have on hand.

RELATIONSHIPS

Teacher-Student

• When I observed another teacher at Judson take roll, she had this wonderfully inclusive way of starting the day with her students. She took role as the kids were settling in and as she came to each student, she greeted them with a “Great to see you today, Greg” or something along those lines and made eye contact with them as well.

· To me, this really grabs on to the idea of recognizing each student as an individual.

· Teachers don’t always have time to talk to each student, every day. If you take roll this way, you are automatically guaranteed a connection with each student and everyone is able to start out on the same footing.

• I have heard that students in middle school are very interested in learning about the teachers. I think that it’s important that if the teacher shares about his or her personal life or personal experiences that, for the most part, it should have relevance to the curriculum.

· I learned about a good technique to continue to get to know the students, to get the kids to learn more about each other as well as the students being able to learn more about the teacher. A teacher brought in two decks of cards. One deck was for herself and she passed the rest of the cards out to the students. She would leave the first five minutes for “get to know us” time. She put a question on the board that in some way or another had relevance to one of the themes or topics they were studying. Say they were getting ready to do outlines on animals and the question was, “What’s your favorite animal and why?” The teacher starts and when she is finished, she pulled a card and whomever had the corresponding card had to answer the same question. They would do this for the first five minutes of every day until the question was answered by every single student.

· This would work well if you had breakfast first thing in the morning and needed to give the kids time to eat. Mrs. Hill always gives five minutes to the kids at the beginning and I find that it just makes it that much more difficult to get things started. If you had an activity going on, at least you would be working towards the goal of improving classroom community.

· It could be something that you did once a month or when you are kicking off a new lesson.

· Another way of improving the relationship between the teacher and the students is to really listen to your students, to try and figure out what they are interested in and to let them know that you care about them. A supportive climate can really enhance classroom management.

Names

• I think learning the names as soon as possible is very important and teachers should know what techniques help them get the names down faster.

· I plan to use name cards with my own students. They will get cards on the first days that they can fold over and decorate and the cards will sit on their desks until I learn their names.

· This technique will also help the students learn their classmates names. I think it’s equally as important for students to know their fellow students’ names. They will be working in groups and if they are using “hey you” to get their partner’s attention, that will work to the detriment of the classroom community.

Community/ Student-Student

• I am a big advocate for building community in my classroom. I think if you are willing to spend some time in the beginning of the year with get-to-know-you games, simple trust activities, and name learning activities, it really pays off for the teacher and the class in the long run. When you have blocks classes in middle school, this is especially important and even easier to implement.
• When you have dedicated the time to get to know the kids through community building and they have had a chance to get to know each other better, I think I would be more willing to take some chances with my classes because I would have a better feel for how they might do if we went on a field trip or tried a learning game for the first time.
• If the kids know other students outside of just their usual friends, I would have more freedom when assigning groups. I would know who to put together and who not to put together, who had some similar interests and hopefully I would be able to match up heterogeneous (sometimes) and homogeneous (other times) groups. I don’t like the way that the classroom I’m in right now always ends up in the same pairs. There is no effort to split up rowdy groups or off-task groups. The same kids always work together. This is to the detriment of both these groups and the whole class.

· I would like my classroom to be a partnership. I want my students to know what I expect of them and I want them to have buy in. If you let them know your expectations, if you are consistent, if you challenge them and care about them as individuals, I think you will have a good relationship with them and they will feel safe in your classroom. They will feel like they can take chances and go out on a limb to try and learn.

GUIDELINES & CONSEQUENCES

Guidelines

• When it comes to rules in my classroom, I will call them guidelines and I will try to only have about three or four. They might be, for example:

· Be Kind, Respect Others, Stay on Task and Participate Actively

· I will have the students help me come up with examples and non-examples of these- what each of these individual guidelines would or would not look like in our classroom.

· Be Kind might look like someone helping another student find his or her place in a book we are reading together.

· Respect Others would not look like someone talking when another student was presenting something to the class. A reminder of the Golden Rule of respect- “Do unto others as you will have them do unto you”.

· Stay on Task would be groups working together and not getting off topic and talking about the limo-lunch for magazine sale.

· Participate Actively doesn’t look like somebody sleeping at their desk.

· When we have enough examples and non-examples in the classroom, I will make up a little bulletin board that we can point to when someone is experiencing some confusion in the classroom.

· I also plan to spend some time going through this, as I would teaching any new concept. I might include an activity or a role play to drive some of the points home.

Rewards

• I am not too big on rewards. I think it’s a good idea to simply have “every day” activities that you do in your classroom act as rewards. Such as working towards field trips or offering a lesson applicable movie that you know is really going to get the students interested or implementing games into your curriculum. I am excited about language arts and social studies and I want to share this enthusiasm with the students.
• I find that too many teachers in middle school rely on candy, candy, candy. I find candy to be an extrinsic motivator that gets you up and then drops you down. Students already have enough moodiness in their young, adolescent lives- I think we need to be more creative and work towards intrinsic motivation.

Consequences

• When it comes to consequences, I am not the biggest believer in giving attention to those who cause trouble but if you don’t have any looming consequences, you are bound to face some major challenges.

· I will tolerate a little bit of noise but if a student is deliberately disobeying our class expectations or guidelines and acting out to disrupt the class, I will take steps to remedy the situation.

· I would start out making eye contact with that particular student and/or moving closer to that student to let them know that I’m onto them.

· If that doesn’t work, I will move that particular student to a different seat.

· If that still isn’t helping the situation, I will have the student meet me after class or after school so that we can come up with a plan about how to solve their behavioral problems. This is my interpretation of Glasser’s Reality Therapy. In the plan, we would identify what the problem is, why the problem is occurring and the steps we will take to try and solve the situation. We will also have to include what will occur if they don’t change their behavior. I will be an active listener in this process, but I would like the student, him or herself, to accept responsibility and to take ownership of the fact that they need to change their behavior. If this plan of action fails, I will take the problem outside my classroom and get the disciplinary figure of the school involved until we can get a handle on the situation.

· As our class begins the year, I will go through these consequences along with the guidelines with heavy emphasis on the fact that we are a team that wants to spend time on actively learning and expanding our horizons. We don’t want to waste our time on consequences. Nevertheless, some time needs to be spent going over the consequences so that the class is clear about the expectations. Again, I think a role play would be helpful or an anecdote.

Goals and Expectations

· If you are able to be clear about your expectations on every front, kids know where they stand and they seem like that in middle school. Without this clarity, they are going to push until they discover your boundaries so the hope is that time spent on guidelines and consequences will be a preventative measure.

· My biggest goal is to have good, solid curriculum that is relevant and applicable to the students. I think that this is the most solid foundation to keep students motivated and engaged. If they are interested in the curriculum, disciplinary measures won’t come up as often.

· By including the students in helping me guide some of the curriculum, I will be able to find out what is meaningful to them and include some of their input in the lessons.

ROUTINES

• I am going to work on being as clear and consistent as possible. I am not usually organized to the hilt but I think there are so many factors that can prevent a class from running smoothly that if you aren’t prepared to deal with all of the little routines that go on, you will surely have problems.

Roll/ Seating Chart/ Beginning of Class

• I already shared how I plan to take roll. I will “check in” with each student by name and eye contact. As the days go on, I will get better and better with names. The students will have this time (one minute +?) to get settled and say hello to one another.
• It also helps to have a seating chart taped to the area where you take your attendance. You can quickly glance down to see who’s not there just by the empty seat. I may use a computer generated form so that I can switch names around easily if students move seats.
• To start class, I will make any announcements after I take roll and then we will get right into the lesson of the day.

Absences

• With absences, I would like to see a note from home explaining the reason for the absence and the days that the student missed. I will also keep a tally of who is gone in my book so that I can match these dates.

· When the student comes back, I expect them to ask me what they missed and then I will turn to my lesson plan book and give them what they need and let them know when the items are due. They will have the same number of days that they were absent to get the missed work in. For example, if a student misses one day, the work would be due the next day, two days, two days, etc.

Tardies

• Tardies are something that I won’t accept. We already have such a limited time period in each class. If I let late students get away with being late, it would offset the whole class. I will give them one free tardy during the six week period a “get out of jail free” card and after that I will write them up and have consequences accordingly. I think I will have them do something that will benefit the class like recycle the class paper or cut out articles for projects or do something after school that I will need help with. I would like the community to feel what this student is going through.

Passes

• I will use a pass if it doesn’t get abused. I will have a list where students will write their name and time so that I can keep track who is going out and if some students are leaving too often, such as every single day, they will lose their pass privilege say, for a week. I would like to have a theme in my room and I may want to change it every couple of years. If maps and globes are our theme, I’d get some kind of globe ball as the pass so that the hall monitor can let me know if the globe kid was causing any trouble.

· Kids will be expected to be prepared for class so the only reason that they will need the pass is if they go to the bathroom, if they need to get something from the nurse’s office or if they have permission to do something out of the ordinary. We have a water fountain in our class and they may use that when it’s appropriate.

Late Work

• Late work is a really bad habit to get into. I will only accept late work if something unusual is going on at home. I want to be at a certain level with my students where they can tell me, truthfully, why they couldn’t get something done. I won’t be unreasonable in my expectations so they should be able to get things in on time. That will be expected unless I hear from them about why they couldn’t get it done. Not to say that I want to know too much information, just that I want to create trust with my students and I want them to know that I realize things do come up and interfere with school sometimes.

Messy/ Incomplete Work

• If a student hands a really messy paper in, I will return it to them and give them one day to turn it in again. I have noticed that a lot of 7^th graders need to work on neatness. This will give them extra practice with their handwriting and it will let them know that neatness matters, it’s not just something that they will use in school but it will be something that they will value for the rest of their lives!
• I will grade incomplete work as if they missed the incomplete part. I would like students to get accustomed to deadlines and some work is better than no work.

Paperwork

• The homework in my room will be collected in boxes on one side of the room. There will be a labeled box for each class and the students will be expected to turn things in at the beginning of class. After they have turned things in, I will collect them and they will be stamped with the date. That way I can keep track of what was turned in when and there doesn’t have to be any confusion.

· From there, the papers will be graded and I will file them. They can come at their leisure (before class, after class, when they have a spare minute) and check out their work but I will try to post their grades with all of their homework scores included every two weeks (by # and not in alphabetical order) so they know where they stand. If they are missing an assignment on the grade sheet that they thought they turned in or the grade seems incorrect, they can go back to the file, check out the homework that’s in there and either prove me wrong or suck it up.

· Tests will be treated differently and after I hand them back personally, I would like the students to file their tests unless they don’t feel comfortable. The files are supposed to be confidential but I can’t always watch them. If they are concerned about certain papers in there and they want to accept responsibility for them, they can hold on to them but they need to keep them as long as the file is full.

· When it comes to assignments, I would like clear headings atop each paper that the students turn in including their full name, a date, the subject and I will encourage them to take time with their writing. When you are doing grades, these kinds of things are very important.

Instructional Activities

• The students in my classroom will understand the expectations regarding raising their hands- when it’s appropriate and when it’s not. It is common courtesy and respect for people not to interrupt others. This will be expected in class and it should carry through regardless of the activity.
• With student movement, I think that it’s okay for students to get up and move around the room if they have a real reason such as picking up their breakfast or sharpening their pencils but again, it comes down to common courtesy and not disrupting the class as a whole. If one person can’t sit still, that’s an issue we would have to handle separately.
• I would like to obtain student attention with some kind of calming bell or some off-beat sound. I think that middle school students like to see originality and again, they do like consistency so I don’t have my magic attention-getter yet but I am on the lookout for a good one.
• Students are going to talk when you give group work and that’s fine as long as you can get their attention when it’s necessary, that’s why it’s so important for me to have a good and effective attention-getter because once student’s get working in groups, it can often be difficult to regain their attention.
• When students are done with their work, I will try to have applicable sponge activities. I am also going to encourage students to write in their journals more than just at one designated time. I will have a lot of resources in my classroom for different journal ideas- not limited to words and questions either. I am collecting good pictures too. I will also have a lot of reading resources in my class and I would like the students to take advantage of the newspapers and magazines in my room too.

Preparedness/Calendar

• I will try to help potentially unprepared students by posting what they are going to need on the door every day. For example, I will put “journals, geography book, and map” if those are the things that we will work on in class that day. For those students who are unprepared, I will again, give them one freebie a semester- a “get out of the hospital card” but obviously this is unacceptable. I will have to make a plan with this student to figure out what it is that is preventing them from getting things together for the class. My hunch is that the student and I would be able to work something out to remedy the problem and if not, proper actions, things that we would come up with in our plan would have to be followed through with.
• I will keep a weekly calendar on a designated place in the classroom so that students can always check their progress. There will be permanent lines and I will write in the specific tasks/ homework for each day of that week. Of course they will be responsible for writing this down in their notebook but that way if a student is absent on Monday, they won’t have to get everything from their neighbor, they can just get it from the board.
• Due dates of different assignments will be posted on the calendar and I will only make exceptions for students who come and make arrangement with me for late assignments.

Grading

• I’d like to do a little syllabus for my students with expectations goals, etc. including how grades are earned and explaining my point system. I will do a point system with A’s, not on a curve- simply including points.
• I will do periodic checks in regards to any long-term assignments that we are working on. I want my students to try and work on things in a sequential order, discouraging cramming as much as I can.
• I will most likely use a computer program for grades and it’s very cut and dry. You enter your assignment, points possible, points achieved and then the computer figures it all out for you. You can print out grade reports for the students and they can bring any oversights to your attention.
• Extra Credit will come into play if I see a need. I may implement it later in the year.

Leeway

• If a student is having a really lousy time in his or her life at a particular moment in time, again I will give them one opportunity each semester to come up to me and to tell me that they just can’t handle class today. Outside of that, sleeping in class is unacceptable and I would need to meet with the sleeping student after class. Again, we would try to figure out what the problem is so that we can try and eliminate it. If not, we will follow through on the action side of the plan and make sure that this student was encouraged to realize the importance of school.
• I will have different expectations in class routines for different situations. For example, if someone is up in front of the class, talking, sharing, lecturing, I will not allow students to just get up and run to the bathroom. When we are working in class, that will be the time that students can get up to sharpen their pencil, get a drink of water in back or get up, one by one, to go to the bathroom. I will keep a mental note of who is always getting up to do these activities because it’s obvious that some students have a much tougher time sitting still than others.

Open-door Policy

• Students are always welcome to come and talk with me about anything that they need help with. I will advertise this open door policy and would like students to feel welcome if they didn’t get their questions answered during class time.

Dismissal/ Clean-up

• As far as dismissal, when group work is going on, I will give them the two minute warning. That will be their cue to get their desks back in order, to turn in any work that they have finished, to check both sides of their desks for trash and to get things together so that they can go. They should be seated when the bell rings so that the bell is the final dismisser.

INCLUDING/ INVOLVING PARENTS/ GUARDIANS

Letter

• At the beginning of the year, I will hand out an introductory letter home, in any necessary languages necessary, to the family/ care takers which will include options for them to let me know the best way to get a hold of them. It will also include a list of different options for them if they are interested in getting involved in the classroom. Additionally, it will include an outline of the curriculum that we plan to cover and if the curriculum covers things that they have personal experience with, I would invite them to come and share this information with the class. For example, say we are studying South America and someone’s mother is from S. America. We would love for her to come and share her knowledge with us. Of course, there would be a lot of different options for parents/care takers, they could even come and file if they wanted to be involved on a less intense level.

· This letter would have a place on the bottom for the parent to sign so that I know it made it home and came back in one piece. I think it would count as the first assignment for the students.

Newsletter

• I would also like to implement a monthly newsletter/ update for my classes. I would do the first one- reporting out about what is happening in our class including student work and local cultural social science/ language arts opportunities. It would also include tips for parents- about how to help their student succeed in my class and others. From there, I would have students take part in putting it together. I assume that I will have a couple of computers in the back of my room and once the software Publisher is installed, I can teach kids how to do a newsletter, lickity split. I will ask for volunteers, possibly recruit TAG kids if no one bites and allow them to work on it if they finish an assignment early and after school. It wouldn’t be too demanding and it’s a wonderful skill to have.

Open House

• For open house, I would like to share a lot of information about the class and also hear from the parents about what their expectations are for the year. I’ve seen too many talking heads at open houses, I think the parent’s can answer a couple of questions too. I might have a survey on hand, if the expectations starter fails. The survey would allow them to share what they hope their kid will learn concerning the outline I’ve given them and anything else that they think I should know about their kid, what will help me teach them better. I would also stress the importance of communication with the parents and let them know that they should feel free to get in touch with me- I will let them know it’s a priority of mine because parents make such a difference in their student’s success- in my class and all of their classes.

Internet

• A few teachers at Judson have a web-page that they update weekly with homework and assignments, comments, etc. The parents can help their student stay on top of things and they can also e-mail the teacher directly from the web page if they have any questions. Granted, that’s not going to work for all parents but it will definitely work for some of them.

Social Functions

• I have also toyed with the idea of having some sort of social function for the parents of my students. A little get to know you with the students, some teachers and the families/ guardians. I think an ice cream social would be a great way to start to get to know some of the folks that you will be working with. There is nothing wrong with doing something like this- they do it for the honor students, why not just certain classes? What goes on at home affects students so much, it would be better to have a clue as to what the kids face at home, it will help me understand how to approach that student if their behavior changes and I would also feel more comfortable contacting the families if I have met them in person.

CLASSROOM MANAGEMENT BELIEFS

It’s your first day of school and you have three blocks of seventh grade language arts and social studies ahead of you. Are you ready? You know what your expectations are for your students as well as yourself. You prepared the room, outlined the curriculum for the year, and you have the first days planned out including community building activities as well as some guidelines that you want the students to expand on. You are motivated and have a really great feeling about your first year of teaching. You feel as though you have done as much as you could to prepare and you think to yourself, “Bring it on!” What gives you such confidence? The fact that you know where you stand with your philosophy and you have taken time to think through as many aspects of it as you could before you actually had your own classroom is the biggest factor in this confidence equation. You know how important it is to be consistent with your beliefs and actions. The only way to nurture this consistency is to wholeheartedly trust in your beliefs. You know that your classroom climate, the class learning goals, and the guidelines and discipline that you will implement are all going to help create a successful year. Without further ado, I will give you a small peek into where some of those beliefs originated from.

When it comes to classroom climate, I think this multi-faceted element has one of the biggest impacts on classroom management. First off, as Alfie Kohn quoted in his book __________, “Label a particular child as a troublemaker and watch him become one. View children in general as self-centered and that is the way they will act.” (Watson 1984, p. 42) In other words, the expectations that you have for your students will emanate from you, the students will pick up on it as soon as you begin to say “Hello” to them for the first time. I choose to expect a lot because I hope that my students will rise to the occasion. Dreikurs has a wonderful point about how ineffective it is to hold your students and yourself to different standards. (C. Mgmt. Ch. 5) So the high expectations that I have for my students are the same kind of standards that I will hold myself to as well. Alfie Kohn, as well as many other professionals in the world of education speak highly of modeling. Having consistently high expectations in your classroom is a good example of that and I do believe that it is quite an effective technique. At Judson Middle School, the whole school is a “no gum zone”. That goes across the board and as much as I despise that rule, I follow it because it’s much easier to preach a behavior that you model.

On a different classroom climate level, I agree with both Vygotsky and Piaget and their beliefs in the importance of social interaction. Piaget supported social interaction with peers and Vygotsky thought that social interaction with more advanced thinkers such as adults was beneficial to learners (Woolfolk p.45). Therefore, in my classroom, I will include social opportunities in the everyday classroom as well as through learning activities, guest speakers, etc. I also believe that you can nurture the social aspect of students by working hard to build community in your classroom. Both Alfie Kohn and the critical theory philosophy support the idea of creating community in one’s classroom. This concept is easily incorporated into the beginning of a year when teachers often don’t know how to get things rolling and will have a beneficial effect for the rest of the school year. Simple things like getting to know the names of your students as soon as possible and helping the students learn each other’s names begin to break down those barriers that tend to go up quickly in the middle school, pre-adolescent years. Kohn and Glasser both support an environment that includes care and I believe that as you build community, care is inherent. Another inevitable benefit from working on these bonds is that you are building trust that will help students feel like they can speak freely and both the teacher and the students will have an easier time picking groups because students won’t always be with the same three students. Dreikurs is a supporter of building trust.

A few other elements of classroom climate that will promote successful classroom management is my belief in classroom democracy. I think it’s important to have a leader/ facilitator in the room and most of the time that would be the teacher. I also think it’s important, especially in a social studies class to involve democracy and to help the students make decisions about what is important to them. We can implement this concept through making decisions about assignment options, during class meetings and as we decide certain activities that we will undertake as a class. This approach is supported by constructivists and again by Dreikurs. They believe in the effectiveness in teaching these valuable societal roles and responsibilities. We live in a democracy so why should our classrooms neglect to approach some of their classroom procedures in this way? I also believe, alongside constructivists, that students need some autonomy. They can be monitored but they also need to be able to have some freedom. If you have such high expectations for your students, how will you see if they are meeting those expectations or not if you don’t allow them some freedom through autonomy? I expect some autonomy as a student so again, I want to hold my students and myself to similar expectations. Classroom climate sets the tone and if you are willing to let go of some of the control, hopefully your students will rise to meet you. I find the tone to be one of the most important aspects of classroom management, hand in hand with the next layer of classroom management, the learning.

As I facilitate and teach my classes, I will always keep in mind a great Alfie Kohn quote, “When students are ‘off task,’ our first response should be to ask, ‘What’s the task?’” (Kohn, pg. 19) I believe that we should share the bigger picture with our students, that we should show them what the whole concept is so that they appreciate what the parts are as we incrementally teach them. What good is a whole without its parts? How can you appreciate a part if you don’t know what the bigger whole is? This view falls in line with both the constructivist and the critical theory philosophy and I plan to use it in my classroom. Constructivists also talk about how errors are critical to learning and how important techniques used in the learning process such as wait time are important. Dialogue and elaboration on the part of the student which support the social classroom are again included in the realm of constructivists’ views. Humanists along with many other professionals emphasize the importance of including a variety of methods which I can’t scream loud enough from the rooftops because the individual learners need to be reached and the only way we can even come close to that is by varying our methods within each lesson. Motivation for learning comes, in part, through the relevance of the curriculum to the student’s lives as well as making sure that the curriculum is challenging but not out of reach so that students don’t feel discouraged. (Woolfolk) Lastly, another way to keep yourself in check as a teacher is to look at the low achievers in your class. Glasser suggests that this low achievement might be because the education is unsatisfying. Never stop questioning to simply fall in line with how things have always been done. Continue to think outside of the circle, square and rectangle no matter how many years you find yourself in the classroom.

One last feature of classroom management that I’d like to expand on is the traditional implementation of guidelines and discipline. Now would Kohn and the constructivist approach agree with implementing such old school ideas? To me, that is the beauty of developing your own philosophy, it’s up to you and as long as you are consistent about it and it works for you, you’re golden! Therefore, I am comfortable supporting the above aspects of classroom climate and learning with some basic guidelines and discipline techniques. Guidelines are a way to let your middle schoolers in on what you expect their behavior to look like. I don’t want too many and I want students to help come up with examples of the few guidelines but I want them to be attainable, realistic and simple. If students choose to go outside of these fairly easily achieved and reasonable guidelines, I don’t want others to suffer and therefore I will work with them to try and figure out what we can do to help them work more effectively with me and their fellow classmates. I think Glasser’s reality therapy theory could be very effective, if it doesn’t take too much time. I would like to have only a few students to “discipline” so that I could take time to develop a plan with them. We could identify what it is that isn’t working and try to write down some goals that might help them mesh with the class. I also think that Dreikurs logical consequences could work for more simplistic discipline issues such as having a student who throws something in class pick up all of the papers on the floor. I like the fact that the consequences match the behavior so that the students can put the pieces together instead of disciplining with completely unrelated tasks. Finally, I want to resist the temptation to conform to my natural reactions, the discipline measure that were used on me as a student. When it comes to your own classroom, you are always working toward the bigger, loftier goal of promoting learning and encouraging students to become life long learners. Therefore, we must to not let these little things take time away from that bigger picture, and consequences have a tendency to take more time than they should and I find this unacceptable.

My classroom management plan was a struggle because I have a hard time dealing with a plan that I haven’t been able to try out yet. When it comes to such practical things, I like to talk about what I did and how it worked for me as opposed to what I will do. Aside from that hindrance, I found that consequences were rather challenging to pin down and looking into the theorists was very helpful for me. I accepted the fact that if you have guidelines, it is compulsory that you will have consequences as well but until I looked into what has worked for others and thought about what I want students to get out of their “consequences” it was difficult for me to know how to approach it. Again, this also comes from the fact that I haven’t actually tried the consequences that I included in my plan. Another aspect that I had a difficult time with was thinking about the eight zillion different aspect of “routine”. How does one remember it all? I think that it becomes second nature but writing it all out was time consuming and at times felt rather tedious. Fortunately, philosophers and theorists don’t spend too much time deliberating the different ways one should implement their routine although I do think the never-ending theme of consistency is extremely valuable here. Lastly I didn’t give too much paper and ink to student-student relationships. Again, I think this is an important aspect but I noticed that I emphasized teacher-student relationships more. I have a couple of ways I’m going to nurture these relationships but it’s obvious that I am more concerned about my relationship with the students. According to constructivism, learning is social. On the other hand, being social isn’t learning. That is why I focus more on building community in my class for the benefits of the group, I’m not overly concerned with nurturing student to student relationships beyond respect, support and a caring climate. Nevertheless, these are all included in community building and both Kohn and Critical Theory support this aspect of classroom management.

It has been quite illuminating to create such an all-inclusive plan of action. I know that as I continue to get more involved with my classroom at Judson and my Practicum, my classroom management plan will evolve as well. I have a good feel for what my expectations are