The First Two Weeks

I just finished my first two weeks of student teaching. Officially it's only been 3 days of student teaching since that is when UK starts. The local school district starts a week and a half before UK. I felt it was necessary to go to the first weeks because that's when all classroom management procedures are started and the expectations of the students are set. If I had rolled in a couple weeks later for student teaching I wouldn't have had the chance to observe and take notes of exactly how this works out. While they may teach us about classroom management in school classes, there is no application involved, so I've never felt comfortable in that area.

The other advantage I have is to see the classroom management of two different teachers at different levels. My teacher at the elementary level is quite good at setting it up her way, but at times it seems like she spends more time on classroom management than on teaching. I'm curious if this is the norm through the entire semester or if it's just establishing everything in the beginning in a very organized manner, and once the children have them down, then teaching can begin.

I went to a CHAMP training for the elementary school, and so they use those guidelines in all the classrooms. This helps keeps things somewhat consistent between classrooms. CHAMP is basically five guidelines that are established in the classroom. Conversation, help, activity, movement, and participation. Can you talk, and if so, who? How do you ask for help? What should be accomplished during this activity? What movement is allowed (bathroom, drink, getting something in the room, etc)? What does participation look like and doesn't look like?

The other aspect that needs to be covered in what do you do when a child breaks one of the rules. Most of the time, it just seems to be forgetfulness at this point. So she usually reminds them by focusing on people who are doing the right thing and praising them for it and the other students realize what they are supposed to be doing and get to it.

If it gets to the point of distraction, then there is time out. So then you have to ask yourself, what is the difference between just needing a reminder and a need to be in time out? There have been a few times when I felt she sent a kid in time out unjustified, and times I felt it was appropriate. I don't like the way she runs her time out. To me, it feels too inconsistent. I can understand why though. She's trying to teach a class and can't monitor exactly how long a child remains in time out. It also matters how they spend time out. She has structured the time out so that a kid is supposed to sit cross-legged with hands in lap in a certain spot. They must do this in order to join the rest of the class. The problem is how long. I've seen kids sit from a minute to the entire class time. I've seen some kids be completely obedient and not make a sound, but may not have their hands in the lap, and therefore aren't able to join the class. Usually in cases like these, I talk to the child and try to get them to obey it completely and tell them if they do that, the teacher will allow them back into the group. With one quite unruly kid, I finally got him to do this, and he did it successfully for over two minutes without the teacher noticing him, at which point he got sick of it and was saying that he did it but the teacher never noticed and that he should be allowed to join the class. I would almost think that with time out you would need to have a certain time limit. I would focus more on the time than the way the time is spent, although if their timeout was still a distraction, it would increase the time. This seems to be one way I have found inconsistency in a classroom can cause confusion in a child and they don't quite understand the expectations if they aren't set.

The next step is safe. If a child is so disobedient and refuses to obey any type of instruction or can cause such problems that safety is an issue, they get sent to safe. Basically a room with nothing in it but desks. There have been downsides to this in the past and probably will be more this year. Last year, safe was going to the office where you helped out the secretary. This meant using the copier and run other errands which the kids thought were cool, so this caused them to act out so they could go to safe. This year they have a room specifically for safe, but the teacher seems to be more buddy-buddy with the students. I say this because of something that happened Friday. One student was acting up, so the teacher said go to timeout. Instead of going to time-out he walked right out of the classroom and headed straight to safe. The teacher had me follow the student out to take him to safe, but he was already there by the time I caught up with him. The safe teacher wasn't in, so we went to search for him. Once they met, the safe teacher reprimanded him and talked with him, but in such a way that the student more enjoyed the attention he was getting, even though it was negative attention supposedly. Well, I headed back to the classroom to join the rest of the class and left the student with the safe teacher. He joined the class before it was over and was pretty well-behaved for the rest of the class. To me, it seemed like he didn't need to misbehave because he already had a visit with the safe teacher like he wanted, and now that he visited him, he could actually go to school. Students really shouldn't want to go to safe. Later that same day we saw the teacher with two students in safe, but instead of being in safe they were having fun in the gym. That'll help motivate the students to act up if it means they have a chance to go play. So this was safe at the intermediate school (3rd through 5th). At the K-2nd, we had one student go to safe, he chattered all the way into class, jumped up and down the steps, and refused to go to time out and continued to act up. We got the safe teacher to come get him, but I don't know how effective it is at K-2nd yet. I haven't seen what goes on, but no fun hopefully.

One other issue that has been interesting to see how to deal is the ESL kids. We have quite a few, and you get quite a few different reactions between all of them. Unfortunately there is only one regular teacher who knows some Spanish in Kindergarten. So her class ended up with two ESL students, which seems to be the most. One doesn't know any English and you can tell. He tries to be involved and mimics what is going on. The other knows English, but he tries to play the Spanish card. He ignores what's going on in class and won't participate because he thinks he doesn't have to since he 'only speaks Spanish'. He pretends that he doesn't understand and just sits there, when that's not the case. I remember in one of our classes we did a game based on this idea. Basically we got in groups and were given a few incomplete rules to play a card game. We played it and whoever won moved to the next table and the loser moved to the previous table. When this happened, you were thrown into a new card game. Once we got there, no communication of any type was allowed, and you had to basically figure out how to play. The reactions we got in the class were quite varied for college students I had thought. A couple of people decided to take advantage of not knowing the rules, and played by his own rules so that he could have his own way and win. Most just got frustrated because they couldn't figure out the rules. Some of them would make a minute attempt to follow the game and others just gave up. Surprisingly, I was the only conformist. I loved the challenge of having to figure everything out on the spot. I usually knew the rules better than the people who made up their card game did by the time we finished the game. I guess you really don't get a lot of people who try to follow somebody else’s set of rules, instead they usually take advantage, give up, play ignorance, etc. That's unfortunate. I can't really think of a way to get them to be involved as much as they should be. I know the teacher makes an effort to get these students involved and tries to have other students help them learn the words since those are important as well when learning music and songs.

I only have one class in the middle school. It's the intermediate band class. I'm not sure exactly how I would set up rules in this type of situation. The rules are set, but oftentimes there seems to be no consequences in many of the situations I see. Time out doesn't seem to be an appropriate punishment for a middle school setting, but I'm not sure how you would enforce rules. Most of the time, whenever I see what I call 'band director mode' it tends to be yelling at kids to be quiet and once they are quiet, continue on with the instruction and playing. This seems way too often the norm and not effective. I'm not sure what I would consider effective for myself and that is definitely an area I'm going to have to explore as I student teach, because I see myself falling into this 'band director mode' way too easily. It still seems too early to find out exactly how the class is set up since I only have one hour with this teacher at the middle school level. I'll figure it all out soon, and exactly how things are run. The one advantage of having sixth grade is that they are all new and slightly shy and quiet at this point, so it isn't as much of an issue.