Beginning of the Second Semester: Classroom Management Reflections

In our classroom management class this week we did a free write activity, writing for five minutes everything we thought about what classroom management is or what we think it should be. At the end I had about a page of unedited, unfiltered free thought on what I thought about classroom management. We were then asked to use a can of Play-Doh to form a representation of what we had written about classroom management. What initially struck me about this activity was the difficulty of synthesizing what I had written on my paper into a visual representation. This led me to reflect on what the overwhelming message was of what I had written. The main themes were inclusiveness with consideration for student diversity and a sense of community in which the teacher is explicit about expectations. I ended up representing this with my Play-Doh as a group of students and their teacher joining hands in a circle with a heart in the center.

After doing a gallery walk looking at the representations created by the others in the class, I saw many themes similar to the one I had been attempting to express in mine. Others chose to represent themes of organization and direction or presented students in small groups working with one another. My representation was less focused on strategies and approaches and more on overall classroom atmosphere. As we walked around we each wrote a word or two on a piece of paper of what came to mind when viewing other people’s Play-Doh representations. When I came back to mine, I found that people had written words such as love, community, and inclusiveness. 

It would seem that my attitudes about classroom management and atmosphere were clear from my representation. I think the clear visual of students and teacher joined in a circle was effective for creating a connection with abstract ideas such as community and inclusiveness. It is encouraging that others were able to understand clearly my desire to create an inclusive classroom community, but there are many other aspects I was unable to translate into my Play-Doh representation. Things such as being an adaptive teacher who is responsive to the specific needs of a diverse range of students or being able to recognize when particular strategies are not effective in the classroom are also important to effective classroom management. Many other people’s representations depicted aspects of order and organization and, while I did not emphasize this in my free write, it is perhaps another facet of effective classroom management that I should incorporate into my approach.