Final Internship Blog Post #1

This is the first blog post of my final semester in the MAT program!

This week was my first week of final internship. The classroom I’m in is a fifth grade classroom that is self-contained, so I am excited at the prospect of getting to teach lessons in all of the subjects. Since this is a new school and classroom for me, I have been spending the week familiarizing myself with the school community and getting to know a bit about the students. This week there were three days in a row of testing, so the schedule was not the norm, but the collaborating teacher I have been placed with is excellent and she has been extremely helpful in trying to get me up to speed on everything.

Last semester, I feel that I was really able to practice creating lesson plans that the students in my practicum classroom found engaging. Going into this semester, I want to continue to develop this as well as focus more on my classroom management and methods of assessing student learning.

In what I have observed this week, I have already begun to learn things that will be helpful to remember in terms of classroom management as I begin to take over more responsibility in the classroom. Especially because these students do not switch to another classroom halfway through the day, frequent stretch breaks become an important part of getting the kids up and moving every so often to keep them more focused during lessons. Teacher-directed P.E. for good behavior twice each week also serves as a motivating factor for getting work done as well as an opportunity for the kids to get time outside on days they don’t have P.E. for specials. Sporadic use of positive reinforcement during lessons, be it verbal or physical (candy, tickets, etc.), proves to be an effective practice for keeping students on task and reminding them of what they are expected to do. Proportionally there is much more positive reinforcement in the classroom than anything else. High, clear expectations and specific, positive reinforcement go hand-in-hand. I’m also seeing fun attention-getters and useful teacher talk that contribute to effective classroom management. For example, with a student that is off-task, rather than scolding the student or questioning the behavior, the teacher may simply ask, “How can I help you to be successful right now?” To contextualize, this was said to a student who frequently has trouble with participating in class as expected and the phrasing here was part of a process of helping this student to make better choices while avoiding escalating the situation. During lessons, accountable talk is also important, such as having students ask each other clarifying questions if another student answers a teacher’s question with a response that is vague or unclear. Students were also asked to give a thumb-up or thumbs-down if they agreed or disagreed with something a classmate said.

In terms of assessing student learning, I have become more familiar now with running records as a method of tracking student reading progress in things such as fluency, comprehension, accuracy, and expression. In addition, the students did FAIR testing for the second time this year and I was able to see how comparing the results from last time with the current results indicated areas that the teacher would focus on more moving forward. For example, with this group there was great progress in syntactic knowledge, but not so much in vocabulary and reading comprehension. Also for individual students, the information was valuable for identifying who may need to be pulled in small groups. Of course this type of data is not the only point upon which such decisions are made, but it was nice to see how teachers could use the results of these tests to inform instruction in such a practical way.

End of the Second Semester: Classroom Management Reflections

This week was the final week of our course in classroom management. I learned about many different theories and philosophies regarding how to manage behavior in the classroom as well as particular strategies that can be used in establishing a sense of community.    

In an earlier post I had developed a classroom layout design for a class of 25 students, as seen below.

Later, for another assignment, I created this alternate classroom layout design for the same hypothetical 25 students I had written about in my previous post.

Here is the accompanying description for the above layout, which I believe reflects a greater emphasis on community and the value of small group work than my previous layout. “The twenty-five students in the class are seated at five tables in groups of five. There are five students in the class who are high achievers and social leaders with an ability to influence others. One of them will be placed at each of the tables in the hopes that their influence will positively affect the behavior of their classmates. Seating arrangements in which high-achieving and low-achieving students are sitting together throughout the room facilitates student involvement and participation (Levin & Nolan, 2010). The seating of students in groups is in keeping with the classroom emphasis on community and group work. Students such as those with learning disabilities will benefit from small group work as well as the ELL students in the class who will be placed at different tables in the classroom.”    

In another part of the paper containing this classroom layout design, I also wrote about a few routines and strategies I would employ in my classroom that seemed to be extremely beneficial to community building and behavior management. Some of those strategies and routines included Morning Meeting (Kriete, 2002), redirection (Rothstein-Fisch & Trumbull, 2008), and the Peace Table (Bullard, 2008).    

More than anything, I think the biggest thing I learned from this course is that no matter what management style you personally have, there is a large amount of prior planning involved. Even teachers whose classrooms are more student-directed must begin with particular routines and strategies in mind to guide students to this point. Structure and routine aren’t just for the reward/coercive, assertive discipline teachers of the world. Building a community takes some serious time and planning.

 

References

Bullard, S. (2008). Peace takes practice. In Teaching Tolerance (Ed.), Starting small: Teaching tolerance in preschool and the early grades (pp. 63-75). Montgomery, AL: Southern Poverty Law Center.

Kriete, R. (2002). The Morning Meeting Book (2^nd ed.). Turners Falls, MA: Northeast Foundation for Children.

Levin, J., & Nolan, J. F. (2010). Principles of classroom management: A professional decision-making model (6^th ed.). Boston, MA: Pearson.

Rothstein-Fisch, C., & Trumball, E. (2008). Managing diverse classrooms: How to build on students’ cultural strengths. Alexandria, Virginia: ASCD.

Classroom Layout Design: Arrangement of Students’ Desks

This week in classroom management, we worked in groups to form a classroom layout design. While there are many components to a classroom’s layout, the main focus of our group’s attention fell on the arrangement of the students’ desks. In Elementary Classroom Management: Lessons from Research and Practice (Sixth Edition), Carol Simon Weinstein and Molly E. Romano discuss seating in terms of the effect this arrangement has on the interaction among students. This is an important aspect of social contact, which they identify as one of the six basic functions of physical settings. Different types of arrangements facilitate different types of social contact to be taken into consideration when deciding what types of student interactions you as a teacher are hoping to promote in your classroom. Desks in clusters, for example, allow students to work in small groups and can facilitate interactions among students from varying cultural and linguistic backgrounds. Desks in rows, on the other hand, promote student concentration on assignments as an individual and can increase students’ average time-on-task. Ultimately, in creating a classroom layout design for a class of 25 students, our group arrived at the seating arrangement depicted below.

 

 This seating arrangement seemed ideal in its fusion of aspects of rows and also groupings. The U-shape allows students to feel a sense of community in seating while also allowing the teacher ample room to move around the students. Groups are achieved through rows facing each other, to allow for student interaction. The aspects of both rows and clusters in this seating arrangement allow for flexibility in terms of being able to place students where they will be most likely to succeed. A student who needs to be able to focus could be placed in the less distracting single row of seats whereas students who may benefit from interacting more frequently with others could be seated in the rows facing each other.    

Following the creation of this design, we did an activity in which playing cards were distributed at random so that each of us had a set of 25 cards representing 25 different students in our hypothetical class. We were given a key explaining what each card meant in terms of describing our hypothetical student. This key is shown below.

Using our classroom layout design, we were then asked to place these “students” as we would seat them in our classroom based on what we know about them from the key, with the caveat that all the diamonds were ELL students. In my initial effort, I placed the students as seen below.    

My classroom seating “philosophy” was to mix up the students by reading level and behaviors. I tried to place the social leaders near those with the biggest behavior problems, in the hopes that peer influence would contribute to diminishing negative behaviors. I also attempted to avoid anyone with behavior problems sitting next to anyone else with behavior problems, a task that was easier said than done with a class in which half of the students were identified as nonconformists. I also avoided placing students with ADD/ADHD next to anyone with behavioral issues to avoid any further possible distractions. I additionally placed well-behaving students by possible distractions or areas of high traffic in the classroom such as pencil sharpeners.      

I also decided to spread out the ELL students, an approach I became unsure of when discussing this with another classmate whose approach was to group them together. My philosophy was that the ELL students would benefit from interaction with English-speaking students whereas my classmate felt that grouping ELL students of the same primary language together would allow them to work together and help each other in ways their other classmates could not. Ultimately, both of these opportunities are important classroom experiences for ELL students. This dichotomy represents the importance of grouping students in multiple different ways for different activities based on specific student needs and not being hindered by an adherence to your initial seating arrangements.

  

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.