“We’ll Manage”: Classroom Management.

I will say that the system of classroom management in our 4th grade classroom is just that – management. Most the times it seems to me that we (my CT and I) are simply reacting to situations instead of pre-acting. In general, it seems that we have not taken the initiative to set up a proactive system of classroom management, that our students were not given the necessary guidelines at the beginning of the school year to follow.

Now, I’m not saying that my teacher does not institute any sort of discipline in our classroom (because she does), but I am insinuating that the system of expectations and disciplinary actions could have been more distinctly emphasized at the start of the school year. For example, we began the school-year with a “ticket-system” – the students would recieve or have tickets taken away when they had negative or postive behaviors. This in itself was sort of a fiasco, as we started out with the tickets being a negative (as in they started out with 25 at the beginning of the week and then would have tickets taken away), and then we changed it to a positive (as in students would begin with none and then have to “earn” them througout the week). The end reward was “choice time” on fridays if they had the correct amount of tickets. It seems that the switching between the tickets being a positive and a negative were consfusing to the students and they system was not so effective.

This lack of stability in classroom management somewhat worries me for my own Full Time teaching experience – I am worried that I will not be able to maintain an appropriate level of discipline and productivity in my classroom as my students are not used to one particular system. I am worried that the sort of behavior system that has been modeled to me by my CT is going to effect my own confidence in “managing” my classroom.

Needless to say, this is something which I will need to focus on throughout this coming semester.