Classroom Management

Classroom management is a key component to effective teaching. It is "how the teacher delivers the curriculum and the environment in which students will learn". Without appropriate classroom management techniques teachers are not able to apply lesson design or demonstrate content knowledge due to the students' learning environment being interrupted by repeated and varied classroom disruptions.

The instructional event is meant for 30-40 new or first year teachers of middle school and high school students. The teachers will engage in lecture and small group activities to provide practice in creating and teaching classroom rules, arrangement of the physical learning environment, de-escalation techniques and the use of positive and negative reinforcement.

TERMINAL PERFORMANCE OJECTIVES:

When given a scenario, the learners will be able to develop strategies/ approaches to address various behavioral issues with classroom management techniques.

"Learning is an active, social process in which students construct new ideas or concepts based on current knowledge." (Constructivism and Learning) Keeping this in mind, the learners will be arranges in groups of 4 to 6 members. Each group will be given a scenario describing a positive or negative behavior exhibited by a 6th through 12th grade student. Groups that are given a scenario depicting an undesired behavior are responsible for creating preventative strategies and prescribed steps to resolve or extinguish the behavior. Group that are given positive behaviors are responsible for creating steps to promote future occurrences of the behavior. Groups will be told to use the mnemonic S.T.O.P- stop, think, objective behavior, plan response. In this way the learners will be able to collaborate and draw upon a collective of acquired knowledge and varying perspectives in order to approach each situation presented in the most effective way.

After developing their strategies, the groups will share with the class what they would do in that situation. The instructor and other groups will provide feedback after group share. The groups will then create two scenarios of their own, one describing a positive behavior and one describing a negative behavior that will be written on strips of paper to be passed around to the other groups. Each group will act out a short skit demonstrating the behavior and an appropriate strategy that would be used by the teacher.

Allowing the learners to first practice behavior management technique through examples of real life situations created for them and then requiring them to develop their own scenario's supports the constructivist principles for designing learning. That is that the learning environment should be realistic and relevant; it should support multiple perspectives, and encourage ownership in learning. A group developing their own examples of possible scenarios