Activity 1: Reflection - Classroom Management Practice

In my initial teaching years, classroom management was a major issue for me. I began observing more experienced teachers, and adopted some of what I saw, thus improving my classroom management skills. After attending the Teacher's College, I was even more equipped with the "tools" needed to ensure a well managed classroom.

Of the management principles outlined in the wiki, I can safely say that I utilise 90% of them. My students are always greeted by me on mornings (mostly), modelling so that it becomes a norm for them to greet their teacher (s), peers and other adults. The other class teacher & myself interact with various students one-on-one occasionally, in an effort to "connect" with each of our students. The students are sometimes involved in setting class rules and also determining the punishment of students (at times), which is a great way for me to introduce principles such as honesty and fairness (students who are friends with the student to be punished usually shy away from suggesting a type of punishment). This however, does not mean that my classes are always "perfect".

One of my short comings would be a lack of catering for the various learning styles of my students. This leads to a lack of interest in some parts of the lesson for some students. This can be overcome by allowing the students to freely express themselves regarding what they like, what they expect from the teacher, from the topic, from the lesson etc. If this can be done prior a lesson or topic, I will be able to prepare activities specific to my students needs. The aforementioned can be linked to the principle 4: creating various communication channels and also principle 9: being honest, open and transparent. Since I was fairly new to multiple subject area teaching, my planning was not always on target. However, I was able to use technology to resolve this issue. Prior to teaching a topic, I utilize various text books and online resources to search for topic information, games and even lesson plans and I document the information in my unit plan. I've set up various folders on my computer to effectively manage the information which I researched for each subject area so that they can be easily retrieved (this takes time and some discipline).

As this course progresses, I hope that I will be able to add more information to this section as new ideas "hit" me.