Second Thoughts about CcTC Classroom Management

In order to create and maintain a positive learning culture in any school environment, teachers must condition their students to certain educational potentials, including but not limited to: critical thinking, cooperation, and empowerment (student production of solution to their own problems). In order to accomplish such a magnificent feat a criteria of objectives must be established so as to check progress against a certain rubric. Since starting at CcTC I have seen only partial preparation of classroom management, therefore, there are questions which remain to be answered that can help to bridge the lapse in principle and practice seen in the classrooms and begin to arrange the criteria for success. The following questions permit clarity of purpose, potential dialogue, and cohesion amongst the team of teachers working to maintain that positive learning culture as goals are clearly known and understood as the questions begin to be answered and more generally explored. Such consistent optimization by teachers would also help to prepare students for future educational ventures and might even double as a management technique. In other words, the positive learning culture would create an environment in which students would be occupied, entertained, and engaged, thereby reducing the strain of managing them for the teacher. In such a way, the role of the teacher would cease to be disciplinarian and become facilitator. This transformation is easier said than done.

This rubric then must begin with fundamental questions and answers. The answers then will function as guides for practitioners to create those positive learning cultures for each student. So, what do young students need besides discipline, and how do we embrace these essential lessons in the classroom? In my estimation, besides discipline CCTC students need collaborative work in order to teach the value of working with others, and to condition their ability to look beyond their own analysis and ask for help from peers. Second, they must learn self-regulation in order to manage their disruptive behaviors. And they need to learn how to express their emotions without a tantrum, this can easily be seen as both a practical social skill and a personal therapeutic skill.

I would also have hopes for making a slight curriculum change, if the students were well enough disciplined, to incorporate critical thinking skills appropriate for pre-kindergarten students. Perhaps limiting the expectations of the students to just being capable of recognizing differences between images represented pictorially.

What will become impossible to ignore, though, are the students who so demonstratively resist such an educational protocol. What strategy can be employed to teach disruptive students the value of education and a motive to cooperate with the teacher.

The reality is impossible to ignore that many students benefit from additional instruction in these critical areas of education: cooperation, self-regulation, and critical thinking. In order to accomplish this task of optimizing classroom culture, strategies must be designed and practiced. Redesigning, dialoging, and altering plans is a necessity. Teachers should expect resistance from students.