Check-In 15

Classroom management was a bit of an issue this week. Classroom management is always somewhat tricky, particularly on white days, and with certain students in particular. These are actually the same students I mentioned in a previous IFO that keep each other in check. However, this week, they seem to be becoming restless and have become more instigating than mediating. On purple days, classroom management was still a moderate issue but not as much as during white days. I might attribute this to the semester quickly coming to a close. Students also started a movie this week; a movie that, admittedly, is old by students standards and boring and difficult to understand because it’s Shakespeare. Some students were understandably annoyed with the movie, but others were utilizing the movie to complete the packet they had been working on for the unit, and were becoming frustrated with their classmates.

I used this opportunity to test out different methods of classroom management. At first, I just attempted at quieting them, and their mentor teacher did this as well. We used a quick and simple method of shushing or asking them to be quiet because we did not yet know the extent to which they might cause a disturbance. This didn’t work after several attempts. So I moved a chair over to them and had a talk with them about the importance of learning new things, ways they might be able to absorb information, and being respectful of others around them. This seemed to have worked since they did not really talk for the remainder of the class. However, they did not exchange simple words between each other which was quite frequent with them. I am worried I might have invested too much into talking with them one-on-one and there might have been a middle ground between the two methods I used that I should have implemented instead.