The Final Countdown: Summative reflection on my teaching experiences this semester.

After two semesters of limited teaching in a first grade classroom I’ve learned that I still have a lot to learn. I would say that the area in which I learned the most this semester was classroom management. In general my teaching partner and I approached the classroom in an amiable way—attempting to show students that we respected them and hoped they would do the same to us. Weinstein & Mignano actually reinforce this approach, stating that “motivating resistant, underachieving, or apathetic students requires “resocialization”… in short, showing students that you care about them as students and people.” The problem with this approach is that it must be complimented with a strong set of classroom management strategies that will help teachers deal with the “bad days” their students are sure to have. My partner and I found ourselves to be significantly lacking in these strategies. We first set out to be social with our students, which made it very hard to discipline a student when he decided to crawl around on the floor or write “boog” as his name on every assignment. We learned that being friends is not the best classroom management strategy. On those bad days, every student was distracted and we were at a loss for how to pull the wandering individuals back on track. The biggest change that we would make to our unit if we could reteach it would be the way we approached management. A small tweak in everything from the language we chose (no “you guys” or “bud”) to adding a little seriousness to our friendly attitudes would make all the difference.