The teacher uses an understanding of individual and group motivation and behavior to create a learning environment that encourages positive social interaction, active engagement in learning and self-motivation.
An effective learning community must support self-initiated learning, student responsibility for decision making and positive interactions and relationships. Part of how a teacher encourages this is through mutually developed and understood expectations, a positive, supportive classroom environment, establishment of mutual respect and trust, and a thorough knowledge of classroom organization and discipline.
Intensive attention to student motivation and classroom management occurs in the elementary and secondary methods courses as well as in the SIMAT summer programs and fall seminars and FLEXMAT intern seminar. Students are encouraged to be eclectic, to adapt methods from a variety of on research-based sources and classroom management theorists. Interns in both FLEXMAT and SIMAT are exposed to a variety of cooperative learning techniques throughout their coursework and/or seminars. In SIMAT, a major focus of the initial summer program is to create a cooperative, collaborative cohort in which interns use each other to problem solve and to replicate this environment in their own classrooms. FLEXMAT pre-intern coursework instructors model behaviors which create a positive classroom climate; a portion of the intern seminar, which parallels the internship, focuses on honing instructional strategies to ensure orderly, productive learning.
I
attribute a good portion of the learning achieved by our unit on modern-day
Maryland to the care the fourth-grade teachers took in drawing the students
into authentic and engaging projects. Before we even began the unit, we started
building student motivation by sharing our own anticipation and enthusiasm in
the fourth-grade monthly newsletter by declaring the first day of the unit
"Maryland Colors Day" (A). Our first lesson was dedicated to building
excitement with the objective: "The student will demonstrate enthusiasm
and a positive attitude about studying the state of Maryland" (B).
Throughout the unit we involved the students in active learning with such
activities as searching for examples of landforms in National Geographic
magazines and conducting map scavenger hunt (C, D). When it came time for a
Jigsaw research project, we used "lottery" tickets to promote team
identity and unity as we assigned students to cooperative learning groups (E).
Finally, we provided motivation for the students' research projects with an
authentic audience of their peers on State Fair Day when the entire
fourth-grade team toured each classroom and reviewed each others' posters and
brochures (F). -Renell Welch
This
photograph shows the class rules and the repercussion for not following the
class rules. These rules are kept up all year long in the front of the
classroom for all of the students to view. I feel that the best way to maintain
management in the classroom is to be consistent and positive with your
management techniques. Students were encouraged in the beginning of the year to
come up with classroom rules. I used this worksheet during the year to maintain
classroom behavioral management. This helps the students understand what they
did and gives the students a chance to explain what would have been a better
choice for them to make. They give the students a way to solve their behavioral
problems without direct teacher participation. I feel that this was a very good
classroom management technique to use with my classroom management system. -Glenn
Hayes
Toward the end of the first quarter, I noticed I was having difficulty moving into the interior of the aisles. In addition, I was having management difficulties with some students playing with gas jets and opening lab drawers. (a) This is the first quarter seating chart. Because of the awkward location of the board, I did not want to rearrange desks at the expense of some students not being able to see. (b) To address these issues I created this seating chart in which the special needs students were placed on the sides of the aisles and the students sitting at the lab stations were moved to interior aisle seats. The revised seating arrangement allowed me to have easy access to the special needs students (who I would often help individually) and to resolve a potentially dangerous safety issue.
-Michael Gonzales
It
was the philosophy of one of my supervising teachers that no credit would be
given for the completion of homework in second semester Pre-Calculus
w/Analysis, an Honors course. Homework was assigned nightly and reviewed but
was not graded. A student's grade was thus determined entirely by his or her
performance on tests and quizzes. Because homework was not graded students
often did not complete it. As a result, many students were not learning the
material as well as they should and it was reflected in their performance on
tests and quizzes. Following the example of my other supervising teacher, I
implemented a policy in my third period class of assigning some small portion
of the daily homework assignment as classwork. Students were allowed to work
together on this, but each student had to show me the completed problems in
order to receive a classwork grade for the day. At the end of the marking
period the classwork would be weighted so that together it counted as an
additional quiz. The opportunity to improve their overall grade with classwork
points motivated the students to complete these assignments. Student grades did
improve, but it was because completing the classwork enabled the students to
better identify areas of weakness. As a result, they were better prepared for
tests and quizzes. -Patricia Truitt