Classroom Management Training

I'm mainly writing this post for myself, so that if I ever get asked to evaluate various parts of my certification training, I'll have written it down somewhere while it was still fresh. So feel free to soldier on, dear reader, but recognize that it's mainly a disquisition on how not to run a seminar on classroom management.

It was a two-day seminar, with different instructors each day (although why this was the case is unclear). Those of us in the career-changers program received the text for this course several months ago, but I hadn't spent much time reading it. The first-day instructor at one point clearly indicated the slide presentation she was giving was hers (noting she had forgotten to change the date on the first slide, which was September 17, 2007), but later in the day seemed to imply that she had nothing to do with writing the presentation.

One thing is clear, however -- she didn't proofread it. In addition to the "September 17, 2007" issue, there were several other typos, including at least one sentence that was gibberish.

Part of good classroom management is arranging the physical space to accomodate the type of interaction you're expecting to have with the students. (I know this because I was actually listening during the seminar.) So, for example, if you expect lots of small group work, cluster the desks together. Or, if you want mostly discussion among the entire class, try to arrange the desks in a large semi-circle or U. Et cetera. Of course, if you can't move the desks around, you live with what you have. But if you can, it's a good management tool. The first day was nothing but lecture and full-class discussion, but the easily-movable desks were arranged in clusters.

Another key element of good classroom management is varying the teaching style -- some lecture, some small group work, some large group discussion, etc. This is important even in 60- or 90-minute classes, so if you have the kids all day like in elementary school or a seminar, it's absolutely critical. So the entire first day was nothing but lecture and large group discussion.

Another part of classroom management is keeping the group on-topic. This is admittedly harder to do when you're talking with adults who want to tell stories that are semi-related, but we spent 30 minutes in a discussion of whether it was against the county's policy to grade homework (it is), and given that, what you could do to ensure homework gets done anyway. Great discussion in many respects, but far afield from how to manage the classroom. Moreover, since the county employee couldn't answer the question and didn't really know what standard practice among other teachers is, it was just a bunch of people with no information trying to guess at a right answer. Highly unproductive and, as noted, off-topic.

Final point on the first day's lecturer: she used imprecise language in instances where precision was very, very important. Specifically, several times, she responded to a question about whether some action was OK to do in the classroom with "Oh, no. You can't do that." Further probing revealed that about one-third the time, this meant "Doing that would be a mistake because it will cause more trouble than it's worth," one-third of the time it was "You can try that, but in my opinion, students will not respond the way you want them to," and one-third the time it meant "That's illegal." OK, maybe we shouldn't do any of those things, but there's a pretty big difference between "that's probably not going to work" and "that will cost you your job."

Second-day lecturer was dramatically better, with much more interaction, much more varied activities and a better slide presentation. Also, the desks were in the same place, but it made sense on the second day because we did lots of small group work.