Classroom Observations

When I observed my mentor teacher the other day, I noticed several effective strategies and several ineffective strategies for classroom management.   For opening the lesson, she did a good job of getting students on track right away.   She did not waste a whole lot of time taking attendance and doing that kind of stuff, but she knew what she wanted to do right away and got them into it.   During the lesson itself, one effective strategy that I observed that I’m going to apply is giving the students choices.   She would say stuff like “You guys can choose to keep doing X, but if you do, I’m going to make you do Y” (where Y is an undesirable thing).   This worked well.   For the lesson closure, I don’t think she was super effective, actually. The students started getting out of the chairs 2 minutes early and she just kind of ended class there instead of keeping strong until the end.   The main types of transitions that occurred were from class disruptions coming from students, which she dealt with by standard practices such as pausing and looking at students, telling them to be quite, etc. The second one would be moving from one activity to another, which she handled well as well.   She gave them 1 minute to put their books away and get a notebook out and get ready for notes and then after than 1 minute to get out the worksheet for corrections.   The only other transition was when a T.A. came into class to get in school suspension work for one of her students from another class.   She got kind of bogged down with this and wasted some time fumbling around and getting back on track, but there was not much she could do about that I don’t think.