Author: eric

In order to create a productive environment, you must have effective classroom management strategies set in place. It all starts with getting off on the right foot with your students and accepting them for who they are; they will accept me for who I am in time. Like most teachers do, I establish my procedures and protocols early for keeping a safe and well maintained work area at an acceptable level. In doing this, you should be gentle but firm, very firm indeed. Throughout the quarter, it’s important to be aware of everything going on in the classroom. Withitness is hard to achieve in my art room, given the layout of the space. Once I recognized that the students were aware of the task at hand and what was expected of them, it made it easier for me to monitor the room. Throughout the school year, I’ve been able to establish good teacher-student relationships by working independently amongst them and conversing with them as if I were one of their peers. They like to be able to talk to me without the view of me being superior to them. They enjoy the informal conversations, and it shows them that I’m hum. Doing all of these things on a regular basis has helped me manage my classroom well and keep a healthy perspective on what my students should be taking away from my class.

For this assignment, I observed the other art teacher my mentor team teaches with, Mr. Lickingteller. Like most teachers, he likes to start class as soon as the bell rings. The first management strategy was getting students on track; once the bell rang, he closed the doors, turned down the lights, and got them going on the drawing for the day. For his class, he uses an Elmo Projector so the drawing displayed on the projector screen. While the students stayed on the task most of the time, they did tend to pull out their phones and text friends. So the second transition that Mr. Lickingteller did was walking over and asking the students to put their phones away or hand them over, which worked. What kid want’s to give up their phone, right? At the end of class, he was good about giving the students ample time for clean up. His biggest pet peeve is standing by the door, so he addressed the group of students with a calm collected tone and asked them to wait in their seats. The only other transition that happened was when runners from the office had to pull a students out of class for whatever reason, and this happens at Dimond High School a lot. The runners really didn’t pull Mr. Lickingteller away from the students for more than 5 seconds so it’ wasn’t a big distraction. I would probably do all the management strategies that he did in his class, in fact I kind of already do in my mentors classroom. That’s the advantage of team teaching, we pretty much share the same management plan.

While the article showed that it’s not just Alaska’s native cultures that are being affecting by outside factors, it’s not surprising that both native an dominant cultures continue to struggle to coexist. It’s gut wrenching to think about being a part of a culture that is literally being erased from the history books. A point that was purposed by Native elders in the article that stuck with me was that the native people should have more control and influence on their own school system, and not so much guided by a dominant culture. I think that the future generations of natives need to be taught by educators from their own community. It’s important to infuse culture and tradition into education. It’s important to pass down the native languages and traditional/religious practices of the community; everyone should know where they come from.

I thought some of the comments were a little naive. Someone made a comment suggested that we are preparing them for the life ahead rather than preparing them to live in the past. The comment was kind of snarky, but I could see where the person was coming from. I do this it is important to teach other cultures how to be a productive member of a dominant cultures society, but it is also important to know about your culture and how it was formed and shaped.

If I were to post rules around my classroom, I would put them in obvious places where the would have to look every time they entered the area. Some of these places would include above the sink where they clean their tools, on the wall where the tools get stored, and the wall behind the throwing wheel. The 4 main rules I would post are:

1. Do not touch another students art work.
2. Come to class ready to work.
3. Clean your work area and tools; place the tools back in their designated area’s. Failure to do so will cost you all of your participation points for the day.
4. If something is wrong, tell the teacher right away. This includes broken tools, problems with your project that may have devastating results if not dealt with immediately, or if you just have a problem with another student in general.

An article that I found that is published by Scholastic  is called “30 Classroom Procedures to Head Off Behavior Problems” by Bonnie Murray.  https://www.scholastic.com/teachers/article/30-classroom-procedures-head-behavior-problems

Here is my wordle link: