Skip to main content

The Effects of COVID-19: Remote ST/ Independent Study

“Good morning, Vietnam!” While there are a million different ways to offer someone a greeting, the only one that feels sufficient for our modern crisis is reminiscent of Robin Williams’s cheer and the turmoil of the 1960s. COVID-19 has changed the world as we know it, if not temporarily, and my last semester at Saint Michael’s College has suffered a similar fate to those of other universities across the United States. As educators, we encourage our students to persevere through academic and social challenges. As humans and community leaders, we must continue to do the same.

In light of the changes taking place within my licensure program, the next few weeks will be filled with independent study of education-based topics from the safety of my own home. Together with my program supervisor, I have selected a few goals to work on remotely as a way to improve my teaching skills while practicing CDC guidelines and keeping out of a physical classroom. This week’s goal is a continuation of one that I have reflected on a lot in the past few months… Let’s talk about classroom management.

Some of the more awkward parts of my school day are the times when I need students to transition between activities that require supplemental direction. Of course, socializing is a part of growing up, and many classroom activities actually ask students to interact with one another verbally, but I often struggle with getting students to stop talking when it’s time to listen to instructions. I want to encourage positive social exchanges, but I also need 100% of my students to engage in my lesson without distracting themselves or others. I do not want to yell over them when the classroom volume gets too high, and I don’t want to adopt classroom strategies that the students feel are juvenile (like a quiet coyote, for example). How, then, can I get a classroom full of middle schoolers to listen up without yelling over them or watching a select few start to police the situation and call each other out?

Several established educators and education theorists have published their own classroom management strategies on a variety of platforms, including Jennifer Gonzalez, the brain behind Cult of Pedagogy. In the short clip below, Gonzalez shares one classroom management tip for talkative students that I am always hesitant to try: gathering student attention by waiting them out.




Keeping a normal “teacher voice” volume is sometimes difficult when I naturally feel the need to yell in order to gather attention in a loud environment. Even more, directing students to prepare for a transition and then waiting for them to recognize the transition I signaled could arguably take more time than any given schedule allows. After all, I am talking about teaching middle schoolers. However, Gonzalez’s strategy offers a lot more than wait time between transitions and activities: a transition is still signaled right away, but students are also encouraged to take the time they need to prepare for next steps without dragging their classmates into a spiral of distraction. The pressure of the whole class waiting on the group to come together does not single out any individuals. Rather, responsibility in learning is distributed among students evenly, and ensuring no students are lost when directions are given becomes the community’s shared task. Although five seconds may seem like five minutes, waiting for students to take ownership of their learning behaviors establishes habits geared toward success over time, and that is certainly worth the wait.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

YA Lit.: Dumplin'

Nowadays, young adult literature covers a wide range of themes, offering commentary on everything from self-image and confidence to abuse and death. While the recent release of the Netflix series (based on the novel) 13 Reasons Why   has arguably created a negative association between young adults and literature, there are plenty of YA novels that deal with teenage realities beyond suicide. Julie Murphy's Dumplin' , a novel full of southern charm and the narrator Willowdean's no non-sense sarcasm, provides the reader with a classic battle between feeling good in your own skin and wanting to fit in with society's bodily expectations. Willowdean, an overweight 11th grader in a town obsessed with an annual beauty pageant, can't seem to get away from the local pressures to be a beauty queen. Usually comfortable in her skin, Willowdean starts to question her confidence when a co-worker shows romantic interest. Although dealing with a serious topic that could...
3 comments
Read more

On Teaching and Reflection

Somewhere on my bookshelves, sandwiched between worn copies of literary classics and young adult novels, rests my collection of the title On Writing and other memoirs focused on the craft. Several authors have attempted to make sense of their adopted art, and even more have tried to guide others through their creative processes: Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, Stephen King, Sol Stein, Ray Bradbury, and George Orwell, to name a few. While many of the memoirs composed by those who have found great success in their writing highlight similar themes when discussing the elements of their work, each writer also offers a sort of defense for his or her own approach in connecting a pen to paper. That, of course, is the beauty of writing: an author has freedom within some set conventions, and even these boundaries can be broken if the right time presents itself. After four years of undergraduate study, I think the biggest takeaway from my experience as a pre-service teacher is that education ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Place-Based Learning: Museums and the Importance of Physical Space in Middle School Education

Before there were formalized schools, there were living rooms, church halls, back steps, battlefields, and the great outdoors. Education came in all shapes and sizes, from the modern understanding of “traditional” study through the analysis of past writings and artifacts to the natural signals one learned to recognize on the farm before an approaching storm. Students were not just young people hunched over a book shielded from the world behind brick walls. They were citizens learning how to manage a family business, reading and printing newspapers, planting seeds, plowing land, and striving to better prepare themselves for the future, whatever it held for them. Today’s students aim to do the same. Yet their education seems to have restricted itself to the boundaries of school property, or perhaps it occasionally wanders beyond county lines. What happened to learning about your environment— and all the life that lived and lives within it— by experiencing everything it has to offer fir...
7 comments
Read more