Good practices in classroom management

In order to realize an effective classroom management, teachers must have in view a few important aspects:

o aspects concerning the training, targeting the adaptation of the instruction to the pupils’ peculiarities and the class’ particularities as a whole, the way the teaching time is used, the methodology used;

o aspects concerning the discipline, which refer to the respect by the pupils of certain demands and behavior-related rules in class and in school;

o aspects related to the curriculum, which refer to the way the curriculum is implemented, evaluated and developed in class;

2.1. Training management

The teacher-manager’s ability to organize and lead the class is extremely important for the obtaining of positive results in learning. So, an efficient teacher must be able to give his pupils:

o informational support, constituting a true knowledge resource for the pupils he works with;

o instrumental support, accentuating the formative character of the teaching process, the formation of competences related to the use of the interiorized information;

o evaluative support, providing a formative feed-back to the pupils;

o emotional support – providing support and understanding when the pupil needs such elements, which invariably leads to the increase of the pupil’s level of trust in his teacher” (Pânişoară, 2009, 189).

According to R. Iucu (2006), the notion of training management intervenes when the teacher is faced with the need to coordinate the space, the classroom materials and equipments, the pupils’ movements and location and the actual material that must be studied, integrated into a curricular area or a study program.

The managerial dimensions implied by the training process are:

o management of the rhythm of the training process;

o promoting group activities: management of the group type the teacher works with, management of the group responsibilities, attention management;

o avoiding saturation (boredom), by means of strategies such as: progressive presentation of the material meant for study, variety, challenge;

o coordination of the daily revision;

o coordination of the unit revision;

o coordination of the individual work in class: presentation of the work tasks, performance monitoring, selection of the work tasks, evaluation;

o coordination of homework;

o coordination of class discussions;

o coordination of projects and systematic learning.

The teacher must know all these dimensions and respect them in his activity, as they lead to an effective classroom management.

2.2. Discipline management

Petrescu Ana-Maria, Stăncescu Ioana / Procedia – Edu World 2010

The educational process in the class represents a systematic, organized action, supposing, with necessity, to accept and respect certain demands, norms and the existence of certain ways of control concerning their acceptance and respect.

Determining and maintaining class discipline represents a challenge for the teacher-manager. He has to know teaching strategies and strategies for keeping the class disciplined, and he must also be able to contextualize these strategies, because they can prove efficient or inefficient depending on the situation he is faced with and on the particularities of the class.

In the context of the assurance of an efficient discipline management in class, an important problem is the determination of a set of rules.

Rules are very important, because they present the teacher’s expectations concerning the pupils’ behavior. At the same time, they make clear what behaviors must never be manifested by a pupil in class and the consequences of an inadequate behavior, too.

The teacher-manager should know that there are certain demands in the formulation of the rules, which he must respect (Oliver, Reschly, 2007):

o let them be short and clear, for the student to grasp them fast;

o let them contain an accessible language, adequate for the pupils’ age and developmental particularities;

o let them be formulated as affirmations (so what the pupil should do) not as negations.

At the same time, it is desirable for the rules to be formulated together with the pupils, this fact having positive effects concerning their understanding and interiorization by the pupils and responsibilization, in the sense of respecting them.

For an authentic discipline management to be attained, the teacher must not content himself with formulating rules, but must be consequent in applying them.

A good class management involves “the determination of clear rules where necessary, avoiding useless rules, eliminating as much as possible the punitive rules, revising them periodically, changing or eliminating them when necessary” (Stan, 2006, 83).

Beside determining a system of rules for the class, the teacher manager can use as well other ways of maintaining the discipline in class:

o creating an atmosphere of mutual respect in class;

o demonstrating selfdiscipline (respecting the rules, teacher’s punctuality);

o equal treatment for all pupils;

o using silence as a corrective means;

o signaling the manifestation of a disciplined/undisciplined behavior;

o manifesting trust in the pupils’ ability to correct the eventual discipline problems;

o treating undisciplined behaviors individually, without making generalizations.

When faced with discipline problems, the teacher must use an entire repertory of strategies to solve the disciplinary problems in class.

Froyen and Iverson (1999) make an inventory of these problems: appreciating the sense of responsibility, correcting irresponsible or inadequate behaviours, ignoring, proxemic control, soft verbal admonition, delaying, placing the pupils differently in class, the technique of the “time due”, eliminating, announcing the parents/tutors, written engagement, determining the rules of behaviour outside the class, coercive measures.

A special importance in discipline management goes to the teacher’s authority. In class, the teacher’s authority must not be mistakenly taken for threats, limiting freedom,

Petrescu Ana-Maria, Stăncescu Ioana / Procedia – Edu World 2010

coercion (be it physical/psychical, direct/indirect), order, command. The teacher should adopt an authority by competence, characterized by: choosing the ways of supporting the pupils, using self-analysis, self-correction by keeping in mind the goals and expectancies, getting the pupils active and responsible (Tudorică, 2006, 112).

2.3. Curriculum management

Curriculum management, as an interdisciplinary domain of study, is related to a set of activities implying the projection, the realization, the permanent evaluation and development of the curriculum.

The main elements that are part of the curriculum management area are: general school policy and organizational culture, the norms and rules system governing the school, curricular products made by the teaching staff (school curricular project, planning, didactic projects etc.), particularities of the training area, ways of organizing the class (frontal, individual, group), teachers’ and pupils’ behavior (didactic style, learning styles, discipline, respect for oneself and for others, evaluation forms etc);

Jacques Delors spoke in his work with the role of pedagogical manifesto entitled

“The Inner Treasure” about the fact that in the contemporary society education relies on four “pillars” directly connected: learning to know, learning to do, learning to live with others, learning to be.

Such an approach of the educational process obliges to a specific perspective on the school curriculum addressed to the child and on the way how this curriculum should be adapted to the context and, implicitly, to reality. So far, education was focused mainly on the informative aspect (learning to know) and less on the formative aspect (learning to do), giving very little importance and sometimes even ignoring the other two components (learning to live with others and learning to be). The actual curriculum must give equal importance to all the four components, so as “education to be looked at as a total experience taking place throughout our lives and dealing both with the development of the capacity to understand, and with the way how knowledge is applied, in the center of attention being situated the individual and his place in society “.(Delors, 2000, 70) .

Seeing that a high-quality curriculum adapted to the local context and to the demands for change can be built and applied only in the conditions of the partnership between school and community, it is natural for each school to develop specific strategies concerning the partnership projects that could support it from all the viewpoints.

So, an important source in curriculum management is represented by the educational partnership, which represents a type of formalized relation between two or more educational factors, whose purpose is to increase the efficiency of the instructive-educative activities with direct and indirect positive effects on the children’s’ training and development.

An effective and sustainable partnership should consider the following directions of action: sesitivizing the parents, attracting local economic agents, convincing the local authorities concerning the importance of their involvement in school life, co-interesting non-governmental organizations from the community. The main role of any educational partnership is to increase the efficiency of the didactic act. The involvement of the educational institutions in partnerships with the family, with the economic agents, with NGOs, or with the organisms of the local community is justified by a certain situational context in which “they increase the schools’ ability to provide high-quality educational services by the access to multiple additional resources” (Gherguţ, Ceobanu, in Cucoş, 2009, 706)

Petrescu Ana-Maria, Stăncescu Ioana / Procedia – Edu World 2010

The concept of educational partnership has a value of principle in post-modern pedagogy, representing in fact an extension of the principle of the unity of the educative demands and of the principle of focusing on the pupil, stated long before that. It represents today an absolute necessity from a fourfold perspective:

o The pupils, as direct beneficiaries, need a unitary and coherent interpretation of the messages coming from the different environments generating education, meant to avoid, as much as possible, their orientation towards non-values;

o The family, as indirect beneficiary, needs the support of the educational institutions and of the local community in order to achieve a high-quality education;

o Under the impact of the principle of decentralization, the educational institutions need to rely on the logistic (economic, especially financial) support provided by the parents and the community;

o The community must know the problems the educational institutions are faced with and get involved in finding local solutions to them.

An efficient school can only be “a school in partnership with the pupil, by valorizing and respecting his identity, in partnership with the family, by recognizing its importance and by drawing it in the didactic process, and in partnership with all the society’s educative resources, which it identifies, involves and actively uses.” (Vrăsmaş, 2008, 220)

3. Consequences of an inappropriate classroom management approach