Classrooms are not just four walls

Keeping the order of the classroom is one of the most important and difficult roles that teachers must confront in the hard labor to teach. Somebody can think that just young teachers with few experiences should pay special attention in classroom management because old and wise teachers are able to face the most difficulties with their groups and they never have been any transcendental problems with them because of their experiences. Perhaps the situation at the majority of the schools where the number of students surpasses the capacity of the classrooms, the chairs and their location is not comfortable, the boards on the walls are small, dirty, damaged or old, the classrooms are too hot or too cold or the students are violent and dangerous, we must have a good plan to face those troubles and others that is possible to appear into our classrooms.

This topic is including into the classroom management and it has been discussed by several authors. In order to clarify what I am going to try in this essay, from now on there are some words by Lisa Rodriguez, PH. D. (2010) who said about management that it refers to issues of supervision, refereeing, facilitating, and even academic discipline. She also said that not all student behaviors require intervention or confrontation while some are serious enough in nature to warrant formal disciplinary action.
About classroom management, I am not going to take into account the untold number of strategies, recommendations and experience that wise teachers or expert people in education have been writing the last years. For that reason, what I am going to attempt some general and important things that we cannot pass over when we talk about classroom management.

Now I want to talk about a hypothetical situation in an unreal official school, which has been taken from several circumstances that I had the opportunity to see in my university practices and in my job as a teacher in different official and private schools.
That official school is located at the countryside, in a remote place where cars and buses cannot arrive easily; students go to school by feed crossing some kilometers with nothing into their stomach, some of them do not have adequate clothes to study, neither good shoes to walk comfortably. At the class, students cannot pay attention to the class because they are hungry and tired because they had to work the last night, also they do not have any motivation and orientation to study. The teacher is an angry man that shouts the students all the time. He never has time to hear his students or answer their questions, he always uses the same book and the same marker which replenishes every day to write on the white board and fill it time after time.

In that hypothetical situation, in which we can find a lot of coincidences with the schools that we know, there are many things that we could do with a good plan translated in what we called “Classroom management”. However who is charged of this work? How can we capacitate to develop an effective change? Is it easy or difficult to apply? Are good classroom managers born or made? I could find a good answer to those questions in the words of Robert J. Marzano (2003), which said in his book that:

Good classroom manager are teachers who understand and use specific techniques. Awareness of and training in this techniques can change teacher behavior, which in turn change students behavior and ultimately affects students achievement positively. After that he said that individual classroom teachers can have a major impact on student achievement. Then he finished his intervention saying that on the three roles of the classroom teacher-making choice about instrumental strategies, designing classroom curriculum and employing classroom management techniques-classroom management is arguably the foundation.

We cannot beginning the classes at the school without a general plan in which we must take into account a lot of relevant things of their context like the place where students are going to have their classes, the number of the students, a previous lesson plan, personal knowledge about students and their families, occupation of their parents, the level of students, their weaknesses and fortresses, likes and dislikes and of course our best attitude to teach and work.

According to D Adrienne Johnson (2007) the academic is very important, but you must first an environment that is conducive to learning and learning will not occur until the environment is conductive to learning. For this reason, I have to continue defending the plan of the teacher before start classes.

After organization and plan, what students need are some rules according to the teacher’s goal; the rules of the classroom do not have to be the same for all teachers and they should elaborate them according to the kind of activities. As I said, it depends to the results of the teacher’s investigation about the context of their students and for this reason, it is a point that we cannot omit. Teachers can adapt several rules for each specific group, activity or situation involve into the classroom management. The rules should not be elaborate without a previous contact with the group that teacher is going to train, needless to say about the plagiarism, which can be worse if our school has a different context than the school that we plagiarize.

REFERENCES

Burden Paul R. (2000), Powerful classroom management strategies, Corwin Press, Inc.

Johnson Adrienne (2007), Successful urban teacher classroom management techniques, Lulu publishing.

Marzano Robert J. (2003), Classroom management that works, ASCD.