Teaching
Personal Classroom Management Statement
It is my belief that discipline is important in a classroom not as a controlling device, but for balance, fairness, and to guide students to learn how to manage themselves. In order to fairly educate students, teachers need to ensure that all of their students are provided with everything that is in their power to aid learning. It is one of the teacher's responsibilities to ensure that the climate of the classroom allows for the optimal learning of every student, creating and maintaining a learning incubator. If students in the classroom do anything that interferes with the effectiveness of the learning incubator, the teacher will need to take steps to regain the balance. To prevent or at least minimize potential imbalances in the learning incubator several factors should be addressed. The physical classroom should be organized in a way that will work best for the class's needs; expectations, rules, and routines need to be established, explained, directly taught, modeled, discussed, and practiced; and consequences for not following these rules and expectations must be taught thoroughly. I believe that all people must be respected, if they are not, it is not acceptable behavior in my classroom.
Misbehavior that involves any physical harm or a threat of harm will require immediate intervention to eliminate any danger and to let the student know that this absolutely will not be tolerated. If the behavior is against whole school policy, I will follow the school guidelines.
I hope that in educating students to respect and practice rules and consequences that are fair, they will learn discipline that will help them for the rest of their lives. I do not advocate punishments and unfounded, blind following of rules that make no sense. Instead I want to foster an understanding that it's important to learn the reasons behind certain decisions that may seem restrictive until you learn more. Learning to do things that we don't really want to do, but that help us to accomplish things helps people to fulfill their potential, to do things that they didn't think they could. I want to help my students to learn to become self managers, to treat others and themselves well, and to try their best. These skills will serve a valuable purpose in all aspects of life.