FINAL!!

Classroom Discipline Plan

 Expectations:

 

1) “Be Present”- When you walk into class, be “there,” be involved, active, and participant learners. Do not be stagnant learners whose body is only physically in class, but that your mind is present as well.

• Natural Consequence: You will miss out on learning opportunities that will enable you to discover, grow, and become knowledgeable.

2) “Be Respectful”- I expect my students to come into class and be mindful of myself and the other students. They need to respect their peers opinions, personal space, and beliefs. They need to conduct as a unit or community where the respect of others will benefit themselves and the rest of the class.

• Logical Consequence: If a student is showing disrespect to me or another student I will address it immediately and explain why they are being disrespectful. This will help reinforce the culture of the classroom. If persistent disrespect occurs, then other forms of punishment will be taken, such as a call home, one-on-one conference, detention, etc.

3) “Use appropriate and polite speech and body language”- Unkind teasing and impolite behavior is unacceptable in my classroom, especially language such as cursing, racial slurs, or homophobic remarks.

• Logical Consequence: If a student using inappropriate language I will address the situation immediately and explain why we do not use such words in my classroom. This will be a verbal warning to the student. If the language persists, then I will have to conference with the student one-on-one, call home, give dentition, or send them to the office (depending on the offense).

4) “Avoid the use of technological devices unless permitted”- Students will not be allowed to use their cell phones, iPods, or other electronic devices during class time, especially while the teacher is instructing the class. The use of iPods may be used only during independent work time.

• Logical Consequence: If the use of an electronic device is being used during an inappropriate time, I will confiscate the student’s property and return it to them after class.

5) “Be Responsible”- Students must be accountable and take responsibility for their own learning, such as their actions and class assignments.

• Natural Consequence: Students might miss out on gaining new knowledge and learning opportunities. Their grades might suffer, and they might not see the benefits of the education at hand. They will not learn how to become independent and mature human beings.

RR5: Reinventing Schools that Keep Teachers Teaching

This article revolves around the idea that if we want teachers who are smart, caring, alive to students' needs, and are in it for the long haul, we need to consider how to create schools that are themselves centers for the continual learning of everyone connected to them. Thus, it is important for schools to create a positive community among the staff and teachers where there exist good communication and support. The article tells the story about a woman working in an inner cirty school of Chicago, where her an her fellow teachers created a school where students, teachers, and the community grew together. The school focues on lots of netwroking, community involvemnt, connections across the curriculums, professional development, and created a school culture that bounded the students and teacher together. The underlying idea froom this article is that we cannot dare continue to keep kids in schools for so many years, incarcerated if you will, without doing a better job of making our schools places we all love. Places that we can't wait to come to every morning and that we leave, exhausted and pleased with ourselves, every afternoon. Places where long-term experience and wisdom are not dismissed as the bad products of "seniority" rules, but what good societies take seriously. Schools are for the children, but they are also where the young build their images of adulthood. Our schools need to serve the students and the teachers.


During my future teaching years, I believe it is so important to "know the culture and be the culture" of your school. The most effective teaching steems from creating positive communities within a school and the individual classrooms, where students feel that their teachers care about them and their learning. I want to create a mutual respect between my students and myself. To do this, I will have to get to know and understand my students, so that I can best serve their needs. I want my students to know that I have a open door policy where they should feel welcome to come talk to me and ask me questions. I want to be involved in the school community by participating in after-school activities and professional development. I want to become a cooperative team player with my fellow teachers, in which I can learn from and gather new ideas from my collegues. If I can make connections from my content to my students' lives and/or community, then I will be reaching for more long term learning out of my students. The article talked about changing of an entire school, which I know I am not capable of doing. However, I can be actively engaged, have a positive attitude, and  be open to try new things in order to maintain that sense of continious learning and progression.

Reading Reflection 4- Designing Groupwork

Chapter 1: "Groupwork as a Strategy for Classrooms"

• This chapter sets the tone and defines what groupwork is in the classroom. Groupwork is students working together in a group small enough so that everyone can participate. Students are free to accomplish their task in the way they think best, but they are accountable to the teacher for the final product. Students communicate with each other by asking questions, explaining, making suggestions, criticizing, listening, agreeing, disagreeing, or making joint decisions.
• This reminds me and re-emphasizes and re-iterates everything the credential program has taught and preached to us teacher candidates: Groupwork is one of the most effective teaching strategies for teachers to make content assessable to all students, to engage all students, and for student success in any content area. I have never participated and engaged in so much groupwork prior to entering the program. I have seen and now have a new outlook on groupwork.

Chapter 2: "Why Groupwork?"

• This chapter describes the pros and goals that groupwork will achieve in your classroom. It is trying to sell you to use groupwork in your classroom. It states that groupwork is an effective technique for achieving intellectual and social learning goals. Groupwork is superior for conceptual learning, for creative problem solving, and for increasing oral language proficiency. It is also a strategy for keeping students involved with their work, and managing instruction for students with a wide range of academic skills.
• My goal for clinical practice 2 is to incorporate more group work activities and opportunities for my students to engage in. Sometimes I struggle with creating a variety of types of group work in a mathematics classroom, but my math methods class has allowed me to see and interact with different approaches to cooperative learning. Thus, I hope my cooperating teaching (CT) will allow me to try and experiment with these techniques. From what I have seen, my CT includes very little groupwork opportunities for her students.

Chapter 3: "The Dilemma of Groupwork"

• This chapter describes some of the porblems and difficultities that can emerge within groupwork activities. Different types of agreed-upon "status" orientations can influence the success of a group in positive and negative ways. The different types of "status" are: status ordering, academic status order, peer status, and status characteristic.
• From personal experience working in groups, these "status" positions are present in many group settings. I am good at math, so if I was working in a group dealing with mathematics, I felt as though I could contribute more to the group. And if other students knew I was good in math, then they expected more from me to accomplish the task. Relating to peer status, if I was unfamilar with the peers in my group, then I was more quiet and reserved with my opinions. I think it is easier to work in a group, in which you know your members and their strengths and weakness.

Week 3 -reading reflection- Ethnography in schools

This selection on Ethnographic studies in the school setting was very interesting and gave me a whole new perspective on the classroom environment. I am not very familiar with this field of study, however the descriptions of the Village social structures and authority levels and systems made it easy for me to learn the concepts presented. One of the points that stuck with me is how the authority systems in society are similar to the way students , teachers and their superiors react to each other. At the same time they differ in the way they execute authority in the school social structure ideally Kinship and status should not be a factor in success. These concepts have given me a new way to approach my class room as a community while still maintaining a respect for the students individuality.

When talking about the comparison in the structure of schools and village life, I would of liked to hear more on how the ideals of the village class systems are practiced in school despite those practices being forbidden. I mean we have all went to High School and we have all seen the rules bent for certain people whether family of staff or status in the community. I am also interested on how certain social systems like trading goods might translate into a more direct practice on the classroom.

The Classroom community is just as diverse and complex as the worlds out side the school walls and for this reason I want explore these concepts further in hopes that I can relate this to my classroom. Implementing a more literal application of real world social structures to my future students might give a new perspective on the classroom and how they fit into a bigger community.

Week 2 Reading Reflection- Disrupting Class

The expectations of our society and work force demands a literate and skilled work force, however the reality is that our schools are producing semi literate and unskilled adults who have little crticical thinking and problem solving capacities.

I also found that the restructuring of the curriculum and the way its paced for the students in the reading was insipering , The general way its done today even when I attended High School is very  facted based and it tends to be to linear. This makes it difficult for students who may not grasp the concepts right away fall behind.

Along with the restructuring of the subjects and how the levels are paced within the subjects , I enjoyed the idea of having the students engaged in a more voctional plan . I feel that the courses taken in highschool should infact focus on what that individuals plan might be for the future. What we have today is a set of standards that does not recognize the indivual students gifts and talents leaving them behind if they do not fit a mold.


I am curious to see how these implementations in the teaching structure will benefit the students who already are focused and prepared , I wonder if it will hinder their sense of accomplishment for standing out in the previous classroom structure.

While reading I thought to my self this makes good enough sense, why not structure our education to favor the student community as a whole while promoting carreer goals and the paths to them. My question is if we all have been wanting our kids to succeed and be productive citizens , then why havent we changed the way we teach.

I was very interested in the idea of Program Majors in which the students have a direct link to the professions that they are studying to one day work in. This type of preperation for the world after School is vital and I am eager to see how these programs devolop.

Week One Reading Reflection- Rethinking High Schools

Chapter one's ideas and reasons for school reforms revolves around the central theme that American high schools are "badly out of tune with the times," and "out of synch with society." The conclusion following this statement is that high schools are failing all of our kids at some point in time and some of our kids all the time. With this in mind, isn't education about teaching children FIRST and our subject matters second? If we think about it, our children gorw up in schools, so wouldn't we want to create a positive and better environment for them to partake in meaningful experiences.

What really resonated with me in this chapter was the section on how children are viewed and treated in schools. It states that some of our children are welcomed and reasonably well served by their schools, other have mixed experiences, and some are ignored, misunderstood, or injured. This goes to show that there is a gap between the students who are served and those who aren't, which is a problem! I believe that a focus on reforming schools should be in how to close this gap to ensure that all students feel welcomed, appreciated, and apart of the school's community. It is obivious (we have all seen it through our own experiences) that high school can make adolescence better, more supportive, more helpful, and more constructive, or it can make it worse. It is important to remember as educators we do place a profound impact on the present lives and the future lives of our students.

I think that the national curriculum standards stated in the chapter set high expectations for schools to conform to more contemporary education. However, I would like to know or see how schools are putting these standards into action, because it seems easy on paper, but i am sure some of the standards may be more difficult to implement in our schools (maybe that's one reason why several schools are resisting to reform).