Teacher Interview, Part 1: Classroom management

The classroom management plan at my 5th-grade placement is somewhat school-wide with some grade-specific adaptations. School-wide, behavior and academic management is based on a book called Inch and Miles: The Journey to Success by John Wooden. The Journey's ultimate goal is to achieve competitive greatness. The foundations of this pyramid are: industriousness, friendship, loyalty, cooperation, and integrity. Up the pyramid you have the attributes of self-control, alertness, initiative, and intentness; then you move up to achieving condition, skill, and team spirit, followed by poise and confidence, and then ultimately competitive greatness. Inch and Miles are a schoolwide program, and throughout the first part of the year, teachers are to focus on teaching two or three attributes or skills in the pyramid.

Also schoolwide is the code of conduct, and this code of conduct is maintained by daily monitoring of progress that students reflect on each day and parents are informed about. Different grades have different things that constitute warnings and how many warnings kids get before they have to do a refocus sheet in a refocus room (a buddy room--another teacher's room) and what behaviors constitute an immediate refocus or visit to the principal's office. In 5th grade, one missed homework assignment equals a warning, and once a kid has three warnings they have to do a refocus sheet. Each day at the end of the day, the 5th-graders reflect on what kind of day they had and they give themselves a color rating (green, yellow, or red) in their agenda/planner. Teachers walk around and discuss the rating, checking the management binder that travels with students to every class they go to, including specialists, and have a conversation with the student about what they did well or poorly that day. This planner goes home every night to be signed by parents, and if parents do not sign the planner, I think that constitutes a warning as well. Once a kid gets 2 or 3 warnings, they automatically have a yellow day, I think. I am still trying to figure out the subtleties, but that is kind of the essence of it.

Anyways, within the classroom(s) of 5th grade, all 5th grade teachers participate in Star Team, which is an extra motivator to the kids. If you are on Star Team, that means you are doing really well. You have to have a whole week of green days before you can be on Star Team, and if you have a single non-green day, you are off Star Team and start over. Star Team members also have the more powerful/cooler class jobs (class president, bell ringer, etc) and if you are not on Star Team, you won't have the "good" jobs. Also, after a kid has been on Star Team for 4 consecutive weeks, then they have the option of being the Star Student that week, meaning they get their pictures on a poster and get to bring in stuff to share about themselves. The teacher chooses the Star Student by drawing names from a hat of kids that have been on Star Team long enough to qualify.

The four core rules of the school and the classroom are: Be responsible, be respectful, be safe, and do your best (do your best is only the rule in 5th grade, it's an add-on to the three core schoolwide rules).

The rationale behind this complex management plan is that it works. It works because it requires student accountability, and many articles we have read in classes at UWB have shown that when students have greater ownership of their learning and behavior, they excel more. The plan also works because it builds confidence, it lets the kids that really deserve it shine, it does not single kids out because it is all done semi-privately, it makes them more aware and self-reflective about their own learning, and there is a positive twist to everything, and humans respond to positive better than negative, according to research.