“Numerous inner-city charter and private schools are proving that the gaps can be narrowed, even closed, when rigorous pedagogy is practiced by teachers in teacher-centered classrooms where knowledge is regarded as everything. But most ed schools, celebrating “child-centered classrooms” that do not “suffocate discourses,” are enemies of rigor”. — George Will, in an article in Newsweek titled, “Ed Schools vs. Education“
It is possible to make classrooms more child centered and less “teaching to the test:, but then where does behavior managment lie? If there are no boundaries, and total child direction…how will structure develop for their social deportment?
Behavior management is the responsibility of the parents, not the school. Our culture is awash in disrespect for authority and too many people sanctioning the ignorance and brutishness of their own children. I see it EVERY. SINGLE. DAY. You can’t put that kind of responsibility on teachers. There’s no way teachers can go into students’ homes to see if they are getting a proper education there, but there are PLENTY of ways parents can (and do) come into the classroom to see if the teacher is doing a good job. Our society has lost its respect for learning and teaching and replaced it with a profound and disgusting materialism (that wonderful by-product of capitalism) that the schools (and much less the churches) just can’t triumph over.
In that case I do agree..but referring to behavior management here is keeping order and control in the classroom..maybe the better word is focus. There are many strategies to do this considering there may be more than 25 students in a classroom..things can get a bit silly if aloud.
I’ve found that being HIGHLY organized in my lesson planning helps. Also, strategic grouping and job assigments help keep my classes “focused”. I work with English learners and structure everything around language objectives. I realised LONG ago that the more energy I waste shutting kids up, the less I have left for the actual teaching. I guess it might have to do with one’s personal issues of control. A “master” teacher of mine had a diagram displayed in her classroom of what a model student should look like when he/she sat at his/her desk: hands neatly folded in front, back straight, mouth shut. But quiet classrooms full of compliant, (scared?) students are not really doing that much more learning than a noisy, but LANGUAGE BASED classroom is. That being said, a noisy and unorganized classroom is also accomplishing nothing but reinforcing the cacophonous “reality” of our culture.
My point was that society puts way too much of the responsibility for raising its children on teachers and rarely, if ever, reflects on what it is doing to them itself. As teachers, we can’t really blame parents for messing up either, as human nature makes it hard for anyone to accept responsibility for its trangressions or negligence. So, parental ignorance and apathy is like a phantom menace that we can neither quantify nor address, while our failures are glaring and ugly and obvious.
Yes I agree-parents are getting very ridiculus. Traditional classrooms cannot exist any longer as do not traditional families..so in the end..I can only wonder where society is going, and how education will reconstruct it’s “philosophy”. It is apparent that guardians aren’t moving in the developmental direction. Teachers are just caught in the middle.