I had posted a while back about trying to pass more of the management responsibility to my students, so that they would begin to self manage more. Well, for my master's program I took on a project to overhaul the ecology of our classroom.
The purpose of our resilient classroom project is to investigate the ecology of our second grade classroom by collecting data on our students’ perceptions of the class environment, identifying key issues and concerns and coming up with and implementing a plan to improve those conditions, then tracking results.
My team and I administered a modified CLASSMAPS survey to analyze data about how the students felt about their classroom ecology, including their peers, their teacher, their academic efficacy and behavioral self control. The class discussed data which needed attending to and came up with a plan to implement interventions for improvement in behavioral management.
The hardest part of this process was then identifying how to measure progress in the three named areas of need. I started week 1 of observation taking far too much data to be manageable. I was trying to record too many anecdotal details about verbal redirections and how kids were feeling about their behaviors at any given moment. This was taking too much class time. I honed in on taking the rating scale system of 1-10 once a day after I taught my math lessons. The students and I would rate the class behavior during a lesson with 1 being the poorest behavior and 10 being outstanding. We would average the student answers, noting the range, and then compare how the teacher and students’ perspectives compared and contrasted. I showed my most advanced math student Liam how to find the average on the calculator. On days that he finished work early, he helped to solve for some of the data. Furthermore, I had the students with the line coral job help count if we had to stop for redirection while in line, then I would jot down the number each day. Thirdly, as for name-calling and problem solving on the yard, I sent a not out to the yard duty teachers to let me know of/when my students were involved in altercations. I also sought them out personally and tried to keep my ears open to students. This was probably the least accurate form of data collection, but it at least gave ,e a frame-work for analyzing trends n behavior.
At the end of the four weeks, the team looked at the results. Overall we saw similar trends with all three areas. We saw a slight decline to no change week 1, a rebound spike week 2 and then a gradual decrease in undesired behaviors almost across the board for weeks 3 and 4. Also, we noticed that Mondays seemed to be difficult for students, as they needed to get back into good habits from the weekend. We noticed that we saw improvement in playground behavior on days there was a character-building lesson, and then the number of incidents would trickle back up.
In conclusion, my students and I have been very affected by this process and how we think about our roles and our dynamic. I had a major attitude shift in how I saw my role as the children’s guide, but not ruler of the class. It is difficult to say, how much the students were responding to the implementation of our plans, or how much had to do with other variables, such as subtle changes in how we disciplined and spoke to the children. Overall, the experience was positive for both the students and teacher, helping us to understand one another. Even in titling this paper, I began to write, “My Resilient Classroom,” then thought better of it and changed it to the more appropriate “Our Resilient Classroom.”
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