Actions for Developing Classroom Management Competences during the Initial Teacher Training
Asist. Univ. Dr. Boja Alina North University of Baia Mare Teacher Development Departament
Abstract: Teacher Training and Development is one of the key priorities of the European Union, starting from the belief that the effectiveness of the education in every country is directly depending of the efectiveness of the teacher training. The common European mark, established by the 2004 strategy: „Education and Training 2010 – The
Success of the Lisbon Strategy Hinges of Urgent Reforms” presents as key competence
the classroom management competences involving the capacity of theachers to work with the people from the educational environment (students, colleagues, school parteners and economic environment). Consequently, the classroom management competences becomean important component in the initial teacher training and a condition of teachers’ profesional development that can assure the quality of education.
Keywords: Teacher Training, Classroom Management Competences, CBO – Competency based Teaching.
1. Experimental model of developing students’ classroom management competences
Worldwide, Classroom Management Competences had become an important component in the training of students, future teachers, a condition of their real professionalization and of quality based didactic activity. As a recognition of this reality, the Romanian Education Plan for Psycho-Pedagogycal Studies for the universitary year 2008/2009 (O.M. 4316 from 03.06/2008) includes as compulsory discipline: Classroom Management.
The main question this paper sets to answer is What are the characteristics of a succesful Classroom Management Course, that would develop students’ competences?
The answer to this question is an experimental one, as we proposed an
Experimental model of developing students’ classroom management competences as a part of our PhD work on Classroom Management. The Experimental model is presented in image 1:
Competen ces Didactic Methods Evaluation Contents Evaluation Competences Organisational Competences Activity Planning Competences Decision-making Competences Educational Projects Management Discipline Problems Management Conflict Management Communication Management Managing interpersonal relations in the classroom Managing classroom as a group of students Classroom Management Functions Introduction to classroom management Role Playing Case Study Projects Method Cooperative Learning Microteaching Evocation – significance achievement - reflection Self Evaluation Team evaluation Projects Evaluation Reflection Diary Applications
3. Modelling
Img.1. Classroom Management Compeneces Development Experimenthal Model
1.Interactive
Theorethical
Preparation
CBT
2. Relation
with
Practice
4. Reflection
The experiment involved working with a group of 158 students, during the second semester of the academic year 2008-2009. They were divided into two equal groups: experimental and witness group. The witness group had been taught the same content, by in the traditional manner: Power-Point lectures, seminars consisitng mostly in presenting the student’s papers, aplications of the teached curricula. As each student had to present only one paper, we appreciate that the extra-curricular time for classroom management was arround 3-4 hours/semester.
For the experimental group, the individual work hours were much more, as you can see below. The 28 hours of class activities were not differentiated into course hours and seminars, as the whole course was students focused and intended to involve them as much as possible. The class activity had 3 main parts:
- Part I: the Programme began with 2 introductive hours, mainly aiming to explain the working mode for the class and make students aquintance with the Competence Profile for Classroom Management that we created and wanted to implement together. Also, we created the working groups of 4 students, groups kept for the whole semester. Each student received a working map with: the whole semester’s curricula, home exercises, bibliography for each theme, informations about the way they were about to be evaluated for this class.
- Part II: 26 hours, aplying the formative programme; - Part III: presenting and evaluating the students’ projects.
The number of individual study hours and cooperative work hours outside the university hours was obviously much bigger for this students. Generally, we appreciate that they used 1-2 hours/ week for studying the suport materials and the bibliography, 2-3 hours/week for projects, approx. 1 hour/week for solving the applications. In the meantime, we requested our students to use their practical experience from the application schools, as many of the assignments implied they work with the pupils from these schools. Thus, the time for extra work for the Classroom Management Class was maximized to a minimum of 6 hours a week, 84 hours per semester.
1.1. The Principles of the Model
In order to assure the optimal reach of the proposed objectives, the formative programme was based on the following principles:
a. Interactive Theorethical Preparation: each Unit will begin by discussing with the students the contents involved in developing their gnoseologic basis of classroom management competences. This part of the activity will use activizating strategies, being followed by a reflection part.
b. Relation with Practice: during the whole activity, the students will get tasks to be solved during their practical training (see the projects subbmited to be evaluated, paragraph 1.5.), we will analise cases from the practical activity in application schools, we will reflect on the ways of applying in practice the learned techniques and will exercise them through role playing, micro-teaching, drama.
c. Modelling (Pattern-Making): as proposed by the socio-cognitive theories, involves observations and self-adjustment of the activity. It is based on the fact that most of the learning outcomes are based on observing self and others activity. The students will be guided to observe their own classroom management strategies, as well as of their colleagues’, assisted techers’ and to reflect on them, to formulate conclusions of their observations.
d. Reflection: will follow every important part of the activity. Yaxley (1993) quoted by Alan Scully (1995, p.27) considers that reflective teachers:”are trying to describe the teaching practices, share these observations with their colleagues, re-interpretate them in the light of critical reflections and conversations. Consequently, through observation, discussion and re-interpretation, the teachers develop and sustain critical beliefs regarding the act of teaching”. In the work with students, reflection will be encouraged by tasks as: essays - making, critical disscusions, analyses, case studies.
1.2. The Contents are common for most Classroom Management courses proposed by the initial teacher training programmes at the university level. The approach is new though, as we created an original table of contents, based on „know-how” knowledge, with great accent on presenting a diverse methodology of educational intervention in the classroom (classroom describing methods, interpersonal relations stimulating methods, conflict resolution and comportamental problems solving methods, project management methods).
1.3. The Didactic Strategy: CBT (Competency Based Teaching)
CBT represents, in our opinion, the best way of approaching classroom management competences development for the students of the universitary psycho-pedagogycal module.
The CBT concept was first introduced in USA in the '60s being used in teacher training, then from 1980 in vocational and profesional training in UK and Germany, and form the '90s also in Australia. The use of CBT in initial teacher training is still less developed, although many specialists have recognised it's great potential.
The origin of CBT ideas is controversed, some authors sustaining that the initiator of CBT is the „father of the modern management”: Frederick W. Taylor, as he managed to improve the relation between the market needs and training, with emphasis on developing competences. The most common accepted ideea is that the CBT concept is older than modern management,
developed in the 50’s by Benjamin Bloom, in his well known Comportamental Objectives Theory. Bloom proposed that teachers should formulate objectives in terms of observable behavior. In time, the ideea developed, it passed through different acceptions, leading toward what we understand today as CBT.
Although the demands for introducing CBT, it’s contents and strategies were different in different countries, we can identify some common marks for the CBT Programmes:
- Result focused: while most of the training programmes start from the inputs (solving issues as: students charactheristics at the beginning of the teaching session, available time, so on), CBT is focused on outcomes. So, for CBT programmes the first step in teaching is to establish WHAT COMPETENCES must the programme develop. More than that, in CBT, those competences are related to the requests of practicing a profession;
- Accent on professionalisation: the developed competences are those presented in the ocupational standards recognised or elaborated as to correspond to the demands of a defined profession;
- The results are observable competences: so that the purposes of the training programmes can be comunicated more precisely and can be more easily evaluated;
- The results are measureable in different moments, in order to identify different levels of competence development;
- The competences are unanimously recognised, so that the training programmes can assure credit transfer.
The steps we have made in using the CBT model in developing students classroom management competences are:
We first started with identifying WHICH COMPETENCES are to be developed by the training programme (as in Romania there are no Competence Standards for Teacher Training Programmes, yet). The result of this process was a „Teacher’s Profile for Classroom
Management Competences” that presents in more than 10 pages the competences involved by exercising the main managerial functions in the classroom: Planning, Organising, Decision Making, Control and Evaluation of the class activity. Each competence was given 3 levels of achievement: beginner, intermediate, expert and also success and failure indicators.
The objectives were clearly formulated and well known by learners: we presented the students this Profile, as a purpose of the programme and ask them to self-evaluate the level
they have achieved these competences and to state in what field they feel unprepared for teaching;
The classes involved every step the students. Theory was used as a support for their learning process, being reduced to elementary informations. In the same time, they were motivated and supported to find out more abouth the theories they had found interesting;
Practice was the main purpose of the classes, as our discussions were based on their practice in application schools, we used a lot of case studies, practiced teaching in groups of students. They also had many tasks to fulfill during their practice periods in school;
The methods used were the activizing ones, allways followed by reflection;
We combined individual work with cooperative tasks, so that each student would work more than in the frontal activities;
1.4. The Methodology
The Methodology used for developing the proposed competences includes activ-participative methods, the ones that involve students in their own development: euristic conversation, debate, problem-solving, brainstorming. The most used ones are ERR, microteaching, cooperative learning, case study and role-playing.
The ERR model (Evocation – Significance achievement - Reflection) was used in all the classes, as shown in table 1.
Table 1. The ERR Model Evocation of previous knowledge Achieving significance of
new informations and experiences
Reflection on new knowledge
Which is the subject (Identify it)? What do I already know about the subject? (front activity based on students’ homeworks);
What else I would like to find out about the subject? (the answers are written down);
What’s the use of finding out all these things? (motivation);
What do I undersand from these new informations?
What did I find out?
What do I think is more important or more new/ interesting? (something that wasn’t mentioned in the evocation stage);
How will I use the new knowledge to integrate them in the old ones?
Evocation was made by interactive activities with the students, such as case studies, debates, case-analysis; Significance achievment involved interactive disscusions with the students, aiming that the teacher claryfies the missunderstandings and points out the essence; Reflection, very important for our model, followed every step of the activity. Besides the usuall questions as: „What new did I learned?” and „How will I use these knowledge?”, the students had to answer, at the end of every class, to these ones:
What did I found out new about teaching? What did I found out new about learning?
What else do I have to do so that what I’ve learned today become an active competence? By knowing what they should achieve as a competence and always wondering what they have learned and how that can be usefull, students became our active partners in developing their classroom management competences.
Micro-teaching, developed in the '50s at Stanford University, by Dwight W. Allen, Robert Bush and Kim Romney, implied a model based on teaching – reflection – repeating teaching, by using students both in the role of teachers and pupils. The model offers a form of concentrated feed-back for student’s teaching activity, being a good teaching exercise for begginers.
We have used this method with the purpose to offer students the possibility to practice teaching a part of a lesson in their usuall working group from the University, to gain immediate feed-back from their colleagues, to test some methods or new approaches in a familiar, non-threatening environment. Ussually, the microteaching activity consisted in 10-15 minutes teaching session, followed by self-evaluation, discussions about the teaching strategy, improvement suggestions. Each activity was followed by a reflection stage, in wich students had to answer several questions, as: „How did I feel as a student / teacher?”, „What did I find difficult in projecting / teaching the activity?”, „What would I change about the way I teached?”, „How can I use this experience in practice”.
Cooperative Learning – includes a set of teaching methods that suppose organising the class in small groups of students (usually 4 - 5), in order to rise the awareness of students both for their own development and self-knowing, and for their classmates performances. All through the semester, students have been working for their projects and particular tasks in groups of 4, established freely at the beggining of the semester.
Project based Learning was used because it is a didactic method that involves the students in developing their own abilities and gainning knowledge by themselves , by working as a group to develop a project. Practicly, each group of students had to carry out
3 projects, present them at the last hour and be evaluated according to their results and commitment.
1.5. Evaluation of students’ results – appreciated: 30% written paper, 30% projects, 30% class activity.
The written paper didn’t asked for reproducing of knowledge, but consisted in solving original appplications, as problem solving, conflicts resolution, diagnose or solve pupils’ behavioral problems, so on.
The 3 projects are monthly assignments, realised by teams of students, based on their practice at general schools:
a.) Classroom describing project: the students had to present all they have found out about a classroom of their choice (as: class componence, a material representing the class culture, materials showing their common activity with the pupils);
b.) Problem-situation solving project: the students had to identify and describe a problem – situation (conflict, behavioral problem), to propose a solution;
c.) Draft of a school / class improvement project: the students had to present the SWOT Analisis of the situation, draft of a PBO method (Planning by Objectives – Project Management Method) for the identified project, possible financiar support for their project.
For evaluating the class activity, we used observation cards completed by the teachers from practice, the classmates during the micro-teaching activities, dates from the students’ reflection diaries; All these were completed by students’ self-evaluation realised by each student for his activity.
1.6. Conclusions
The Classroom Management Compeneces Development Experimenthal Model, as presented above has proven to be a successfull manner of teaching. The advantages of the Model, compared to the traditional teaching are:
It aimes competences, not only knowledge acquiring: the programme starts from presenting the competences to be developed, involves the students in developing those competences, uses a clear set of activities for developing the proposed competences and can easily measure at the end the level of their development; By the relation with practice, the Programme improves student’s work at the
application schools (as the teachers from these schools and the students themselves appreciate);
Each student is aware of he’s/ she’s level of classroom management competeces and works to develop them. The cooperative tasks make them care for their colleagues performances too. This way, the learning process gaines implication and steady work from the students, not a passive reception of the „ready-made” informations transmited by the teacher;
The Reflection part of each course makes students more aware of their learning process and what they need to learn and practice to be succesfull teachers,
The Evaluating process teaches students to think, solve-problems, be creative and not only reproduce memorised knowledge;
The Experimental Model can also be improved. The first improvement we have thought of is to realise a web-page to support this course and teacher-student cooperation. This way, e-learning can add it’s bennefits to the programme: extra-working time for students, on-line disscusions and exercises, so on.
Bibliography:
- Alan Scully, Teaching students about classroom management: the importance of active engagement, modelling and reflection, (1995), on
http://www.boardofstudies.nsw.edu.au;
- Alina Boja, Managementul clasei de elevi. Suport de curs, (Ed. Risoprint, Cluj Napoca, 2009);
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- R.B. Iucu,, Formarea cadrelor didactice. Sisteme, politici, strategii, (Ed. Humanitas Educational, Bucureşti, 2004);
- Oser, F. K.; Achtenhagen, F.; Renold, U., Competence oriented teacher training: Old research demands and new pathways, (Sense Publisher, Rotterdam, 2006);