I have been thinking about and re-thinking about my classroom's seating arrangement as it relates to classroom management, and have probably re-arranged desks in my classroom 5 or 6 times since the beginning of the school year, so an article that really caught my eye on EducationWorld.com had to do with discipline and seating arrangements in a classroom. One phrase that caught my eye from Fred Jones was: "When students as a group are given the freedom to sit wherever they want in a classroom, they will always choose the location for themselves that is to the teacher's greatest possible disadvantage." THIS was precisely my problem with the LAST "group" situation in my classroom. I allowed the students to choose a group to sit with. Their big promise to me was, "If we're too noisy, put us in separate corners of the room, and then we won't EVER want to misbehave." Well, right away, it was crazy with everyone choosing their friends (i.e, someone they're going to constantly want to talk to) and some being excluded and some wanting to be by themselves in the back 40 of the room. I told them I'd give it a few days and see how it went. Probably by day three, it had turned into a "boys vs. girls" thing, with most of the boys being in a group of 8 and the girls being in a group of 8, plus two groups of two boys. One of those groups had to be separated quickly, because they were a couple of kids who didn't focus anyway, and it was just TOO convenient to have someone RIGHT THERE to distract themselves from schoolwork with.
This morning I went right back to the good old "rows" that I began the school year with. I've had a couple of different arrangements of students within rows, but this time I went with "boy, girl" in a checkerboard pattern, and it was pretty nice again. I didn't feel like I had to yell over the class's noise, which is a problem, anyway. I've had t break out my stopwatch again for the first time in a while, however, which means that I'm taking their recess time for equal "teaching" time of mine that they waste by being noisy. I certainly don't like doing it, because recess is one of my few "breaks" during the day, but if it's the only threat that will work...
My classroom management has good times and bad times. Sometimes I feel like things are going really well, and other times I feel like I'm turning into a shrieking lunatic trying to get the students to LISTEN. I know it's not my job to yell over their noise, but I haven't quite found my niche where I can just give them "the look" and silence reigns. I envy the teachers who can keep their door open during the day because their classes are doing their work and can't be heard all the way down the hall! My husband thinks my class is too "fun" and that I need to be more hard-nosed with them (he's the son of two teachers), but I don't want my students to hate coming to school, either!
I feel like I've got pretty good established routines (bell work, how we hand papers back, grading methods, what things we do on which days), but recently I had to take an item off of the prize wheel that students really loved because they were being irresponsible. I think just like with my own children, I have to be consistent, or students aren't going to believe that I'm going to follow through and give them unpleasant consequences for disobedience. I got a good tip from a veteran teacher just this morning concerning "groups" and how to make sure they stay in shape, so even though I have disbanded the groups in my room for now, I think I will assign "rows" as groups so I can use her reward method. She uses checks (negative) and stars (positive) and the whole group gets rewarded or punished according to how many checks or stars they "earn". That will be implemented tomorrow, I vow (woo for me, I used a vocabulary word there!).
Here's that article I was talking about:http://www.educationworld.com/a_curr/curr330.shtml
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