Classroom Management Questions
I was sat at my desk today and my thoughts were racing around my head at a million miles an hour. And one classroom management question just kept popping into my head.
Now it’s only a small question, and it doesn’t really matter, but I just thought I’d throw it out there anyway.
Do you think teaching classes for just one lesson per week leads to better or worse classroom behaviour?
The only reason I ask is because a lot of my colleagues only teach many of their classes once a week. And it’s often these teachers who seem to have more classroom management problems that others.
So what do you think? Does the amount of lessons that you teach your classes per week have a big impact on the behavior of the students you teach?
I’d love to hear what you think…
classroom management effective classroom management student behavior
June 19th, 2007 at 9:01 pm
I think it would be tremendously difficult to have a well-behaved class if I only taught them once a week. This is one of the reasons I teach band and don’t ever want to teach elementary music. In my district, each elementary music teacher has their classes (all grades, about 1,200 students) once a week for 45 minutes.
This poses classroom management issues for a number of reasons. With the younger students, keeping their focus for 45 minutes can be a nightmare. Any activity that lasts longer than 15 minutes might as well be thrown out, or put on hold until the next week.
For the older students — as well as the younger ones — it makes lesson planning difficult. On a long-term scale, this means that each student will have your class 216 times from the first day of kindergarten until they finish fifth grade. That’s not even three semesters worth. As a result, you have to be hyper-focused and not waste any time. For this reason, classroom management is something that must be constantly taught in these situations., while still keeping them learning. It’s got to be a huge challenge!