Classroom management

I think that classroom management is something that a person can have a good concept of before entering a classroom to teach for the first time, but I also feel that in order to fully understand how to best manage a class a teacher must take the time to get to know their class.
To me the most important part of classroom management is being approachable and making the classroom as comfortable as possible. The reason that I feel that this is the most important is because it is crucial that your students respect you and your authority and I feel the best way to do that is to make sure they realize they can be comfortable around you and don't need to feel intimidated when they walk into your classroom. The more comfortable the students are in class the easier it will be for them to learn. I would connect this aspect of classroom management to behaviorist learning theory. Through repeated behaviors and actions I will be able to show my students that they can talk to me and that the classroom is a place to feel safe and to grow as an individual.
I also think it is very important to set high expectations for the class and help them attain those goals. If your students don't feel that they have expectations to meet then they will have less motivation to work hard in the class. I don't plan on coming out and telling them my expectations, but I will show them what I expect from them by treating them as adults and not letting them give up. I think that this would also fall into behaviorist learning theory because I will have to show them repeatedly what I expect from them and I will reward and punish them when needed. This could also be explained by developmental learning theory because I will be giving them concrete examples of how to succeed, not only in my classroom but in the future, also.
When it comes to whether I want to be strict with my rules or more lenient, I think it is important to have a good mixture of both. Teachers have to be strict when it comes to actually teaching to ensure that the students learn the material, but I think it is also important to be flexible and lenient with the students and the pace that they are learning. If one topic takes more time than originally thought, it is important to not move on if the students aren't prepared. This may mean taking less time on another area or maybe even cutting out some things, but I think it is better to understand a few things really well than to kind of understand a lot of things. 
I know I wil need a lot of work on actually disciplining my students, but I feel that is a skill I will develop through practicums and student teaching. One thing that I have learned thus far in my practicum is that I don't want to be "that teacher" that allows their students to do whatever they wish and talk over me. My practicum teacher has rather poor class management, so I feel that observing him will give me a great understanding of the things I don't want to do in my classroom.

Presentations on 10/14

Group 1-Healthy Living
-Interesting use of technology... www.pollseverywhere.com
-Not much use of social learning theory
Overall I thought you ladies did well. You had a concrete example with the powerpoint and also had examples of foods off the food pyramid on our tables. Since your lesson was about healthy living the candy might not have been such a great idea, but I'm not complaining! I thought you did well and the image of the fat from the rat was definitely a good image to get across the idea of how bad fat really can be for you.

Group 2-Homophones
You had us work in groups right away after you told us what your lesson would be about. I liked the way you used riddles to get us to think of new homophones that we couldn't come up with on our own after you told us to make a list of all the homophones we could think of. You did a great job of utilizing SLT.

Group 3-Reading/Active listening
For this group we were told to pretend as if we were fourth graders. They had us sit on the floor while they read us a story. Before reading the story we discussed ways to be respectful as a class. They asked questions while reading the book aloud which is a really good technique to keep students actively mentally engaged while listening to the story. To us the questions seemed silly but they would have been very good questions to use for the age group you were targeting. I really enjoyed your presentation.


Group 4-Alphabet
I liked the game. It got us up and moving and would be a great way to get younger students involved and excited about the lesson. You used concrete examples by having the letters written on pumpkins for us to go to the back of the room and find. You then moved to abstract when you asked us to read the words on the list that started with that letter. This would definitely be a great lesson for kindergarten age children although they would probably need a lot more instruction on how to play the game than we did.

Lesson Plan Presentation

I felt that we did a good job of utilizing DLT, but we may have not done as great of a job applying the other theories to our lesson. By providing an example of a good and bad speech we allowed the class to have a concrete example of what we would be discussing. I feel that if we would have discussed what our goal of the lesson was from the beginning then our activity of having the groups discuss the topics on the board would have been more successful. It was a good idea that we had but we didn't quite think it through fully to be able to successfully accomplish the goal of social interaction.
We also didn't move around the room to listen to whether the groups were actually discussing the topic or not, which was not good on our parts. I didn't even think of doing it until I saw a member of the group after us do it. This would have helped to keep the students more actively mentally engaged and would have kept them from straying from the topic.
By asking the class what were some good and bad points from both of the speeches we hoped to keep them engaged in the topic, which I think was successful. If we would have simply stated the ways to give a good speech the class would have gotten bored and uninterested in our discussion.
We could have made the lesson more relatable to the class by simply focusing on speaking in  a classroom setting, which isn't something that I thought of until writing this post. The class would have been interested in that because it is something that we have to do now and that we will have to do in front of a class eventually.
All in all, I felt that our group did a fairly good job for the amount of time we had to prepare. The candy may have been overkill, but it's almost Halloween, and who doesn't like Reese's?! =]