Classroom Management & Motivation
Classroom setup is an important component of classroom management. The classroom should be set up so that the teacher can see all students at all times. The traditional set up with desks in rows is effective for direct instruction, minimizing student interaction and keeping the attention on the teacher. Many classrooms today are moving toward cluster seating, encouraging student interaction and cooperative learning. In the 6th grade classroom I tutor in, there are no desks. There are half oval tables where 5 to 5 students sit together and each table has a computer screen on it, which shows what is on the teacher’s smartboard at the front of the class, so all students can see what is being presented without having to face the front of the room. The teacher promotes the students to work together to find the answers to the problems she presents and encourages cooperation. Since I have been in the classroom, she has had to make changes to the seating arrangement due to students becoming disruptive. She allows interaction, but sometimes the students are chatting when they should be doing their work or listening to her and sometimes, they are just too loud. She has had to separate the ones that are constantly goofing off together to make the class more manageable. Although corporative learning is great, the teacher must also maintain on task behavior with her students because they can quickly get off topic and become disruptive.
The teacher in the class I am in groups her students according to ability as well. She has a heterogeneous mix at each table so students can help on another, promoting cooperative learning. Her classes though are determined by between-class ability grouping. I am there for three of her classes, she has an ESE class, an average class, and an advanced class. Each class has students at different abilities within that ability range. Although her classes are grouped like this, she teaches the same exact lesson to each class. Her advanced class needs little help, her average class needs help occasionally, and her ESE group needs a lot of scaffolding and support. I wonder if it would be better to have the classes mixed so that the advanced students could help the students who are struggling? This might improve the learning fo all the students, as the ones getting to teach it to the struggling students are deepening their knowledge when attempting to teach the information and the struggling students are getting the support they need from their peers.
Self-worth theory states that humans instinctively strive to sustain a sense of self-worth, or an assessment of one’s own value as a person. Schools provide rewards to students who perform well on tests, this can affect students’ perceptions of their abilities and can contribute to their feelings of self-worth. Unfortunately, this promotes students to be motivated by external rewards and consequences, leading students to become extrinsically motivated, or motivated by external factors. This can then compromise their intrinsic motivation. Students gain extrinsic rewards for learning, like good grades and high performance on standardized tests. This leads to higher feelings of self-worth. However, if students do not perform well their self-worth can be compromised. This is especially true of students with disabilities, English language learners, and students of low socioeconomic backgrounds. Schools can end up decreasing students’ intrinsic motivation, because of the focus on external rewards. It is important for students to be motivated intrinsically. The most successful students are intrinsically motivated, because they define success as becoming the best that they can be, regardless of how well others are doing. To develop this in the classroom teachers should explain to students why what they are learning is important and use real world tasks and to also allow students choices that are within reason to promote interest in learning. I wonder how much student engagement and success would improve if schools stopped focusing on testing and gave students some autonomy in their learning and provided lessons using real world applications for student to understand why they need to learn what they are learning and how to apply it to the real word? I think this could really improve student outcomes.
