Classroom Managment Styles

Classroom management is a very important part of the daily in class routine.  I found an article online about this on the website incredibleart.org that has a lot of useful information towards this subject.  Being in an art classroom is asking for the students to act up and goof around whenever they can.  After observing in the classroom this quarter it is easy to see that a lot of students do exactly that constantly, and they don’t take the class seriously at all.  Discipline is something this article goes into a great deal about and also offers links for further reading on the subject.  It is also stated that not all discipline styles work for every teacher and every class which seems obvious, but it is something we may all struggle with seeing as all these different styles and ideas are available to us and we will have to pick and choose until we find one or more that we can work well with.  One creative teacher idea that was given here I thought might work very nicely, the sense of smell is a very powerful sense that is not commonly used in classroom discipline practice, but she has devised a way to use it as a reminder for the students to behave.  “I give "quiet lotion". Just a small squirt of lotion to remind them to be quiet (they can smell it to "remind" them to be quiet) really works! Kids just say no thanks if they don't want it. Suave in the big bottles is what I use sandalwood/cinnamon rocks.” (Ali). 

Another creative idea given by a teacher in this article is in response to something I have seen frequently during my observation as well, the abuse of bathroom privileges and the hall pass.  A band teacher solves this problem by attaching his restroom pass to a 20 pound tuba case so that the students will not abuse the privilege as often.  According to him the bathroom visits during class have dropped significantly, this says to me that it is a very simple idea with extremely beneficial results.  Although it will probably be a good idea to have something that is bulky but not altogether too heavy because as a person who has had frequent injuries, it would be working against those handicapped people who currently lack the physical ability to maneuver such a heavy object.  All in all classroom management is important, discipline may be spread thin among some students and others may have an abundance, but regardless it is our duty to adapt certain styles of classroom management in order to ensure an effective learning environment for all students.