Creating Effective Management Strategies

Classroom management was something that I felt that I had little understanding of when I first started my internship last fall. When the beginning of the school year started up, my schedule was chaotic, my assistants tried to go by last year's schedule and routine, and I was trying to figure out how to manage the various behaviors of my students and how to integrate a class-wide management system that my assistants would buy into. Unfortunately, the first few months were somewhat tense, as my assistants would try to implement their own ideas of classroom management over mine. Some of their ideas were good, and others were....well, not my ideal. We dealt with a lot of interruptions to teaching time, as some of my assistants would actually interrupt my lessons to deal with what they thought were offensive misbehaviors. It took the whole first half of the school year to finally figure this out, and to come up with a solution that my assistants and I could all work with.

My goal for next year? To have all of this stuff figured out BEFORE the assistants walk through the door, and to make sure that before the students arrive, we are all on board and understand what the expectations are. Also, I want to have a better understanding of what might occur in the classroom, and this can be accomplished by talking to teachers who have previously had my students, and carefully reading IEPs. More than anything, I want to avoid the chaos and feeling of stress that was present those first few months, and make my classroom a well-managed and stress free area from day one.