I feel that I should get a refund for all the college courses I took that didn’t actually help me in my career. And there were a lot of them. I changed majors and colleges, so I ended up going to school for an exceedingly long time. I loved it. I loved the books and the classes and the smell of higher learning. Despite all that, looking back, I feel that a lot of the courses were a waste of my time. Most of them blur together except for a very few that had unique professors and interesting information. (“Death and Dying,” is one example. Yes, I really did take a course called “Death and Dying.” It was memorable.) And the one class that every elementary teacher needs didn’t even exist: a class on classroom management. I had to take everything from “Elementary Psychology” to “Fantasy Books for Youth” to “Historical Geology,” yet no one taught me how to manage 29 five-year-olds in a classroom without any assistance. I figured that out the tough way—by being thrown into a classroom full of 29 five-year-olds.
Are you getting your degree, or do you have your degree? How do you feel about your education?
Personally, I would like to get that refund. It would keep me in Starbucks chai lattes for a long, long time.
All the best!
Kim
You are so right! All teachers should have a Classroom mgmt. course open to them. Plus, with the CCLS and having to write Student Learning Objectives/LMAs, there should be coursework to aid teachers in writing them.
If colleges can’t give refunds for dud courses, they should at least offer 50% off another course that’s worth its weight in gold.
The problem with a Classroom Management class is that it must be taught so that all the theories discussed, and all the information given can be used at that point in time. Otherwise, all the valuable tools you learn about will be forgotten by the time you student teach. In the advent that a class was structured to allow a student to go into a classroom and try different classroom management methods, no teacher is going to allow a preservice teacher to enter their classroom and adjust or change their time tested classroom management policies, simply to see how it works. Ultimately, being thrown in and having to learn classroom management, when you must use it is really the only authentic way to learn good classroom management, as you stated you have to learn some things the hard way.
No class is perfect, but there are many great classes people take, that don’t make a huge impact later on. The fact that you were able to get a job where you teach 29 5 year olds is a testament to the fact that your education worked.
I agree! Most of the classes I took in college did little to help me when I actually got into my own classroom. I did, however, have a classroom management class, but it, like most of the others, felt like a waste of time. We discussed the theories, but without actually facing any particular situations to know how to apply them. I feel it would have been helpful to spend more time in multiple classrooms observing management systems actually being used to deal with real problems. But the only real way to learn effective classroom management is trial and error (and there are a lot of those!).
I guess I was kind of lucky. Not ALL of my classes, but the majority of my classes (in my major) were useful to what I’m doing now. My college was very hands on and cohort group based learning. I did my research though, and I went to the school that had one of the best reputations for training highly educated and inventive teachers. There were some classes I took that have not impacted my teaching at all, and those were the classes that I dreaded throughout school because I knew how pointless they were.
I agree with Sarah that teachers need to spend more time with successful teachers observing these teachers and the different techniques they use for successful classroom management. Different techniques work with different personalities and in different situations so the more experiences that student teachers have, the better the chance they will find a model that works for them.
I took a classroom management class but…….. it was pretty much theories and so forth. I learned alot in school and I enjoyed it. But as far as learning to manage a classroom and planning I learned through doing it. I love that my school allows me to observe another teacher yearly. I always learn through that. I think what is difficult is that we are not given time to just sit and talk to other teachers.