RUNNING HEADER: AUGUST EXPERIENCE REFLECTION

August Experience Reflection

Mary Jane Walker

Louisiana State University

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This summer I interviewed five teachers across grades first, second, and third to identify

the different ways in which they each make decisions about classroom organization and how to

structure the first few days of school.

The teachers all agreed that they typically will organize their classroom into clusters of

three to four students. It also helps make the room feel less cramped and allows the teachers the

ability to walk around the classroom and monitor the students with ease. The groups give the

students shoulder partners that they can turn to for help as well as making it easy to assign

groups different tasks around the classroom. Some of the teachers do find that their students

make tend to talk to their groups at inappropriate times but others find that there is little

problems with this seating arrangement. Waiting to get to know the students is something all the

teachers I interviewed felt was best when deciding seating arrangements. Its best to get a feel for

which children are chatty, who can be redirected easily, and who has difficulty with fidgeting.

While a seating arrangement might work at the moment it’s always a possibility that it won’t

work in two weeks so it’s better to be flexible. The teachers all agree that besides behavioral

reasons, they try to keep the groups organized by ability.

While some teachers don’t have the time for centers and others simply don’t do them at

all the first week, many agree that it’s important to wait until you understand the needs of the

children when considering the types of centers you’d like in the classroom. For those teachers

that do have centers, they all have various ideas about the number of centers that should be

available. Throughout this process I have realized that centers are something that are different

within each classroom and it really depends upon the class and their needs as to what you offer

and how much variety they need.

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When dealing with materials, some teachers describe them as things they will eventually

want their students to know how to use without question, such as their folders, journals, crayons

etc. The teachers recommend having all these types of materials ready to go with routines for

them set in place so that children can start right into understanding them and how they should be

used. For most of the teachers, it is combination of purchasing items themselves as well as

having parents purchase items for their individual children. However, dome teachers have been

lucky enough to work at schools where those costs can be covered for them.

The classroom library is important to many of the teachers I interviewed. Several

described that their library is open throughout the day and that children are encouraged to read

whenever there is not active class instruction. Other say they like to have the children only go

into the class library when they have completed their work of have free time in the afternoon. A

pattern through all of the classrooms is the organization of the books, some go by genre, others

by reading level, but most typically sort by ability. They often label them with Lexile scores, AR

level, or reading levels and sometimes with all three to help students pick appropriate books.

With behavior management, the first few weeks are typically dedicated to procedure

routines and rules. This helps students to understand the expectations they will be help to for the

remainder of the year. Some teachers use reward systems, where children earn things through

good behavior, and punishment can include missing recess or sitting out of centers for a few

minutes. To introduce these expectations some, choose to have roleplaying, or will read books

and relate them back to choices and behavior expectations. On the whole, most of the teachers

like to have class discussion about the expectations.

Daily schedules seem to be something set by the school and less in control by the

individual teacher. For others though, they try to get the important things done in the mornings
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when the students have the most energy. Still others will base it around lunch time and

enrichments. With those whose schedule is set by the administration there is little flexibility

allowed, therefore these teachers try to give the students as much choice as possible in the other

activities of the day.

The curriculum of each teacher I met with is quite different to some degree. There are

some who work with curriculum directors, while others follow directly from the Louisiana

Department of Education, using Eureka Math, Wit and Wisdom, and PhD Science. For these

teachers, they spend much of their summers in training learning how to use these programs to

their students best advantage.

All in all, over the course of this assignment I have really gotten an idea about the work

that goers into the start of a new school year. Teachers work all summer to prepare themselves

and their classroom, however with each teacher comes the variability of how they run their

classroom. There are many ways to run a successful classroom, it’s important to realize that what

works for one class may not work for another, however its always smart to gather ideas from

those teachers around you and try to see how you can alter them to suit your own classroom.