Proximity, flexibility and manoeuvring room are the key words for classroom management
What is really important and decisive for whether a student participates in the classroom teaching, talks to the student with whom he or she shares a desk or is lost in reverie?
The answer to that question is the distance to the teacher. And that is why it is utterly important how a classroom is organized and furnished.
Classroom Management
The better the organization and furnishing of the classroom, the higher the quality of the teaching and the students’ participation. Professor Fred Jones, who is one of United States’ leading experts in classroom management, which is the art of controlling a class of students while teaching, says that “To place the students’ desks in a good way from the very beginning is the cheapest form of classroom management ever invented.”
The distance between the individual student and the teacher is of great importance, if the teacher is to be as close to the students as possible, when he or she needs to write on the blackboard or show something on a whiteboard. If the teacher has a desk, it should never be placed between the students and the blackboard or the whiteboard – whether board might be in usage in the classroom in question – but it should be placed at one of the sides of the classroom or even amongst the students’ desk, so that the distance between the students and the board is as minimal as humanly possible. At the same time the classroom should according to Fred Jones be organized in such a way that the teacher can move around freely between the students and with only a few paces can reach any of his or hers students.
Move the desks
Professor Fred Jones
“The best teachers are those who move around amongst their students, not only when the students work individually, but just as much when it is the teacher, who is teaching or explaining a given matter”, Professor Fred Jones emphasizes.
But it is not always that easy
The ability to move freely around the classroom, while one speaks, engages and motivates the students, is an ability which needs to be trained. And it is imperative that each separate teacher is conscious about the typical pitfalls. The American Patrick W. Miller has written several books about the teacher’s body language and unconscious behaviour, and his studies show that teachers unconsciously station themselves closest to the students, they like the best. For that very reason it is important to be aware of how the teacher moves about in the classroom and to make sure that he or she moves as much as possible and is familiar with the shortest route from one end of the classroom to the other. That secures the highest degree of flexibility and attention from all students to the teacher and vice versa.
But one thing is classroom teaching, another is group work. When the students are engaged in group work it is obviously an advantage to place the students’ desks in smaller groups reflecting the work groups. When the group work is over and done with, it is crucial that the desks are returned to their previous stetting. This rarely happens according to Niels Egelund, who is Professor and Leader of Denmark’s Pedagogical University. He thinks that the organization of desks and chairs in rows just like we know it from churches and the like is the best one, when the students’ attention is to be directed at the teacher.
Classroom Management
“I observe so much teaching that I have stopped counting, and I do believe that the students in around half the classrooms, which I visit, are constantly sitting in group work formations. If each school and each teacher was sufficiently aware of and attentive to how much the students disrupt each other with both verbal and non-verbal communication, when they are sitting in group work formations all the time, they would never allow it. It is rather problematic that this group work formation of students’ desks is used as a common standard”, Niels Egelund adds.
Due to the fact that classroom organisation and management should depend entirely on the subjects and contents of the teaching at hand, the possibility for quick and flexible rearrangement of the desks and chairs is important, when classrooms are being organized. And we need to take the organization of the classroom into account for each single lesson, even if it means reorganizing the desks and chairs several times a day, and even if we need to use the first five minutes of every lesson to do so!.
“It is without doubt worth the effort”, Niels Egelund confirms.
Read more about Professor Fred Jones’ methods at http://www.fredjones.com and/or watch this video.
In the introduction to Classroom Management by Fred Jones, the students call themselves Mrs. Garcia’s Freedom Writers thereby refer to the book and film by the same name.
Erin Gruwell
Assigned the thankless task of teaching English at a gang-infested high school at Long Beach, a 23-year-old teacher Erin Gruwell, played by Hilary Swank, resorts to unconventional means of breaking through to her hardened students in the best-seller film The Freedom Writer’s Diaries: How a Teacher and 150 Teens Used Writing to Change Themselves and the World Around Them. The film is based on the novel The Freedom Writer’s Diaries by Erin Gruwell.
The students at Long Beach High School that the young, idealistic teacher tried to move had been written off, and her chances of succeeding scoffed at, but Erin Gruwell wasn’t about to go down without a fight. Long Beach is a place where a new war is waged with each passing day, and when the hardened students who walk those dangerous hallways sense an outsider attempting to understand their plight, their cynical resentment threatens to keep a deadly cycle in motion.
Some of the "Freedom Writters" from the Film
Despite the initially hostile reaction she receives in the classroom, Gruwell uses the writings of Anne Frank and Zlata’s Diary: A Child’s Life in Sarajevo to teach her students not only the basis of the English language, but compassion and tolerance as well. Later, when the time comes to tell their own tales in a project specially designed to explore the daily violence that the majority of students have grown numb to, the barriers that had once stood so strong gradually begin to crumble. When the only chance for survival is to befriend the person who was once your mortal enemy, the world is opened to a whole new realm of possibilities.
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