The View Hot Topics – Do Teachers Have Control in the Classroom?
Today on The View, the ladies talked about young teachers not being trained in how to keep control of their classroom. They learn how to teach the subjects, but not how to gain control over their class. Joy felt class size is a huge factor in teachers keeping control. Elizabeth felt it begins at home and a lot of children are not getting the discipline they need at home.
I agree with both of them. Class sizes are getting out of control. If a teacher must handle a lot of children during the day, they spend more time chasing and less time teaching. I’m not a teacher but I’m the product of two teachers. My mom still teaches preschool today. I’ve volunteered in my daughter’s classroom. This doesn’t make me an expert, but it has opened my eyes to the difficulties teachers face.
In a class of 20 children, you are going to have 20 different personalities, disciplines, home lives, places in their learning and maturing. Different learning styles and different personalities. When my daughter was in kindergarten, the class always hinged on out of control. Her kindergarten teacher was in her first year of teaching and kept the children in line. But she spent a huge amount of time getting one to sit down, another to focus on their book, another to listen and so on and so on.
So much of the class time was spent keeping control, the learning felt secondary. There were three to four of the children that took the greatest amount of the teacher’s time. These were also the students I could see falling behind later in school. Being brushed aside because they didn’t focus or learn as quickly as the others. They weren’t bad children, they didn’t get enough of what they needed at home or they had a learning disability or they just weren’t maturing as quickly as their peers. They just needed more time and energy from the teacher.
This of course was kindergarten and now in second grade, the same children still need an extra push, but fortunately my daughter’s school does a great job at giving extra attention to those who need extra attention and those who need extra challenges. They look at every student’s learning style and work to teach to it. Not something that happens at every school.
I agree with Joy in that class size is a very important factor in keeping control in the classroom. The more children a teacher must focus on, the less time they have to actually teach. Children need discipline, respect and boundaries at home that will transfer when they are out in the real world.
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March 24th, 2010 at 6:18 pm
Wish I would have know about this episode, I would have loved to listen to the conversation on this topic. I agree with all you say about teachers not having control in the classroom and much has to do with class size. Although when there is a commonality among students I think that the issue of losing contol in the classroom is not so much an issue. But like you mentioned, when there is a wide range of differences like learning styles, focus, etc, there tends to be more issues in control. When my children attended Brick and Mortar schools, I remember a large Gifted and Talented class where the teacher had total control every class, but again that’s a group with a common focus. Great post.