Journal #7: Middle School Classroom Management

The article that I chose was Middle School Classroom Management: Behavior Action Plan by Adam Waxler. This article basically talked about how classroom management is one of the most important and most difficult skills to master, and that it can be an especially daunting task for middle-school teachers. Waxler talks about the fact that many first year teacher let the first few weeks of the school year fool them into thinking that there doesn’t seem to be much of a problem with managing their classroom. Once the students start to feel more comfortable though, they begin to test the teacher boundaries.

Waxler then goes on to give an alternative to the standard reward and punishment management systems, which he says is “only a temporary solution to an ongoing problem. Students who respond to the rewards begin to do their work and behave ONLY if a reward is involved, while at the same time many students who thrive on negative attention actually begin to seek out the punishment.” He suggests the behavior action plan. This is a more “proactive plan” that’s main purpose is to keep the students actively engaged in the lessons. The behavior action plan calls for the students to set up their own plan. They do this by completing three statements: “I am writing this plan because I...”, “This behavior was not appropriate because...” and “To prevent this from happening again, I plan to...”. The students then sign and file their statements. The author feels that this management plan has more long lasting effects because it makes the student acknowledge their actions and then think of ways to correct that behavior.

Questions:
1.) Q: What did you find most interesting or informative about this article?

A: I found this article interesting because I would like to teach middle-school and in my observations I have found that classroom management in middle school classrooms can be an issue. So far I have seen a number of reward systems and I have not really thought that any of them were terribly effective and I am interested in the different types of techniques out there.

2.) Q:How effective do you think the Behavior Action Plan would be?

A: I would have to say that I do not one-hundred percent think that the Behavior Action Plan would be very effective. If the student still does not think that their behavior is in the wrong, filling out the BAP afterwards would not really get the point across. Also, I do not quite understand if this plan is ment to be implemented before the unwanted behavior takes place or afterwards.