Classroom Management: Key to Teacher Success Penn

It is my pleasure to speak to you today and to participate in the first International Symposium of Teacher Training and Development. My topic is classroom management. I want to preface this speech with the assumption that teaching is both an art and a science. As teacher educators, the best preparation we can give for our pre-service and new in-service teachers is the knowledge, skills, and dispositions that research has proven is the science to good classroom management.I also want to preface this presentation that I am speaking from an American teacher educator perspective, but I am confident that classroom management issues are similar globally. Finally, I want to preface that I am not going to discuss extreme behavior issues. Certainly, they do occur, but for the majority of pre-service and in-service teachers, the management issues are minor, which, left unresolved, can lead to very difficult behavior issues and distract from student learning. Research shows that the number one issue that teachers have when they enter the profession is classroom management. As a matter of fact, 50 percent of new teachers leave in the first five years of teaching, citing classroom management issues as the most frustrating, debilitating part of their job. As teacher educators, we know that classroom management is difficult to teach outside the actual classroom setting. Thus, it is imperative that our pre-service teachers see the classroom dynamic in action in order to experience the best ways to manage a classroom. With this background I’d like to focus on the following areas: 1. Managing the classroom in terms of good instruction and procedures. 2. Promoting participatory governance in the classroom. 3. Understanding cultural issues. 4. Including fieldwork and reflection in all course work.