Creating a Safe and Supportive Environment

The students in this class clearly knew the rules and expectations because the SBTE has modelled clearly and consistently (See Appendix 3.1) as suggested by Canter & Canter (Charles, 2008 & Marsh, 2008). Coming into this setting as a pre-service teacher aiming to sustain a positive classroom environment, it was important for me to consistently maintain these rules and build co-operative relationships with students as suggested in Ginott’s teachings. (Charles, 2008).

Marsh (2008) discusses motivation and explains the need for balancing intrinsic and extrinsic motivators in the classroom as individual students will be motivated in different ways. In two separate lessons, there was a different student who was off-task and behind in their work. In the first instance (See Appendix 3.2), student G was not motivated by the work of his peers (Marsh, 2008) even with the management skill of ‘cueing with parallel acknowledging’ (Richmond & Davidson, 2006) As Marsh (2008) points out, behaviour management is often a matter of ‘trial and error’ so for the case of student E (See Appendix 3.4), the behaviour management skills used had a different effect showing E is motivated differently to G. E had possibly been off-task to simply receive attention as Drieukers suggests (Richmond, 2007) and so by using Skinner’s theory of shaping behaviour through constant reinforcement (Charles, 2008) combined with the extrinsic motivation of peers and achievable goals (Marsh, 2008) E completed her work.

On the other hand, disengagement became evident in S’s behaviour (See Appendix 3.3) when he started to disrupt other students, showing signs of boredom (The State of Queensland – Department of Education and Training, 2002). Offering a distraction/diversion (Rogers, 2006) which was a variation of the current learning activity (Marsh, 2008) was an effective method to help S refocus on learning and fulfil his need for fun, one of five needs which drives human belonging according to Glaser (Richmond, 2007).

Works Cited

Charles, C. M. (2008). Building classroom discipline (9th ed.). Boston: Pearson/Allyn & Bacon.

Marsh, C. (2008). Becoming a teacher: Knowledge, skills and issues (4th ed.). Frenchs Forest, NSW: Pearson.