EDU684: Classroom Management Challenges

EDU684 Week 4 Classroom Management Challenges

1. Last year I had a student who consistently liked to make jokes during small group demonstration which was distracting to the group. This was mostly because the student needed adult attention as his home life was not so great, and he also thought the jokes help him fit in with the attention it brought from his peers.

2. This year I have a 12th grade student who is in an independent study class with me. He has done minimal work so far on his project(set up his documentation portfolio website and daily logs) this year and in Q3 has not done any work. He is very distracted by any technology and even had his personal and school technology taken away by administration(unheard of in my district). I have sat near him as well as done more frequent work checks with him, and the only time he has been productive is when I’ve personally given him tasks related and unrelated to his project(which I cannot maintain for this large indy study class). This is not the first time he’s underperformed in a Technology class(supervisor knows), and I’m not the only class he’s doing poorly in this year(failing 3 classes). Two things I’ve been working to on this year: one, he always brought food into our lab which has finally stopped; two, he always reverts back to using his cellphone which I have created a space for him to now place if I see it out. His behavior isn’t disruptive, but quite disengaged, it’s interesting to see how other students respond to that.

Notes from earlier in the year w/ I&RS:

• Student brought food to class every day for week, 2 of 4 periods he took food out of his bag after first 5 minutes of class.
• Student was on phone every 30 seconds or more frequently the entire period.
• Student was redirected every 5 minutes to put away phone in bag.
• Student was not engaged in personal project and application usage could not be tracked on 1-1 laptop. (This little hack led to him loosing [school & personal] tech access for 2 weeks)

“Wow, the kid has something on the ball if he employed a hack to stop the application tracking. He has the chops to pass your course, and others, if he has that level of ingenuity.”