Classroom Management for Teachers

Consider that the new school year starts in just a few weeks, and you are standing in the doorway of your new classroom at the school where you have been recently hired. You have been teaching English for 7 years, but this year you will be at a different school. Your former school was a small, K–12, private, Christian school, but this year you are at one of the public middle schools. You feel blessed that you do not have to move, but the new setting has you feeling a little anxious.

As a Christian teacher, you try to demonstrate the love of Christ in all your lessons, but today you wonder: Can I even say the word Jesus? What if a student approaches me about my faith? One thing you enjoyed about teaching at a Christian school was being able to share your faith openly, so you are uneasy about how this will look at your new school. You remind yourself that Jesus is everywhere, so yes, He will be in this school, too. You silently pledge that you will not get so uptight about sharing your faith that you forget to live it.

The other aspect that is different about your new position is that you will be teaching a single grade level. The Christian school was small, and you were the only English teacher; your classes were composed of mixed grade levels from 5th to 12th. At this school, you are 1 of 12 English teachers and are assigned to the 6th grade team; there are 4 teachers on your team.

In the 6th grade literacy block, you will be teaching a combination of topics in vocabulary development and comprehension, written composition skills, and exploring fictional and nonfictional works. Last spring, the district decided that increasing comprehension would be a high priority in its middle schools. You are familiar with each of these topics, and you are already gathering ideas for improving the reading scores of your new students. Your apprehension lies with the number of new approaches for delivering content that you will be called on to learn and use. At your new-teacher summer workshops there is a focus on teachers using different strategies to meet the needs of today’s diverse learners.

Your new school’s population looks very different from where you came. It has a diversity score of 0.68, so there is a good chance that most of your classes will be comprised of different ethnic groups. This is appealing to you, though, because at your former school most of the students were of the same race and economic background, and few diverse teaching strategies were needed for reaching students.

You are meeting with your team at the school today because the principal has instructed all teams to lay out their plans for academic success in their classrooms this year. Your team leader calls a meeting so that you can discuss ideas together. She begins the meeting by sharing last year’s 5th grade iReady results for reading. Her presentation is helpful because the program produces a colored bar graph, and you can clearly see where the students in each of your classes ended their previous year.

With regard to teaching comprehension, some of the English teachers at the school are using computer software that delivers curriculum and training to teachers. Your team leader finds this approach to be worthwhile, but she is not requiring the team to use it. She also tells you that the district’s reading coaches want you to use small group instruction in your classrooms. One example she has for a small group work station is to use question sets assigned to quality articles. By assigning each of the students in the groups a specific role, students can effectively discuss the passage together, as guided by the question set provided at their station.

Your team leader reminds you that nonfiction passages are important for developing reading skills, too, because reading and interacting with them on a regular basis builds stamina. She specifically wants the team to take advantage of the school’s Literacy Lab for this purpose. If you know the reading levels of your students, you can use that information to individualize learning for them.

The team must now lay out their plan for academic success. You all agree that the first step is to determine the academic goals for the 6th grade, because these goals will drive the strategies you select. As a reminder, the focus of these goals are comprehension, vocabulary development, and nonfiction exploration. One of the teachers volunteers to search the online library research articles with the most up-to-date classroom strategies. Another teacher suggests increasing parental engagement would be helpful, and you suggest how you think using a flipped classroom model might work.

You leave your meeting feeling energized. There are so many ideas available for teaching strategies that it will be hard to choose only a few. These teachers are committed to their students! You are also thinking back to this morning, standing at your door musing about sharing and living your faith. In consideration of Christ-centered teaching, how can your strategies for teaching literacy demonstrate the love of Christ in your classroom journey to academic success?

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