Growing As a Classroom Manager

MACT Synthesis Paper

In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the

Master of Arts Degree in Curriculum and Teaching
Department of Teacher Education, Michigan State University

Shuai Wei
PID A49216399
April, 2016

Growing As a Classroom Manager

Before Coming To the U.S.

What is the biggest difference between being a teacher in China and in the U.S.? This could be a
question to every teacher coming from China. When I knew that I would come to the U.S. to be a
Chinese teacher, I started to think about this question. By learning from books and the internet, I
figured out some differences between the education systems of the two countries and had some
thoughts about how to teach in the U.S. Instead of focusing on tests and exams, which is the main
target of Chinese education system, American education system seems caring more about students
ability of solving problems and to have their own thoughts about things. I had some teaching
experiences in China public schools and I wanted to make some adjustments to my teaching style,
most of which were about teaching skills and instructions. Also based on the experiences of
teaching in China, I thought little about classroom management and did not take it as a big case.

Before Teaching In the U.S.

I had some class observation after I came to the U.S. and worked as a Chinese teacher in a threeweek Chinese summer camp. The experiences helped me to understand American schools and
students better. It was not the same way as China schools. Students seemed more difficult to
manage and teaching strategies should change accordingly too.

At the same time, I started my study in the MATC program and started to think about teaching in
a theoretical way. I realized the importance of classroom management and how it can impact
teaching. I learned from books, my instructors in MSU and experienced Chinese teachers, and

started to think about my own classroom management plans. By writing a short essay of teaching
philosophy and thinking (Artifact 1), I had a clearer outline of my thoughts about teaching. I
defined teacher as a guide who present learning content and a manager who keep the learning
process effective and efficient. In this way, classroom management seemed as important as
teaching to me. So when I was preparing for the coming semester, I not only wrote lesson plans
and unit plans, but also developed classroom rules, procedures and management plan according
what I learned in the MATC summer courses. I was trying to have sufficient preparation prior to
my teaching in American public school and wished they would work well, however, they did not.

First School Year

Nihao everyone! My name is Shuai Wei, which should be Wei Shuai in Chinese since we say last
names before given names, and I am your new Chinese teacher this year. I hope we can have a
wonderful year together. Here are some rules of the classroom that everyone should follow
here

I still remember the first time I talked to my students. I made all classroom rules clear and
understandable to students and got good attitude from them. Things seemed really good at the
beginning. Students were mostly quiet and respectful, with some minor interruption of talking,
which was not a big problem. Teaching was also going really well.

However, it was not long until things started to turn bad. Talking and interruption happened more
and more frequently, which often made me stop teaching to deal with these problems. Classroom
rules and procedures were often broken and I started to take further steps such as giving warnings,

calling parents, sending students to the office and issuing detentions. However, behavior problems
seemed not to be stopped but became more and more serious.

I was taking TE 894 in the first semester. As the final assignment of that semester, we should finish
an improvement project (Artifact 2) focus on certain aspects of teaching. We were encouraged to
choose the biggest challenge we confront in teaching as the topic to the improvement project. I
decided to work on classroom management since it was, definitely, my biggest challenge.

With the help of the course instructor, I figured out the situation of my classroom and possible
reasons that had caused those problems. I was not strict enough to students which lead to many
behavior problems. Good students were also impacted and the whole class lost control.
According to these, I had a clear action plan to solve the problems step by step, including
rearranging students seats and clarifying classroom rules and consequences, designing lessons
better to engage students in class better, videotaping classes and reflect on teaching, and to get help
from parents and colleagues.

I implemented the plan in class and found things are getting better. Based on the data I collected
in the process of implementation, I assessed and reflected on my effort, and saw some exciting
changes, as well as some necessary adjustments that had to be made.

In the second semester, I continued with my classroom management strategies, but they were not
as effective as they were first used. Some students began to ignore some instructions and cared
less about warnings and consequences. I made some effort on improving the strategies and tried

some new approaches, which made things better, but not as good as I had expected.

Summer courses
In the summer of 2014, I took TE891 and CEP891, which helped me a lot in future teaching.

Through learning CEP891, which was a course about adolescents, I had a new angle of thinking
about students and their behavior. There are some common patterns of adolescents problems and
each one has some reasons behind it. In addition to taking actions from the teacher side, we should
also think from the student side. Trying to understand students, figuring out why they are behaving
like this and taking actions accordingly should be necessary components of a teachers work. I
reflected on my learning in this course and made these thoughts clear to myself. (Artifact 3)

In TE891, which was a course right focused on classroom management, I learned even more. By
reading books and learning some cases about classroom teaching, the concept of classroom
management became clearer to me. Although I had thought about improving lesson designing, I
did not take it as a very important part of classroom management. Instead, I put more attention on
carrying out classroom management plans and dealing with students behaviors. However, by
learning this course, I realized that classroom management is a more complicated system rather
than a one-direction work. The way of designing and teaching a lesson could also be a necessary
part of classroom management. Comparing with my original thoughts of teaching and classroom
management, things had changed a lot.

Based on the learning of the two course and my first year teaching experience, I made a new

classroom management plan for the second year (the improvement project of TE891, Artifact 4),
in which I involved instructional approach, educational value, instructional goals and students
motivation and engagement. Those were all new angles of thinking of classroom management for
me. I could not wait to try these in my classes.

Second School Year

The situation became more complicated this year. Another Chinese teacher left and the school did
not want to recruit a new teacher. As a result, I was the only Chinese teacher in school that year
and had to teach all students who wanted to learn Chinese, which meant over 120 students
altogether. I was overwhelmed by lesson planning, classroom teaching and other new added school
works. What made things even worse was that the level 1 students I taught in the first year now
became level 2 and, as they knew me and the Chinese class really well, the classes were hard to
manage from the very beginning of the school year.

However, I still hung on and tried my best. I continued with most of my classroom management
strategies from the first year, and used some new strategies I learned during the summer.

According to the concepts of CEP891, on one hand, adolescents of this age have already started to
take charge of their life to some extent. They, somewhat, want to take responsibility of their own
and should be encouraged to do so. Under the direction of these concepts, I started to guide students
to think about their behavior and encouraged them to take their own responsibility for that. Instead
of just refer to consequences of breaking the rules, I let students to reflect on their behavior and
think about how to improve in the future. On the other hand, adolescents are still kids. They are

not mature enough to take full responsibilities. Guardian involvement is still necessary to deal with
most problems. According to this, I wanted to have parents and guardians more involved in
classroom management. Although I used to call and email parents, even meet with them to talk
about students behavior issues, it did not always happen. Most of the time, I was trying to solve
the problems in class. In this semester, I tried to be more strict and consistent with classroom rules.
I issued more detentions to misbehaving students and gave them detention notifications, on which
a parent or guardian signature is required. In this way, parents and guardians would know what
happened in class and could take action on the issues. (Artifact 5)

According to my improvement project of TE891, I also improved my lesson designing and

instructional strategies. Since culture is always an important part of language teaching and is easier
to carry out fun activities, I put more attention on designing culture related activities. Chinese hand
craft and calligraphy are good options for students to do fun works to experience Chinese culture,
as well as to learn essential knowledge about China. Also, I tried to make connections between
students learning and their real life to get their interests. I not only made learning useful in real life
that students could practice out of classes, but also guided them to compare Chinese language and
culture with their owns. Students showed more interests than just learning through the curriculum
and, since they were engaged more in learning activities, their behavior had improved as well.
They had done some wonderful job in these class activities. (Artifact 6)

Because of the more complicated situation and worse environment comparing with the first year,
although I did a lot to improve, I will not take classroom management of this year as a successful
case. Behavior problems still happened frequently in classes and I had to deal with them almost

every day. However, it was a good opportunity to try new strategies and improve old strategies.
More complicated situation and various behavior issues pushed me to find out more effective ways
to survive, also made many typical cases of classroom management that covers most types of
behavior problems. This, I finally realized, was a good resource bank for my future teaching.

Third School Year

I switched to another school for my third year. Based on my experience of the first and second
year, as well as my learning in these two years, I made more systematic classroom management
plan prior to the beginning of the school year.

On one hand, I had clear classroom rules, in which I tried to cover most possible behavior problems
that I had seen in the first two years. Actions to deal with these problems were also well designed,
including most effective strategies I had used. I made these clear in my course syllabus (Artifact
7) and distributed to students on the first day of school and required for a parent signed receipt slip,
by which I intended to get parent involved from the beginning.

On the other hand, I always tried to be aware of making lessons and teaching life related and fun.
I added necessary elements into the curriculum and tried to make content of lessons friendly to
students. Meanwhile, since I could see better behavior of students, I improved teaching strategies
too. I tried to make class activities more student centered which could provide students with more
opportunities to manage their own learning. This had always been an important part of my thought
of teaching, but I did not have many chances to carry it out because the base of it is effective
classroom management. Only students behave and have sufficient motivation to learn that these

kinds of activities are possible to be carried out in class.

The entire thoughts and action plans were presented in my final assignment of the MATC course
I took in this semester, which was TE807 (Artifact 8). To address the concept of quality teaching,
I summarized my thoughts with three essential aspects, which are student friendly content, student
centered teaching strategy and effective classroom management. These, up to now, are my general
thoughts and beliefs of teaching.

Looking Back
When I look back to my growth in the MATC program, I found one interesting thing about my
teaching philosophy and thinking. At the very beginning, like I expressed in Artifact 1, my basic
thoughts about teaching was that a teacher could not make students to know anything. The job a
teacher do is to present the content to students and let students learn by themselves through certain
types of activities based on effective classroom management. However, these activities could not
be carried out in a classroom in which the management is poor, just like my experience of the first
two years. Finally in my third year teaching, I saw clear proof of those thoughts. Like I expressed
in Artifact 8, the basic of the three elements (student friendly content, student centered teaching
strategy and effective classroom management) is effective classroom management. Based on this,
I was able to carry out activities in the form of the one I described in Artifact 8, in which I taught
nothing but students mastered all the content through using them. What I did was to present the
content and tell students what to do. This is the teaching pattern that I always believe to be the best
way and could only happen in an effectively managed classroom. My final experiences right
matches and proves my first thoughts of teaching, making my whole learning experience in the

MATC program a perfect circle, through which I could see my significant professional growth.