Class Management in the Primary School

E. C. Wragg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134534555
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book is one of a set of eight innovative yet practical resource books for teachers, focussing on the classroom and covering vital skills for primary and secondary teachers. The books are strongly influenced by the findings of numerous research projects during which hundreds of teachers were observed at work. The first editions of the series were best sellers, and these revised editions will be equally welcomed by teachers eager to improve their teaching skills. Successful primary teachers operate in many different ways, but they have one thing in common - an ability to manage their classrooms effectively. Without the skills required to do this, the most inspiring and knowledgeable teacher will fail.
In Class Management in the Primary School, Ted Wragg helps teachers to clarify their own aims and to find the strategies which will work for them.
Topics covered include:
*first encounters
*establishing the rules
*management of
*time and space
*coping with specific discipline problems
There are certain skills that teachers possess that are of paramount importance - class management is one of those areas. Effective classroom management can be the single most influential factor in getting it right and is a core teaching skill that both trainee and experienced teachers should constantly be improving on.

Unit 1 Skilful class management

The word ‘management’ is usually associated with the most senior people in an organisation. Ordinary employees are supposed to carry out the daily business, while their better paid superiors ‘manage’ them. Such managers may live in a remote office, eat in an executive dining room, while avoiding soiling their hands on machine oil and grease.

Teaching is different from that time-honoured stereotype, because even newly qualified teachers have a lot to ‘manage’. From the beginning to the end of their careers, teachers are responsible for managing, among other things:

• resources and materials (including quite expensive equipment, in some cases);
• time and space (lesson beginning and end, time spent on activities, layout of room);
• teaching and learning strategies (e.g. use whole class, small groups, individual learning);
• pupils’ behaviour, safety and wellbeing, interactions with others, progress;
• relationships in and out of school, including with parents, support staff, other agencies.

If ever you watch young children playing together at home or in school, before long someone will suggest playing at ‘school’. At the beginning of this familiar fantasy game a common ritual is followed. One child will step forward and say, ‘I’ll be the teacher’, and from then onwards that person is assumed to be in charge. There is not usually a rush to say, ‘Can I be the rather quiet child who sits in a corner getting on obediently with some maths problems’, but then children are not prone to use adult language in these matters.

It is fascinating to see what happens next. Most children role-playing as a teacher will immediately move centre stage and start ordering everyone else around, ‘Right, you sit here, you go over there.’ It seems to be the element of control that attracts. Others mimic a more kindly style. In this mirror of classroom life, where the players know the daily reality better than anyone else, some children will start to misbehave and then may be told off or even sometimes whacked about the body or head in a way that would have a real teacher up before the nearest magistrate.

Control over the behaviour of others, however, is only one of the aspects of class management highlighted above. Every day, busy teachers will find they are planning lessons; choosing topics or tasks; making judgements about what they as teachers should determine and what children should be encouraged to decide or choose for themselves; supervising movement around the classroom or school; organising a variety of activities undertaken by individuals, small groups or the whole class; praising good work or reprimanding pupils who misbehave; making sure the right materials and books are available; selecting from a range of possible teaching strategies.

The importance of effective class management is well illustrated by the following true story. A few years ago I was an external examiner at a college in London. This involved visiting students on teaching practice, seeing them teach and discussing with their tutors and supervising teachers in the schools whether they should pass or fail. I arrived at a school and was met by the head. She told me that the student had had considerable discipline problems, had not been able to control one or two of the more difficult pupils and, in her view, should not be allowed to pass. I watched the student concerned and was surprised at how orderly the class actually was. The lesson was quite interesting, pupils got on with their work and there did not seem to be too much difference between this student and others who were in the lower band of the pass category.

The sequel, however, is interesting. When I spoke to the student, she confessed her surprise at the good behaviour of the class and the relative smoothness of the lesson. Her teaching practice had gone very badly, she explained, because of poor behaviour by the pupils, and she fully expected to fail the course. Indeed, this was the first lesson for weeks that had gone according to plan and in a civilised manner. When I explained to the head what had happened she could not at first believe it. Suddenly she had an idea. ‘Let me talk to Jane,’ she said.

Five minutes later she returned and all became clear. Jane was the kindhearted deputy head who normally taught the student’s class. Hearing that an external heavy was coming in to assess the student, Jane had gone to the children and told them that, for once in their lives, they should behave themselves, as Miss X’s career was on the line. Children who would walk ten miles to feed a poorly pigeon, but not hesitate to torment a nervous student teacher, had done as she had asked. It seemed a pity that a student, who, with the help of a superordinate external authority in the form of an experienced deputy head, could teach with a modest degree of effectiveness, should be so ineffective on her own. It also confirmed that the ability to control behaviour, in whatever manner, is a ‘threshold’ measure – if you have enough of it you are over the threshold and can display the rest of your repertoire of professional skills, but too little of it and these may never become apparent.

Life in schools in the twenty-first century is much more demanding than in former times. Awareness of possible unemployment, the demands for greater knowledge and skill, as well as the speed of change, have all exerted greater pressure on teachers during the years of compulsory schooling (Wragg, 1997). The importance attached to results in public examinations, the use of league tables and other means of comparison between primary schools, high profile inspections, close attention from print and broadcast mass media and the prominence given to education by politicians, have produced a system of high accountability. Teachers are under constant scrutiny and are expected to be able to manage their classes effectively.

In the nineteenth century, there were fewer demands and teacher-training institutions were known as ‘normal’ schools. The assumption was that there was an agreed ‘norm’, some single approved way of teaching that all must copy. It led to Charles Dickens describing M’Choakumchild in Hard Times as like ‘some one hundred and forty schoolmasters [who] had been turned at the same time at the same factory, on the same principles, like so many pianoforte legs.’

There have been two contrasting tendencies in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. One has been for more prescription. As was the case with the normal schools, some people advocate conformity to a single prescribed pattern, the most notable form of which was the literacy and numeracy hours imposed in English primary schools in the late 1990s, when the nature of activity every few minutes was cen...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• AIMS AND CONTENT
• UNIT 1 SKILFUL CLASS MANAGEMENT
• UNIT 2 DIFFERENT VIEWS
• UNIT 3 FIRST ENCOUNTERS
• UNIT 4 THE TWO RS — RULES AND RELATIONSHIPS
• UNIT 5 SKILLS, STRATEGIES AND DECISION-MAKING
• UNIT 6 DEVELOPING AND ENHANCING COMPETENCE
• REFERENCES