Section B. 1:00 - 3:45pm Thursdays 
540 Waterman

One professional hallmark of an accomplished teacher is the strategic ability to radiate more than one instructional environment in her classroom setting. This means classroom management and organization, including the disciplinary context of the room, results from intentional action upon various classroom structures. Management by autobiography and doing to others what was done to you are the hallmarks of thoughtless practice; good management is comprised of a series of intentional decisions within the ecological system of the classroom. This capstone experience will enable you to exercise those decisions by teaching you to view and affect classroom behavior through the application of both psychological and sociological theory. You are thus empowered to understand and manipulate individual and group behavior as part of the same interrelated process. One ultimate goal of this course is that you be able to "manage" a variety of classroom environments by gaining control of yourself. 

A second professional hallmark of an accomplished teacher is the realization that relationship is at the heart of the teaching and learning enterprise. Relationship just doesn't happen. Accomplished teachers know how to exercise and teach a set of leadership and group processing skills so that participants in the classroom feel membership in a learning community. Communities can feel magical. There is no magic to their construction. The other ultimate goal of this course is that you become a builder of community.

If these two goals met, then the third goal for this course is achieved. You will be a leader among peers, a teacher who will simultaneously know what it is and what it takes to advance with all children the causes of equity, excellence, and social justice in America's schoolrooms.
 

Cohen, Elizabeth.  (1994). Designing Groupwork: Strategies for Heterogeneous Classrooms, 2^nd ed. New York: Teachers College Press.

Charney, Ruth.  (1992). Teaching Children To Care: Management in the Responsive Classroom. Greenfield, MA: Northeast Foundation for Children.

Albert, Linda.  (1996).  Cooperative Discipline. Circle Pines, MN: American Guidance Institute.

Electronic Coursepack. Available on electronic reserve, Bailey-Howe Library.