Classroom Management and the Learning Theories

Unless you're teaching preschool or kindergarten- and I'm not- students are going to have expectations; expectations about the material, the tests, and about how the class is run. For example, most teachers don't tolerate raised voices and yelling in the class, and so students will assume that you too will not tolerate it. This is not to say, however, that students will approach a new teacher the same way they behaved around previous teachers. At the beginning of the year, students will observe you and determine how the class is going to be run.


Through observing their behavior, using BLT, as a teacher I will determine what my student's expectations- their schemas- are for my behavior and classroom management. This is important because if my style of running a class doesn't fit into what they are used to, I will have to assimilate my management into what they're used to. If they are accustomed to a teacher who will ask a question, and then immediately answer it for students, I will have to slowly get them used to my method of waiting at least 10 seconds and giving students time to answer a question.

Reflections on my Lesson

Overall, I thought the lesson I taught, along with Lindsey and Emily, went well, and I enjoyed it. We considered Developmental Learning Theory first, and thought of different representations for our topic, social norms. We decided that the most concrete representation would be being in the presence of someone breaking a social norm. We considered assigning a few members of the class to break social norms throughout our lesson, without telling the rest of the class that it was part of our presentation. We decided that might be distracting, and would also push our time constraints. We settled on showing videos of people breaking norms first, and allowing the class to point out what they noticed. We would then move to an abstract representation by introducing the concept of a social norm, and defining it. We implemented Social Learning Theory next by having the class come up with examples of other social norms.

After that, we returned to concrete by using another video to display another example of a social norm being broken. After the video, we had a class discussion analyzing what norm was broken in the video. I appreciated the value of Social Learning Theory then, because by allowing the class to share their ideas first, they came up with answers that we hadn't thought of while making the video, but that were absolutely right.

We used one last video, demonstrating a social norm that is less obvious, and thus is violated fairly frequently. We showed a group of people waiting in line, and two people in the line were standing inappropriately close to the people in front of them. This is certainly a social norm- respecting personal space- but isn't a obvious one, and no one in the class could identify it after watching the video. By showing this example, we changed their concept, their schema of a social norm, implementing CLT.