The Effective Primary School Classroom

The Essential Guide for New Teachers

Joan Dean

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134286195
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

This book describes good practice in the primary school and offers advice particularly to beginning teachers and students. It begins by considering the children, their physical, intellectual and emotional development and the development of their self-image. It makes suggestions about ways in which a teacher can assess a new class and stresses the importance of motivation and first-hand experience.
The Effective Primary School Classroom covers all the issues teachers are faced with in their day-to-day work and includes chapters on:

• managing time and space
• teaching and learning
• working in groups
• evaluation and record keeping
• classroom management
• working with support staff
• working with parents.

In addition, there is discussion of ways of organising learning to help children acquire the learning set out in the National Curriculum. Including case studies and suggestions for investigations, this text is essential reading for student teachers about to begin school placements or newly qualified teachers just starting their first post. More experienced teachers and teacher trainers will also find the book a useful resource.

Chapter 1

The children

If you are to enable all your children to learn and develop their particular interests and abilities, you need to find ways of stimulating their interest in learning. Children are born with particular inherited characteristics and abilities and these interact with their environment so that each child discovers personal talents and abilities and interests and becomes an individual person, using the people encountered in the environment as role models. The growing child tries out different behaviours and modifies them in the light of responses from those around.

Physical development

Children at the primary school stage are developing rapidly and the time of year at which they were born has an effect on their progress at school. Children born in September are likely to be physically better developed than children born early in the year and may also have started school earlier than those born at other times of the year. It is very easy for teachers to assume that such children are more intelligent than their peers rather than simply at a later stage of development. Mortimore et al. (1988) studied aspects of work in London primary schools and found that teachers tended to think that younger children were less able rather than at an earlier stage of development. It is therefore important that you are aware of the actual ages of the children in your class and make allowance for their differences.

If you teach younger children, you also need to be on the look out for children with difficulties of sight or hearing which have not yet been diagnosed. Sight and hearing are not yet fully coordinated when a child starts school and there may be some problems which will later solve themselves. A child may have long or short sight and will not know that this is different from the norm until he or she makes comparisons with what others can see. The same is true of hearing. You need to be aware of children who appear to be straining to see or hear, perhaps screwing up their eyes or holding their heads at an odd angle. Colour blindness is another problem you need to be aware of. It is comparatively common and a child who is partially or fully colour blind may have difficulty if resources are colour coded.

Looking at age and ability

Go through the register of your class looking at the ages of your children. Make a list of the youngest and the oldest children in the class. Then list the most and least able and compare the lists. Are you seeing the younger children as less able?

Intellectual development

Most teachers are familiar with the Piagetian stages of development (Inhelder and Piaget 1958). The young child up to about two years of age is in what they call the sensori-motor stage of development in which he or she is learning to coordinate movement and discover the world around them. When children start school they are in the pre-operational stage in which they tend to see the world as revolving around themselves. From about seven years of age they enter a stage of concrete operations when they see the world more logically but are still tied to action. Eventually, often by the age of eleven they begin to reach a stage when they can think more abstractly.

Piaget (1952) also describes the way in which individuals adapt to their environment. They use two processes: assimilation and accommodation. In assimilating new information the child first takes it in. He or she then tries to fit the new experience into his or her existing knowledge and understanding, which is accommodation.

Vygotsky (1978) writes of the ‘zone of proximal development’, by which he means the distance between the stage of development the child has now reached and the stage he or she could reach with help. Teachers work within this zone and Bruner (1985) suggests that adults perform the critical task of scaffolding or developing the learning task so that the child can make it his or her own and be able to use it.

Gardner (1983) suggests that we have a number of different kinds of intelligence. They include linguistic, musical, logical-mathematical and scientific, bodily-kinaesthetic, which includes art and movement and personal intelligence or ability to get on with other people. You need to be aware of these different kinds of intelligence in getting to know the children in your class.

Emotional intelligence

Emotions are a primitive response to danger and we respond more quickly in emotional terms than we respond intellectually. Children have to learn to control their emotional responses and need our help with this.

Goleman (1996: 34) puts forward the idea that emotional intelligence plays a more important part than intelligence quotient (IQ) in how well we do in life. He suggests that, ‘At best, IQ contributes about 20 per cent to the factors which determine life success, which leaves 80 per cent for other forces.’ He goes on to suggest that other factors are important: ‘abilities such as being able to motivate oneself and persist in the face of frustrations; to control impulse and delay gratification; to regulate one’s moods and keep distress from swamping the ability to think; to empathise and to hope’. He suggests that there are the following aspects of emotional intelligence:

1 Knowing one’s own emotions – self-awareness – recognising a feeling as it happens.

2 Managing emotion.

3 Motivating oneself. Emotional self-control. Marshalling emotions in the service of a goal.

4 Recognising emotions in others.

5 Handling relationships.

Children need help in managing their emotions. Activities such as circle time (see Chapter 3) can be helpful when the children discuss feelings and occasions when they felt sad, happy, angry and talk about ways of managing these feelings. Children need to learn to be sensitive to their own feelings and the emotions and those of other people and manage their relationships with their peer group. They need to learn that different people feel differently and they need help in recognising the ways others are feeling, and it is helpful to discuss with them the ways in which people show how they feel. It is useful to consider possible situations and discuss different solutions to problems of relating to other people. Drama and role play may be helpful here.

Thinking about feelings

1 Talk with the children about how you know how what someone else is feeling and what your reaction should be to different feelings.

2 Role play a situation in which another child is crying. Discuss the way you feel when you are unhappy about something and ask the children for suggestions about the best way to handle this.

Brain development

The brain and sense organs of human beings grow at a faster rate than the rest of the body. By the age of seven the brain and head of a child is 90 per cent of its adult size, while the body is not yet half-way grown. The left hemisphere of the brain is usually concerned with speaking, writing, mathematics and logic, while the right hemisphere is concerned with spatial relationships, shapes and patterns, emotions and intuition. Brierley (1980: 68) suggests that the speech areas in the left hemisphere are slightly more advanced in girls of four or five years than in boys and the speech organs are more advanced. In boys the right hemisphere is more developed, hence their better capacity for spatial work with patterns and shapes. The capability of the brain, including memory, seems to be impaired by anxiety, so it is important that children are not made to feel anxious about their work or behaviour.

The development of the self-image

Docking (1990: 7) describes the self-image or self-concept as follows:

The self-concept is the picture of ourselves which we carry around and incorporates all those things which are important to us – relative and friend relationships, status, material possessions, other skills and hobbies. It is learned in detail as we grow up and glean information from what others do or say to us. . . . The self-concept is learned . . . It is vital that early experiences are predominantly positive and that children come to see themselves as accepted, loved and successful.

A child’s parents start to build his or her self-image from a very early age and the child’s experience at nursery and later at school contributes to it. It is very important for teachers to be conscious of the way in which a child’s self-esteem can be damaged by apparent failure and you need to be very sensitive to the way children receive your comments and criticisms. It is also important to make each child feel that you have high but realistic expectations for him or her, that he or she is valuable and that you care deeply about his or her achievement and behaviour. You want children to develop a positive self-image which helps them to be confident in tackling new tasks, feeling that they are competent members of the class community. This is a particular matter for concern when children are grouped by ability for some work. How does this make the children in the lowest group feel about themselves? This is not an argument against ability grouping because it is necessary for some purposes, but you need to be aware of its effect and try to compensate for it. If a child has negative views about him or herself, this may create behaviour problems.

Another aspect of the child’s self-image and the world around them is the view he or she takes of what happens to him or her. A child may regard failure as a personal deficiency or simply feel that the task was too hard. An event may be viewed as being due to the child’s own behaviour or due to outside forces not under his or her control. As a teacher, you need to help children to see that they have some control over what happens to them, that hard work can lead to success. It is valuable if you can give them opportunities to make decisions about what they do and help them to weigh up the consequences of their actions. At the same time they need to accept that the control they have is limited and that they cannot always succeed. Some people are more depressed by apparent failure than others and you need to be very conscious of the children for whom this is true, because they will need extra support if they are to go on making an effort.

An important contribution to the self-image of each child will stem from the picture you have of him or her and the way you show your views in interactions. You will be building up these pictures of children from the time they come into your class or even before and you need to be conscious of how easy it is to get a false picture and convey this in demonstrating the expectations you hold for particular children. There is what Fontana (1994) calls the halo effect and the demon effect. The halo effect operates when a child produces a very good piece of work and leads you to expect further good work. It also operates in terms of the social and ethnic background of children. It is easy to have high expectations of children from middle-class homes who speak well and are obviously well supported by their parents. Conversely, there is the demon effect in which you have low expectations of some children based on inadequate evidence. It is very easy to expect too little of children from a working-class background or from Afro-Caribbean children. In your dealings with such children you may unconsciously convey your views, and this has an effect on the effort the children are prepared to put in. You need to question yourself about your assumptions about children at frequent intervals.

Learning styles and motivation

Different children learn in different ways and you need to work at discovering not only what stimulates each child but how he or she learns best and what motivates them. To do this for a whole class is not realistic but by varying your teaching approaches you can help to cater for differences in the way children learn. At around eight years of age, most children realise that there is no automatic link between effort and achievement. This can be discouraging for some children and they need help in continuing to make an effort and to see that whatever the outcome, effort is still needed for achievement.

Children would seem to be motivated by an inner need such as the need for recognition by others, by first-hand experience of looking, hearing and handling things they are learning about. They may be stimulated by the classroom environment where displays may provide interest. Children are often stimulated by a desire to master something or solve a problem which is challenging. If you can make some aspects of learning an interesting problem-solving activity, this can be helpful. For example, children asked to work out spelling rules from examples are more likely to remember them than children passively being told the rules. Competition is also motivating and even if you avoid competitive situations, children will make their own comparisons. The trouble with competition is that children may place too much emphasis on winning or getting good marks and too little on the learning itself. It is also the case that some children will be losers too frequently and this affects the will to try. Trying to beat your own previous performance is a better form of competition that trying to do better than other people. Children will also be motivated by collaboration where it becomes important to do well because others are depending on you. Teaching someone else is another way of stimulating a child and helps to reinforce the learning he or she sets out to teach. Computers are also motivating for most children.

Case study

Susan was the class teacher of Year 5 in a one-form-entry primary school. She started preparing for the new school year during the summer term by arranging to meet Janet, the teacher of Year 4, to discuss the children who would be coming into Year 5 in the following autumn. She asked about the work that they had covered in the past year and the teaching approaches that Janet had used. She also asked for information about the background of individual children. Were there any for whom English was a second language? Were there children with disabilities of any kind, and what had Janet found worked for them? Which children had special educational needs and which children appeared to be exceptionally able? Were there any children with home problems which affected their behaviour and work in the classroom? She made notes about the children in a file with a separate page for each child.

Susan then arranged to exchange classes with Janet for an afternoon so that she could get to know the children who would be coming to her. She spent time talking with the children about what they had been doing and gave them a questionnaire which asked what they had most enjoyed in Year 4, what they had disliked and which approaches were best for helping them to learn. For example, listening to the teacher, discussion and work in pairs or small groups, individual work, work with the computer, and so on. The questionnaire also asked them to write briefly about the characteristics of their ideal teacher. She also asked them to write a short statement about themselves – their families, the things they liked doing, their interests and hobbies. She filed these statements and the questionnaires with the notes she had made during her discussion with Janet. While the children were working on these, she asked them to put out on their tables their exercise books so that she could look at their recent work.

She felt that she had a very useful collection of information about her new class which would be valuable when they started in Year 5 in the autumn term.

The effect of home background

Children will differ in various ways because of factors in their home background. The language used at home may differ from that used in school. English may not be the child’s first language and you have to take this into account, especially if you teach young children. Home language may also differ from school language in vocabulary and structure and the extent to which it is used to discuss ideas and talk about things. Research suggests that children who have fathers in non-manual work make better progress than those with fathers in manual work. Hughes (1986) found that there was almost a year’s difference between middle- and working-class children starting school in their knowledge of numbers.

Tizard and Hughes (1984) studied middle- and working-class children at home and at nursery school and found no significant differences in the number of conversations the children had with their mothers, in the length of the conversations and the number of words used. However, ...