Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Nathan L. Tamborello
16/04/2017
As I began to sit and answer the reflective questions for this week, I was faced with a sort
of paradox and found it difficult to relate myself to the action plans for instruction. I’ve never
been a teacher; how can I have a great action plan in place already, or know good classroom
management techniques? I’ve never been in a classroom besides being either a student myself or
simply as a substitute; how do I know if my future self will employ this stratagem? Instead, I
chose to parallel these standards and action plans to my work life currently: how do I excel at
this skill subset or how do I fail at another at my everyday job? The comparison isn’t perfectly
relatable, but I believe that most of these skills are basic structures, and only need slight
modification to be relevant in the classroom setting. Therefore, through the use of reflection on
my own school days and on my current performance in the workforce, I was able to analyze,
reflect, and think about how to shape these plans and models in the future, so that I may be a
Louis, Leithwood, Wahlstrom & Anderson discuss how great teachers essentially have
two core functions: to provide direction and to exercise influence. (2010, pg. 9) In order to carry
out these two functions, teachers act as a proponent of both stability and change. While on paper
stability and change serve to be dichotomies of each other, in the classroom they serve a more
instruction, but also be an agent of change. Learning and the learning process is constantly in a
state of flux, and if stagnation occurs for too long, old methods will be outdated and may no
longer be beneficial to the student. Active Planning and Ongoing Planning, both stages of the
four phases of planning (Freiberg, page 33), are both crucial to this idea of stagnation, as they
provide ongoing assessment of instruction and immediate feedback of what works in your
planning and what clearly needs revision. These two phases are the two most important to me
Nathan Tamborello, 16/04/2017, CUIN 7304 3
when planning and implementing instruction; they allow me to fine tune planning as it pertains
only the way my co-workers and I approach jobs, but also changing the very nature of the job
itself. For example, as a project estimator for commercial construction, the normal process in
estimating a job is to print out a set of about 100 pages of 30 X 42 paper. Realizing that this was
a horribly outdated, inefficient, and costly way to estimate, I set out to find an alternative. I
researched for weeks on various components of differing software. I put a presentation together
and invited my boss and our employees to learn about the software I had chosen and to test it out.
4 years later, our company no longer prints plans except for field sets. We save thousands of
dollars per month in paper costs, and have very limited errors on our take-offs due to the built-in
software corrections. Not only do we save money on man hours waiting for 100 pages of paper
to print, but the process is more streamlined, more efficient, and slowly bringing the company
into the digital age. This type of research-driven change is not only vital to the construction
field, but also vital to education. Changing outdated techniques for easier, more efficient ways
of educating isn’t lazy like most older generations claim of millennials: it’s smart. This type of
change would help in my Active Planning stage, as it allows me to research the best way to
As I referenced earlier, I am new to the field of education, which also means that I’m new
to Classroom Management. As Arends states, “beginning teachers continue to feel insecure about
managing their first classroom, which remains a crucial aspect of developing teacher leadership.
Another anxiety for first year teachers comes from the nervousness that goes along with being
placed into a leadership role where the teacher has influence and authority for the first time. If
the inexperienced teacher is able to gain a basic classroom management understanding and skills,
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he/she will be able to reduce much of the anxieties that go along with it” (1997). Reading
through the Classroom and Instructional Management Plan (Freiberg, page 180-182), these
heading provide a great way to organize and gather my thoughts for this particular type of
effort between teacher and student; it is defined by the teacher with input from the students and
maintained by both teacher and classroom for an overall effective learning environment. In
Figure 6.4 it states that Rule Development is one of the major aspects of overall good classroom
management. I believe that developing rules with your students and creating a Rights &
Responsibilities Charter holds the students more accountable to not only the teacher, but also to
themselves. They signed this charter and agreed to its contents, now it’s up to them to enforce it
upon themselves through self-discipline. I personally ascribe mostly to the two headings
Organization and Procedures & Routines. I am extremely organized in my day job as a Project
Manager: all of my folders are labelled, organized by a system with good flow, have ingoing and
outgoing boxes, and contracts are neatly labelled and dated and laid out in an easy to follow
pattern. I feel like this kind of good organization will translate well to my classroom skills, and
All of these skills are being built up, so that one day, as Arends hopes, I as a first year
teacher won’t feel insecure about managing the classroom. I will have a good grasp on not only
the classroom management skills needed to organize a healthy classroom, but will also have
good planning techniques that allow me to introduce and implement instruction that is useful for
the student. Using new research and tried and tested methods, I will ensure that my classroom is
operating in the 21st century, and that I am teaching for my students’ futures and not my own
past.
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REFERENCES
Arends, R. (1997). Classroom Instruction and Management. New York: McGraw Hill
Companies.
Freiberg, H. J., & Driscoll, A. (2005). Universal Teaching Strategies (4th ed.). Boston:
Pearson/A & B.
Wahlstrom, K. L., Louis, K. S., Leithwood, K. A., & Anderson, S. E. (2010). Learning from
Minnesota.