EDE 4504 Blog 1

Chapters one through three discussed classroom organization and classroom management in terms of culture. Though it may not often be thought of this way, students act the way they do because of their culture. The way things work at home reflects how they act at school. In my classroom there is a student, who will be nicknamed Jimmy,that picks on other students and does not complete his work. At first, I did not think of the "why" and only of the "how" to fix it. However, in order to fix something you must first understand why it is occurring. I thought about how his life at home was. Maybe he is picked on by his siblings. Perhaps he does not receive any attention from his parents and so he acts out at school. When I talked to him, I found out that he has two older brothers, an older sister, and a younger sister. His older siblings are thirteen and older. His little sister is only six months. It sounded to me like his siblings did not spend time with him, that his dad works all the time, and that his mom is most likely preoccupied with the baby.

One of the topics talked about in the chapters was an individualistic perspective versus a collectivist perspective. “From the individual perspective, learning is an individual matter...”(.Rothstein-Fisch and Trumbull 12). The individualism framework is most representative of the mainstream United States. It is all about self-reliance, individual achievement, task orientation, and cognitive intelligence. This is what is seen often in middle school and high school. In elementary schools, we see more of the collectivism framework. It is about the well-being of the group, cooperation, respect, and social intelligence. I see this in the classroom every day. The students are seated in groups of four and are referred to as teams, which is used to reinforce the importance of teamwork. The teacher poses questions for the students to think about and then they either discuss what they think with their face partner or shoulder partner.

References

Rothstein-Fisch, C., & Trumbull, E. (2008). Managing diverse classrooms. Alexandria, Va.: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.