Teacher's Behavior

Discipline in Elementary Classroom: Eight Teacher Behaviors

1) Withitness. The teacher communicates to the pupils that he/she knows what is going on-“has eyes in the back of his/her head.” The withit teacher picks up the first sign of disruption and directs appropriate attention toward the right pupil. In addition, the withit teacher is also good at timing his/her reaction to disruption: neither acting too quickly, nor waiting until a minor matter becomes major.
2) Overlapping. The teacher is able to deal with more than one classroom event at once. For example, if a student approaches the teacher while the teacher working with a reading group, the teacher will attend both the reading group and to the student. As another example, a teacher working with a reading group sees two students in another part of the room fooling around. The teacher keeps her reading group reading while she goes over to the two students.
3) Smoothness. The teacher is able to keep the lesson flowing. It means that the teacher does not interrupt the flow of the lesson by turning attention to irrelevant events, bursting in on students who are at work with orders, statements, and questions. Nor does the teacher leave a lesson hanging in midair-changing the topic before reaching closure, or by starting a topic, changing to another, and then returning to the first.
4) Momentum. The teacher maintains an appropriate “momentum.” The teacher does not slow the lesson down by overemphasizing a student’s behavior, a subpoint in the lesson, or the materials of the lesson rather than the substance. The teacher does not deal with the class in fragmented groups, nor does the teacher needlessly repeat instructions.
5) Group alerting. The teacher is skilled at involving “nonreciting children in the recitation task,” maintains their interest, and keeps them on their toes. This is done, for example, by creating suspense-suspense as to who is going to recite next, asking for a show of hands before choosing a reciter, letting nonreciter know that they might also become apart of the lesson, presenting new, novel, or alluring materials during the recitation.
6) Accountability. The teacher holds the class accountable during the lesson by, for example, asking the whole class to show their work by holding it up, getting the whole class to recite in unison, bringing other children into the recitation, asking the checking the work of nonreciters by circulating around the classroom.
7) Valence and challenge arousal. The teacher tries to get pupils enthusiastic and involved in the lesson by showing zest and enthusiasm him/herself, pointing out that the activity possesses positive aspects, showing that the activity has genuine intellectual challenge.
8) Variety. Finally, the teacher makes certain that the activities involved in the lesson are genuinely different from one another.