Over on My Teacher Training Experience, Peter has a post about “Classroom Management.” After appropriately rejecting corporal punishing, Peter settles on the undefined asks, “How do you control a classroom?” without corporal punishment. His answer: personality.
Well, there are a few different ideas and strategies. My personal idea on it, is to use your personality. I’m quite a casual and informal person, but I draw the line at a very defined point.
I suggest that’s either (a) a misdirection or (b) a misunderstanding. Why would I say a “misdirection?” I see a misdirection as a recommendation that unwittingly takes one away from the actual answer to original the question. For example, if a beginning reader needs help with reading the word “hat,” it would be a misdirection to use as a hint, “Think of the things that people wear to cover their heads”; such a hint takes the student away from the fundamental strategy of decoding the word.
A “misunderstanding” is simply that one doesn’t have the background knowledge to assess the situation. It is as if one doesn’t even know how to decode—doesn’t have sound-symbol relationships and know how to blend one sound into another or to collapse a stretched-out pronunciation into a word said at a normal rate of speech. Often, in my interpretation, when one misunderstands, she grasps at misdirections.
When one misunderstands, one might think, “Oh, wait. I don’t have a well-developed answer to this question, but I have to say something. I don’t really have a properly reasoned response that’s based on scientific evidence, so I’ll make a general answer that is general enough that it is plausible it might include an answer that’s closer to the fact. Uhhh, how much is 2 + 2? It’s a number.”
The bad news? If one succeeds with such an answer, is not required to refine it (“Yes, it is a number, but the answer to ‘how much is 2 + 2′ is ‘four’; how much is 2 + 2?”), then is more likely to give the misunderstanding again (i.e., it is reinforced) and continues to spin up nebulous, misdirected answers.
To his credit, Peter comes closer near the end of his post. Read it and see if you agree.
