This post is specifically to address some of the questions that I may have missed in some of my other blogs.  Mrs. A classes were generally well behaved, but there was one particularly that seemed to give her more trouble than others.  I'm not sure if it was the mix of students or if the teacher generally in charge of them was a little more laid back with classroom management.  Mrs. A general would ask the students to give her five and did a fair amount of waiting for the students to stop talking and start listening.  She did have an area of the room designated for a student to work by themselves if they were giving another student trouble.  If the situation warranted it she would send the student to the office for a set period of time.

Her rules were the same as the rest of the schools they were posted in the room.  The students were asked to be respectful, do the right thing, and solve the problem is they created one in the rules.  There were no rules posted about safety issues within the classroom.  Mrs. A addressed safety concerns primarily by making sure that her projects were designed to be safe for the student.  If there was any potential for a safety issue she would address that when giving a demonstration but that very rarely happened.


Students were allowed to go to the bathroom or get a drink one at a time after they requested the break from Mrs. A.  Mrs. A did not have a hall pass the students were simply allowed to leave after given permission.  This was an elementary school so the students were not allowed to borrow materials, none the students had ipods or phones that Mrs. A had ever seen in her classroom.  The radio remained off for the class Mrs. A allowed the students to talk while they worked and keeping the radio off helped her to hear the classroom discussions.

I asked Mrs. A if she had to turn in lesson plans to her principle.  The principle did ask for lesson plans from all of the teachers, but as Mrs. A spent more time at this school her lesson plans had become shorter and shorter.  She did show me what she turned in it was basically a chart with the time and grade of every class laid out and the name of the project that class was working on.  If Mrs. had to be gone for a class she had a sub station with detailed lesson plans for each grade that the sub would follow.  Then when Mrs. A came back she would pick back up on the project that she had been working on with the class and leave the sub project to be completed when their was a sub again.  I don't think that it would be necessary to do this though at the high school level