Practice And Introspection Of Training Normal Students' Classroom Managing Skills

The past 20th century witnessed the emerging of many theories of classroom management in the western countries. These theories, from different angles, expound the strategies and principles for effective classroom management. In recent years, scholars from China, based on the practice of new curriculum reform, have conducted corresponding research in classroom management. There is a consensus among these scholars that scientific and effective teaching and learning management, on the one hand, can help to maintain classroom discipline, control classroom order, develop students'autonomy and self-discipline and enhance students' motivation to learn, and on the other hand, can lower the anxiety level among the teachers and improve their efficiency in teaching.But the current curriculum designed for normal students in our university is short of the courses of classroom management. The concerns with classroom management are scattered in other pedagogic courses. At the same time, teachers, when teaching relevant knowledge, often ignore the actual need of the normal college students. They adopt the one-way teaching method lacking in teacher-student integration, hence unable to arouse students'enthusiasm and initiative for learning. As a result, the normal students, for a lack of knowledge and skills in classroom management, are unable to manage a classroom effectively in their education practice and even late in their first years of teaching job.Directed at the existing problems, this study in the form of action research, enlightened by literatures and theories including humanism, constructionism among others, has been carried out with the voluntary involvement of normal college students to investigate into the skill in classroom management that they are expecting to develop, on which the curriculum goal is based. Through negotiations with normal college students, the teacher and the students together decide on the three units in the current classroom managing skills teaching, that is, "building authority", "establishing rules", and "anticipating and treating problem behavior". At the same time, the teacher and the students negotiate to decide on the teaching objectives and specify the content of study, learning methods and evaluation modes. This study substantiates that the negotiations between the teacher and the students arouse students'initiative and responsibility for their learning.In order to facilitate the normal students to learn classroom managing skills actively, the teacher has adopted a series of measures in the process of teaching and learning. Some major measures are listed below. Help is offered to normal students to identify and define the problems and confusions existing in classroom management, with which the teaching is begun. Scaffolding is provided for the students in their process of learning by explaining, demonstrating and questioning. Case sharing and discussing greatly enriches normal students' knowledge and experience in classroom management. Help is also offered to normal students in analyzing the drawback in their practice. They are guided to reflection and encouraged to ponder over what they have learned in the classroom and personalize the knowledge.In the process of this study, the normal students are both learners and researchers. They build their own classroom managing skills by collecting cases, sharing and discussing, consulting teachers, practicing, reflecting and other ways. Thanks to their own involvement in this action research, the normal students no longer only rely on imitating experienced teachers'way of managing classroom to develop their own skill in managing classroom teaching and learning. They begin to attach great importance to the application of theoretical analysis to settle some real problems in practice. There appear some changes in their classroom management practice. They attempt to build authority by various ways, set up rules and use them to manage their own classroom, and lay stress on the anticipation of the problem behaviors in the classroom and abide by the Minimal Intervention Principle to cope with the problem behaviors.This action research has converted normal students'way of learning, enhanced their initiative in learning, promoted their sense cooperation, and developed their research consciousness, which lays the foundation for their further study of classroom managing skills...