Classroom Instruction from A to Z: How to Promote Student Learning (Study Guide) (A to Z Series)

The second edition of The Principalship from A to Z provides a set of tools that can be used immediately to improve your leadership practice. Learn the most effective ways to promote student learning. This book focuses on basic strategies you can integrate into everyday instruction in every subject area and across grade levels. It shows teachers how to motivate and engage students.

The practical examples in this book make it easy for you to apply these strategies in your own classroom. Hardback — Routledge A to Z Series. The activities in the guide will help you connect the suggestions and strategies in Literacy from A to Z to your real-life teaching experiences. For each of the 26 chapters in the book, you will find a series of three activities that will help you reflect on your current practices.

They ask you to…. This book offers strategies, activities, and tools to help teachers and reading specialists teach elementary and middle school students to become better readers, writers, speakers, and listeners. Written in a lively and accessible style with one chapter for each letter of the alphabet, Literacy….

Blackburn The second edition of The Principalship from A to Z provides a set of tools that can be used immediately to improve your leadership practice. Noting that the most frequent misbehavior can be somehow objectively observed, a particular behavior is regarded as the most disruptive or unacceptable depending on the teachers' subjective judgment and values, professional training, and years of teaching experiences.

Therefore, this study recruited teachers with different years of teaching experiences and training background, in order to get a comprehensive view of the issue. It is a descriptive and exploratory qualitative research study. Academically, the present findings would add to the local literature, as recent research studies on this topic are scanty in Hong Kong [ 8 , 9 ].

Even though there were some studies, they were conducted a decade ago [ 4 , 12 ] and limited to focusing on the mainland China educational settings [ 5 , 18 ]. Practically, it was expected that the findings would have profound importance to counseling and guidance work in the school context. Three schools, each admitting students having low, medium or high academic competencies, were invited to join this study. In total, twelve teachers 5 males and 7 females participated in this study.

Four of them were members of the school counseling team and three were members of the discipline team. The average of their teaching experiences was 9.

Their participation was voluntary and written consent from the school principals and the interviewees were obtained prior to data collection. Issues of anonymity and confidentiality in handling the data were also clearly explained at the beginning of each interview. A self-constructed semistructured interview guide was used for each individual interview. In the interview guide, questions and prompts used to explore the interviewees' perceptions of students' problem behaviors and their management strategies in the classroom and school contexts.

They were invited to use real-life examples to further illustrate their views. Each interview was conducted by two trained interviewers in Cantonese the mother tongue of both the interviewers and interviewees. The interviews were audio-taped with informants' prior consent and transcribed in verbatim after the interview.

As many questions were covered in the interview guide, only data related to the following questions were analyzed in this paper. Findings pertinent to teachers' perceptions of students' problem behavior inside classroom are reported in this paper. Data was analyzed by using general qualitative analyses techniques [ 20 ]. First level of coding was conducted by a colleague who has a Bachelor degree of Psychology and teaching experiences. Further checking and second levels of coding and categorization were conducted by the first author, in which similar codes were grouped to reflect higher-order categories of theme.

The coding and categorization were finalized with consensus among the coders and further checked by a colleague with a Bachelor degree of Psychology and professional counseling training. As the code and categorization were inductively derived from the data, both intra- and interrater reliability on the coding were calculated to ensure the credibility of the findings. In the reliability test, 20 raw responses were randomly selected for each rater to code without referring to the original codes.

The intrarater reliability tests were conducted by the two coders independently; whereas the interrater reliability tests were conducted by two colleagues one has a Master degree and several years of teaching experiences and one has a Bachelor degree independently. Table 1 summarizes 88 responses regarding students' problem behaviors inside classroom reported by 12 informants. The responses were classified into 17 main categories, and 6 of them were further divided into subcategories. Teachers reported that students would do something in private which was unrelated to the lesson, such as reading, drawing, and doing other homework.

Some teachers pointed out that it was a rising phenomenon that students liked to use electronic devices, such as mobile phone for texting people inside or outside classroom, playing electronic games, surfing webpage, or listening to music. In response to this phenomenon, there were regulations in some schools prohibiting students to switch on their mobile phones inside school. For instance, a teacher mentioned that refusing to follow instructions was a disobedient and disrespectful behavior. Teacher B02 commented that. They won't listen to teacher's opinion.

They will insist to do what they think…These behaviors are mainly perceived in lower competent classes at the moment. Another teacher illustrated that disrespecting teachers meant rudeness, talking back, and confronting teachers. As remarked by Teacher C If the teacher commented on, the student would be enraged and hostile, and then disputed against the teacher. Scolding teacher was unusual, unless the student was agitated. At the school level, I think there were less than five cases of scolding teacher in an academic year. When arguing, students usually had poor attitudes, especially boys.

Hence, teachers would scold at them, and the students would become hostile, temper-losing… more seriously, they would knock tables or throw books to express their anger. But this situation was very rare; say one to two cases a year. Some teachers also regarded failure to submit assignments on time in a habitual manner as one of the problem behaviors, as reflected in the following narrative:. You need to chase after them for the homework…I think Form 1 Grade 7 students are more likely to fail to submit their homework.

A teacher mentioned that. When other classmates had wrong answers, he would immediately call out and point out their mistakes. These students are quite disruptive. A teacher explained that. I have to stop the chatting, otherwise I cannot teach and the students who chat will miss the content of the lesson.

If I do nothing, other students will imitate and join the conversation…As the classroom is small, others can still hear even you talk in a low voice. Moreover, students are very attentive to the surroundings. As revealed in the interviews, such behavior indicated that students lacked proper attitudes and values in interpersonal relationships as well as in their morality. Teacher C04 remarked that. The underlying reasons of these behaviors are simple. For instance, chatting in the middle of lesson could take place because they feel bored; or they just pop up some ideas to share with their neighbors.

However, if they argue back or disrespect their teachers, it is something related to their attitudes and values. So I think this is the biggest problem…Normally, they behave offensively against individual teachers, a certain kind of teachers including those who are too gentle or those who are rigid but not convincing. This is something that I cannot accept…It is obvious that he does not hold a point but still insists he is correct.

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Among these verbal aggressive behaviors, teachers revealed that they could not accept students speaking foul language and teasing others, particularly insult would hurt the bullied. If they are out of seat, they may act out. There is a greater chance that they will distract other students and so the whole class. I think it is inactive during lesson. To me, it is misbehavior although it is not obvious.

If there are a number of passive students in my class, it is hard for me to teach them. No matter how and what I teach, they just do not want to learn.

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Compared with these inactive students, those who make noise in class are better. Based on the perspective of teachers, this study attempted to generate a list of categories of students' problem behaviors in Hong Kong junior secondary school classroom, and to identify the most common, disruptive and unacceptable student problem behaviors. Among them, the most common and disruptive misbehavior was talking out of turn, particularly in the form of disruptive conversation.

The most unacceptable problem behavior was disrespecting teachers in terms of disobedience and rudeness, followed by talking out of turn, and verbal aggression. Teachers would consider these behaviors as intolerable when they disrupt teaching, affect student learning adversely, or suggest the fact that students do not have proper values and attitudes.

These findings indicate that teachers are concerned about classroom learning and student development, and they expect that there are respect, obedience, order, and discipline in the classroom. There were some unique findings of this study, although most of the categories of problem behaviors identified are similar to those reported in the previous studies.

In this category, on top of dealing with personal stuff, doing other homework, reading, and drawing that are unrelated to the lesson, this study showed that using electronic devices e.

With particular focus to Hong Kong, mobile phones are popular among adolescents. As these electronic devices are multifunctional and audio-visual stimulating, some students would be tempted to use them for communication and fulfilling personal satisfaction even during lesson. Actually, doing something in private is an off-task behavior in which students are doing something irrelevant to classroom learning. Others, like nonattentiveness, idleness, and daydreaming were grouped together as a category of problem behaviors in this study because they were mentioned as related to the fact that students were tired, lazy, or lacking learning motivation.

Sleeping was a single category, because it was an obvious off-task behavior and would be disruptive if students imitate each others. All these referred to verbal disturbance in the lesson without teacher's permission.

This conception is much wider than the narrow definition in Ding et al. It was due to the fact that the noises are disruptive and teachers need to spend time to manage, otherwise, such behaviors would escalate in term of frequency and intensity and would be contagious. It is also a distracting behavior hampering others' learning in the same classroom. The lack of sympathy or hostility involved in these aggressive behaviors was mentioned as intolerable as the teachers recognized the hurt involved. It reflected that caring was valued in the eyes of the teachers when they judged a behavior was problematic or not.

Sometimes, these behaviors would also be perceived as offensive to authority. These findings further demonstrated that these values are still strongly held in teacher expectations, and thus behaviors that fail to comply were pinpointed as disrespectful and the students were judged as lacking proper values and attitudes.

The findings suggest that problem behaviors include those breaking explicit rules as well as those infringing implicit norms or expectations. Apart from respect and obedience, order and discipline are essential elements of the Chinese classroom. The interviews revealed that on one hand, the teachers would like to have more control on the classroom order and discipline for not only easy management but also facilitating student learning.

On the other hand, they would like students to have more self-control or self-discipline which is an important ingredient in learning. It also reflected that some teachers expected students to get ready for the lesson and take an active role to learn throughout the lesson. If students were passive and not engaged, similar to daydreaming and not paying attention, teachers tended to regard students as irresponsible for their learning and even lacking learning motivation.

Again, perception or labeling of problem behaviors results from the mismatches between the student behaviors and the social expectations. In short, the present findings indicated that student problem behaviors are not necessarily rule-breaking, but violating the implicit norms e.