Action

Identification of problem area

During past years of my mom teaching, there has been many challenges that she have encountered, from learning a new school system, materials, and strategies to learning the structure and regimentation through personal experience. Since I am not a teacher yet I decided to talk with someone who is and that is my mother. The one thing that she found to be the most challenging though is finding her own individual teaching style and structure for classroom management. In a trial and error process, slowly find your own individual style for classroom management. To enable me to learn more about my ability to manage the classroom and to reduce disruptive behavior, my mother conducted action research on her classroom management.

Her research focused on her third period health class, which consists of thirty, ninth grade students at a high school in Wilson, NC (academic and vocational school). In this class, there is an almost equal division of males (14) and females (16). The divisions between academic and vocational students are not as heterogeneously split. There are seven vocational male students, two vocational female students, seven academic male students, and fourteen academic female students. This combination of students, from different areas of interest and different learning abilities and levels, has been the source of my exploration and need to find appropriate classroom management skills for this unruly mix of learners.

Origin of the Problem

In investigating the variety of students that were grouped together, my mother came to the realization that she needed to create a solution to the chaos in order to accomplish daily classroom assignments. Through researching the five classes and their behavior, it was realized that the third period health class possesses a combination of disruptive behaviors that needed to be addressed. In developing the starting point, which originated with all five of the classes, she decided to focus...