3.4: Written Assignment: Liz Noble Case Study

3.4: Written Assignment: Liz Noble Case Study:

LIZ NOBLE: Healthy Classroom Environments

“Can I please sit on the other side of the room? Joey’s distracting me,” said a lanky teenage boy in the back of the classroom. “Sure thing Isaiah,” said Ms. Noble, his 9^thgrade Earth Science teacher. Isaiah banged his books, gave a few “high fives” to some friends, knocked some chairs out of the way and finally found a seat on the other side of the room. Immediately, another student, Dawn, asked to get a drink of water. Ms. Noble told her to go out and get a drink quickly. Another student reported that he was distracted and wondered if he could hold the class “stress ball”. By this point, the entire class was chatting and Ms. Noble had to repeatedly ask the students to settle down. She didn’t want to yell at them because she felt like her students were yelled at for the rest of the day in their homes and communities. She wanted her classroom to be a positive, supportive place. For this reason, she rarely follows through on disciplining her students, and will usually give in to their demands.

Liz Noble is a new Earth Science teacher in a large high need urban school. She has over thirty students in each of her Earth Science classes, with a variety of strengths, weaknesses and needs. Liz had very little classroom experience before being hired at this school, and hadn’t had a lot of time to try out her ideas about classroom management and instruction before her first day of school. She has been teaching for about 3 months and has seen a gradual deterioration in her ability to manage her classes. She finds that she struggles to get through the material most days because her students want to talk about other things or move around the classroom, or hear about what she is involved in outside of school. It is clear that her students like her and enjoy talking with her.

This all came to a head one day when a student in her 3^rd period class slapped another student (and laughed, making it seem like a joke). Liz reacted very strongly and asked the student who had done the slapping to leave the room. She picked up the phone to call a hall monitor to escort the student to the office. This student immediately screamed at her “I was joking you bitch!” The other students started getting involved in the conflict and the room was in complete chaos when the hall monitor came in and dragged the student, still yelling “I was joking you bitch!” down the hall. Unable to get control back in her classroom, and only having 3 minutes left before the bell, Liz just dismissed her class without talking with them about this event.

Written Assignment:

In your paper, please explore each of the following issues based on the readings you have done in this module and/or outside sources.

• 1) What are Liz’s biggest issues in terms of classroom management?
• 2) What does Liz need to do immediately in terms of dealing with this specific issue in her classroom?
• 3) What can Liz do over the long term to improve the level of engagement in her classroom?
• 4) What are some best practices that Liz might use next year that would avoid this kind of a situation?

Please be sure to support your ideas with references (in APA style) to readings and/or outside sources. Your paper should be 5 typewritten, pages (not including your cover page and references section) and submitted in this dropbox.