Bog entry 7 Classroom rules and how they are enforced

     On one of the first days that I started my field work in the Special Needs class, I took a few pictures of the classroom.  Everything was so bright and cheerful, including the classroom rules. They were on the front wall, where all the students could see them.  When I asked the teacher if I could take a picture of them, we started talking about how the students know what are expected of them.  She told me that at the beginning of the year they went over the rules and talked about what each one of them meant:
We will listen and follow directions
We will raise our hands to talk.
We will keep our hands, feet and objects to ourselves.
We will stay in our seats.
We will stay on task.
We will be nice to others.

        Every morning for the first two week they would go over the classroom rules so that all the students knew what rules they were suppose to be following.  The teacher said that throughout the year she would change the rewards and consequences that went with following or not following the rules.  While I was in the classroom she was using a method similar to the TOAD method.  She had a seating chart with the kids names on it and if they were disobeying, she would remind the student that they were not following the rules and then she would make a mark next to the students name.  She told me that at one time she had used a flip card method, where students cards were flipped to different colors when they were disobeying. She had also used rewards for following rules along with a few other methods that she changed throughout the year, when the methods started losing their effectiveness.
      I thought the students were well behaved and the classroom ran very smoothly.  I think this was because they knew what was expected from them and the teacher made sure that she gave a lot of encouragement and was very positive when the students were behaving appropriately but also let the students know when they were not behaving the way that was expected from them.  i was very impressed at how well the classroom functioned and you could tell that the teacher loved the students and they felt the same way.

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