Nathan Tamborello, 16/04/2017, CUIN 7304 1

Analysis & Reflection

Nathan L. Tamborello

16/04/2017

CUIN 7304: Professional Seminar II: Best Practices

Currently Work 9-5 in Commercial Construction

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As I began to sit and answer the reflective questions for this week, I was faced with a sort

of paradox and found it difficult to relate myself to the action plans for instruction. I’ve never

been a teacher; how can I have a great action plan in place already, or know good classroom

management techniques? I’ve never been in a classroom besides being either a student myself or

simply as a substitute; how do I know if my future self will employ this stratagem? Instead, I

chose to parallel these standards and action plans to my work life currently: how do I excel at

this skill subset or how do I fail at another at my everyday job? The comparison isn’t perfectly

relatable, but I believe that most of these skills are basic structures, and only need slight

modification to be relevant in the classroom setting. Therefore, through the use of reflection on

my own school days and on my current performance in the workforce, I was able to analyze,

reflect, and think about how to shape these plans and models in the future, so that I may be a

better teacher and be prepared for life in the classroom.

Louis, Leithwood, Wahlstrom & Anderson discuss how great teachers essentially have

two core functions: to provide direction and to exercise influence. (2010, pg. 9) In order to carry

out these two functions, teachers act as a proponent of both stability and change. While on paper

stability and change serve to be dichotomies of each other, in the classroom they serve a more

complimentary relationship. Teachers must provide stability to their students through

instruction, but also be an agent of change. Learning and the learning process is constantly in a

state of flux, and if stagnation occurs for too long, old methods will be outdated and may no

longer be beneficial to the student. Active Planning and Ongoing Planning, both stages of the

four phases of planning (Freiberg, page 33), are both crucial to this idea of stagnation, as they

provide ongoing assessment of instruction and immediate feedback of what works in your

planning and what clearly needs revision. These two phases are the two most important to me
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when planning and implementing instruction; they allow me to fine tune planning as it pertains

to my needs or the needs of my students. In my day-to-day job, I am constantly changing not

only the way my co-workers and I approach jobs, but also changing the very nature of the job

itself. For example, as a project estimator for commercial construction, the normal process in

estimating a job is to print out a set of about 100 pages of 30 X 42 paper. Realizing that this was

a horribly outdated, inefficient, and costly way to estimate, I set out to find an alternative. I

researched for weeks on various components of differing software. I put a presentation together

and invited my boss and our employees to learn about the software I had chosen and to test it out.

4 years later, our company no longer prints plans except for field sets. We save thousands of

dollars per month in paper costs, and have very limited errors on our take-offs due to the built-in

software corrections. Not only do we save money on man hours waiting for 100 pages of paper

to print, but the process is more streamlined, more efficient, and slowly bringing the company

into the digital age. This type of research-driven change is not only vital to the construction

field, but also vital to education. Changing outdated techniques for easier, more efficient ways

of educating isn’t lazy like most older generations claim of millennials: it’s smart. This type of

change would help in my Active Planning stage, as it allows me to research the best way to

approach topics, teach materials and build my teaching repertoire.

As I referenced earlier, I am new to the field of education, which also means that I’m new

to Classroom Management. As Arends states, “beginning teachers continue to feel insecure about

managing their first classroom, which remains a crucial aspect of developing teacher leadership.

Another anxiety for first year teachers comes from the nervousness that goes along with being

placed into a leadership role where the teacher has influence and authority for the first time. If

the inexperienced teacher is able to gain a basic classroom management understanding and skills,
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he/she will be able to reduce much of the anxieties that go along with it” (1997). Reading

through the Classroom and Instructional Management Plan (Freiberg, page 180-182), these

heading provide a great way to organize and gather my thoughts for this particular type of

management. My current philosophy of classroom management is that it is a purely cooperative

effort between teacher and student; it is defined by the teacher with input from the students and

maintained by both teacher and classroom for an overall effective learning environment. In

Figure 6.4 it states that Rule Development is one of the major aspects of overall good classroom

management. I believe that developing rules with your students and creating a Rights &

Responsibilities Charter holds the students more accountable to not only the teacher, but also to

themselves. They signed this charter and agreed to its contents, now it’s up to them to enforce it

upon themselves through self-discipline. I personally ascribe mostly to the two headings

Organization and Procedures & Routines. I am extremely organized in my day job as a Project

Manager: all of my folders are labelled, organized by a system with good flow, have ingoing and

outgoing boxes, and contracts are neatly labelled and dated and laid out in an easy to follow

pattern. I feel like this kind of good organization will translate well to my classroom skills, and

ensure good classroom management.

All of these skills are being built up, so that one day, as Arends hopes, I as a first year

teacher won’t feel insecure about managing the classroom. I will have a good grasp on not only

the classroom management skills needed to organize a healthy classroom, but will also have

good planning techniques that allow me to introduce and implement instruction that is useful for

the student. Using new research and tried and tested methods, I will ensure that my classroom is

operating in the 21st century, and that I am teaching for my students’ futures and not my own

past.
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REFERENCES

Arends, R. (1997). Classroom Instruction and Management. New York: McGraw Hill

Companies.

Freiberg, H. J., & Driscoll, A. (2005). Universal Teaching Strategies (4th ed.). Boston:

Pearson/A & B.

Wahlstrom, K. L., Louis, K. S., Leithwood, K. A., & Anderson, S. E. (2010). Learning from

leadership: investigating the links to improved student learning. The University of

Minnesota.