Jackson,+Philip-+Life+in+Classrooms

=Summary=


 * Chapter 1** **-** It is a known fact that children spend a great significance of their conscious time enclosed in a classroom. There is no other place that a child will spend a majority of his day in other than maybe their own bedroom for sleeping purposes. The classroom becomes relatively uniform for the student’s as every day is similar to the last and to the next. Three important facts a child must learn to deal with will in a classroom involve crowds, praise, and power. First, the student has to learn to live amongst a crowd. Many of the classroom activities will involve being in a group or in the presence of a group. A student’s quality of life can depend greatly on how well he works amongst a crowd. Also, a classroom is very much an evaluative setting. Students will eventually learn that everything that they do or say is being evaluated by somebody, whether it is by their teacher or their peers. Thirdly, the power of the teacher is clearly shown as it is their responsibility to teach the students. The children see the teacher as an authoritative figure and must cope with that in order to be respectful. Teachers have many jobs throughout the classroom. They have to make sure every student understands the lesson being taught, see that attention is given to any special circumstances, as well as being a timekeeper for the daily activities. With that said, students are expected to have a lot of patience. Things can get very difficult with only one teacher and thirty or so students. Overall, there are many demands of classroom life and both the student and teacher have difficult obstacles to overcome, but hopefully with the help and respect of both figures a common ground can be found that will enable the student to fully take adavantage of the classroom capabilite.

Immediacy is when the teacher can see a direct change in the student. Their faces become alert and seem to be interested. When the child starts to yawn or daze off, it is apparent the teacher is not teaching effectively. Effective teaching is when the student goes above and beyond the minimal expectation. Informality is how some of the admired teachers describe their teaching style. These generally included a free and friendly attitude. Unlike a classroom fifty years ago, the students of these interviewed teachers have class discussions and are able to express their opinion on a topic. Autonomy is the relations between the teacher and the administrators. The teachers complained during the interview of the possibility of an inflexible curriculum, or having to plan their lessons too far in advance. They felt this would make the classroom have too many constraints. Individuality pertains to the teacher’s concern of the individual student. The interviewees told of the satisfactions of teaching, which included personal usefulness, the unexpected events, and an extreme emotional experience obtained from student progress. The one event that brings the best satisfaction for the teachers is when a student whom other teachers had given up on progresses. Jackson then ties together the interview by analyzing the conversations he had with the teachers. These conversations seemed to portray the conditions of teaching and the psychology of an elementary school teacher. Jackson noticed that the teacher’s language was conceptually simple and lacked technical vocabulary. He also implied that the teacher’s didn’t seem fit to supervise the intellectual development of a child. Jackson predicted that he might have just viewed the evidence and the interview tapes wrong, or that the teachers were not as talented as their administrators and colleagues insisted. The author concludes that using conventional models of rationality is not a good way to describe a teacher’s behavior in the classroom. Throughout the history of education, there have been a few efforts to modernize education. Some examples are the “scientific movement in education”, set up in the early 1930’s, and the “technological revolution in education” in the 1960’s. In this chapter Jackson discusses and criticizes the “engineering” point of view of education. This is the idea of getting things done as quickly, cheaply, and with the least wasted time as possible. The engineering theory has guided such movements of educational testing, a guided curriculum, and educational technology. Again, a weakness of this practice is that it over-simplifies what goes on in most particularly, an elementary school classroom. “When it is remembered that the average teacher is in charge of the twenty-five or thirty students of varying abilities and backgrounds for approximately 1000 hours a year and that his responsibilities extend over four or five major curricular areas, it is difficult to see how precise about where he is going and how to get there during each instructional movement” (165). The classroom is unpredictable, leaving the teacher to sometimes “play it by ear.” Even what would seem to be the simplest of decisions for a teacher is in fact very complex. For example, when students raise their hands to answer a question, the teacher must consider who has not spoken yet, who is not paying attention, who was called on last, etc. Those who also believe in the engineering theory are concerned with the waste of time. This can be eliminated by convincing students that their activities have meaning and are not just “busy work”, and by avoiding unnecessary delays. The third source for educators which Jackson criticizes are clinical psychologists. Like the learning theorists, clinical psychologists study a single patient rather than a classroom full of children. A teacher can also see how some students actions are appropriate, given the environmental conditions that either constraints the children or gives them opportunities. Their behavior fits the situations. On the other hand, a psychologist considers only the individual. In total, the knowledge about each individual child does not let a teacher do their job more successfully.
 * Chapter 2** - **Chapter 3 -** It is not enough for a child to be just present in the classroom, they need to become involved in their schoolwork in order to benefit. Several early studies based on attention of students were conducted including ones by Henry C. Morrison, William French, Percival Symonds, C.W. Knudsen, Brueckner and Ladenberg, Professor Shannon. Unfortunately, there was much controversy over the studies because the modes used to test attentiveness were subjective, and attentiveness can be faked. After these studies were conducted, world affairs affected the nature of education and educational studies. With an influence of Freud there was a change of focus from static to dynamic view of human affairs. Any educative authoritarian connotation was avoided and there was a shift to more classroom discussions and bettering teacher-students relationships. Studies implemented after this era by Benjamin Bloom and Bryce Hudgins prove the previous studies too optimistic. It is important to note that it is a teacher’s job to be committed to the more important goal of improving the well being of the students rather than entertaining them. Yet there is a specific rule of order that should be followed in all classrooms. There are also three major strategies for increasing the involvement of students beyond the limits established by techniques of classroom management: alter the curriculum, group the students better, and inject human interest into a lesson. Overall, inattention will always be an issue in the classroom, attention and involvement are different and should be treated as so, involvement is not enough, and inattention can be attributed to just going to school.
 * Chapter 4 -** John Dewey once suggested, supported by Philip W. Jackson, that the ideal way to learn from “good” teachers is to watch them in action. The goal of chapter 4 was to see how some highly admired teachers view life in the classroom. Several gifted teachers were interviewed based on questions such as: How do you know that you are doing a good job as a teacher? What is your reaction to administrative authority? What are your personal satisfactions of being a teacher? The teacher’s answers contained four themes including immediacy, informality, autonomy, and individuality.
 * Chapter 5 -** In Chapter 5, Jackson questions the sources in whom educators call for guidance; the learning theorist, the human engineer, and the clinically oriented psychologist. In the first place, a learning theorist’s studies are too over-simplified and are not fit for a complex classroom. Their studies are usually based on rats, or other lesser complex forms of life. The learning theorist’s knowledge is also pertains to simple skills, ignoring personally meaningful and complex tasks. The study is also done in a controlled environment, rather than in a realistic environment of a chaotic classroom. The teacher works with a class full of 20-30 students, rather than one subject.

= = =**__Key Terms__**=

//Evaluative setting// – Student’s are frequently assessed in the classroom on a daily basis. This is most obviously done by teachers giving a test, but it happens much more frequently by other students. People, including small children, will form an opinion based on what another person says or does on a constant basis. Pg. 10 “Of equal importance is the fact that schools are basically //evaluative settings//.”

//Hit and misses//: concept applied to actual response of students in describing accuracy of teacher’s judgment.

//Roll Call-// official identification of persons with both a ceremonial and practical significance.

//Control Techniques//- three interrelated techniques to which Henry C. Morrison uses to explain the division of a teacher’s tasks: control, operative, and administrative.

//Stimulated Recall//- a term coined by Benjamin Bloom meaning a technique for revealing the thought processes of students as they sat in class.

//Learning theorist//: One who researches and develops scientific theories in efforts to move education forward.

//Educational “engineering//__”__: The viewpoint that teaching should be done efficiently; fast, accurate, and economically with the least amount of time and effort wasted.

//“Unconditional positive regard”:// A Clinical Psychologist’s attitude towards a student, stating that a teacher should never reject or judge a student due to his academic performance.

all of this is wrong =**__Key Passages__**=

Pg. 10 – “In three major ways then—as members of crowds, as potential recipients of praise or reproof, and as pawns of institutional authorities—students are confronted with aspects of reality that at least during their childhood years are relatively confined to the hours spent in classrooms. Admittedly, similar conditions are encountered in other environments. Students, when they are not performing as such, must often find themselves lodged within larger groups, serving as targets of praise or reproof, and being bossed around or guided by persons in positions of higher authority.”

Pg. 29 – “The relative impersonality and narrowness of the student-teacher relationship has consequences for the way in which authority is handled in the classroom. It is there that students must learn to take orders from adults who do not know them very well and whom they do not themselves know intimately. For the first time in the child’s life, power that has personal consequences for the child himself is wielded by a relative stranger.”

__Pg. 88__ “ There is no good correlation between the teacher’s control technique and his gross effectiveness as a classroom technician. It is fair to assume that the teaching in a large school or in a city-school system which is associated with low or erratic attention scores is less effective than is the teaching in another system or school which is associated with consistently high attention scores.”

__Pg. 106__ “ Here, the, is one way of organizing the rules that can be observed to operate in most elementary classrooms. The flow of traffic in and out of the room, the level of noise, the movement of students from one part of the room to another, the behavior of idle students, and breaches of social etiquette, each of these classes of events serve to destroy the work orientation of the entire group, or of individual students.”

__Pg. 109__ “... involvement is a more significant educational goal for the teacher to strive toward than is Morrison’s 100 percent attention.”

Pg 115 2nd paragraph (excerpt taken from Dewey) : “…the success of such individuals tend to be born and to die with them; beneficial consequences extend only to those pupils who have personal contact with such gifted teachers…..the only way by which we can prevent such waste in the future is by methods which enable us to make an analysis of what the gifted teacher does intuitively, so that something accruing from his work can be communicated to others.”

Pg 149 2nd paragraph from the bottom: “But among those qualities is surely the ability to tolerate the enormous amount of ambiguity, unpredictability, and occasional chaos created each hour by 25 or 30 no so willing learners. What is here called the conceptual simplicity evident in teachers’ language may be related to that ability. If teachers sought a more thorough understanding of their world, insisted on greater rationality in their actions, were completely open-minded in their consideration of pedagogical choices, and profound in their view of the human condition, they might well receive greater applause from intellectuals, but it is doubtful that they would perform with greater efficiency in the classroom.”

Pg 175 1st paragraph: “People who are interested in the application of learning theory or the engineering point of view to teaching practice often have as their goal the transformation of teaching from something crudely resembling an art to something crudely resembling a science. But there is no good evidence to suggest that such a transformation is either possible or desirable. An equally reasonable goal, and one more in keeping with the views expressed in this book, is to seek an understanding of the teaching process as it is commonly performed before making an effort to change it.”

Pg 163 1st paragraph of section II: “ From time to time in the field of education there emerges a movement designed to modernize the institutional operations of the schools by bringing them into closer harmony with the spirit that guides the development of technology in industry, government, and the applied sciences. The forces behind these cyclic efforts are ill-defined and more often seem to arise from the prevailing climate of opinion than to be instigated by an identifiable persons or groups.”