Reflections of a first year teacher

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Being a first year teacher, I really had no idea how I should set up my classroom. On the first day, the paraprofessional assigned to work with me made some suggestions for me to think about that were very valuable. The first suggestion she made was to keep proximity control in mind when arranging the desks. All of our students at Rutland Psychoeducational Academy have been diagnosed with some form of Emotional/Behavioral Disorder (EBD). I honestly had no idea what that really meant when I took this job. Looking back, my paraprofessional gave me some very valuable advice. Most of my students really value their space more than the average child. I think it is the one thing they feel they can control and they absolutely try to control it. Most of the disruptions that went on in the first few weeks had to do with students not maintaining personal boundaries and getting too close to another student at the wrong time. Another thing I considered was making sure my classroom would be interactive and not as restrictive as students are used to. I staged classroom materials in different parts of the room as to require students to have to move about the room quite frequently. I placed the student notebooks in one corner of the room, away from the student text books. I placed the printer/media materials on the opposite side of the room from the computers. This results in lots of students moving around at the same time. It may look uncontrolled, but in actuality, it has turned out to be a very effective classroom management tool. Students diagnosed with EBD or ADD/ADHD have a hard time being able to focus for long periods of time and often display impulse control problems. Being able to move around the classroom more often has resulted in fewer behavior problems in my classroom compared to others that are more restrictive. Our routine has adjusted as students

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