Understanding your students

I first watched To Be And to Have (Être et avoir), a documentary of a one-room school in the French countryside, six years ago -- well before I had any aspirations to teach primary children. But at the time, what struck me about this teacher (Georges Lopez) was the sense of pride he had in his work. And also his immense understanding of each child's circumstance outside the classroom, together with incredible amounts of compassion and patience inside it.

I am not sure whether you can teach teachers to develop these personal qualities as exhibited by Mr Lopez but I believe they carry some weight in being an effective teacher. A teacher that cares compared to one who does not, about his children's welfare and learning will most likely yield better results (academic and disciplinary) from their students.

But I guess what this documentary pointed out was how different every child's home life was. And how that impacts on students when they come to learn. An astute teacher should know about these as it helps them better teach said child. This documentary was circling through my mind when I was reading the chapter Discipline Problems and their Causes in Clifford Edwards and Vivienne Watts' book Classroom Discipline & Management: An Australasian Perspective.

In To Be And To Have, Geroges Lopez intimately knew the children and their families. One child would work long hours on his parent's dairy farm. This could also lead to discipline problems and mere concentration issues because the child was up at the crack of dawn feeding the cows. Understanding your children and their circumstance in the home can arm teachers with better strategies to teach students when they turn up to school.

In my Year 5 class, one of my students has an unwillingness to learn and is a constant source of distraction to students because of his lack of concentration. The most likely reason is that he tragically lost his father several years ago.

Roslin Brennan Kemmis and Erica Smith’s article about Classroom Behaviour and Management for TAFE teachers provides a nice summary of this issue and the points raised by Edwards & Watts. According to them: "The decisions about discipline, a code of behaviour that you expect your students to follow and the ways in which you deal with unacceptable behaviours is very much a personal decision."

I look forward to this teaching and disciplinary challenge that I face in a few weeks’ time. I just hope the decisions I make are the right and most effective ones.

A trailer for the movie Être et avoir. Mr Lopez's temperament as an understanding and warm-hearted teacher really comes through. And so too his effectiveness as a teacher.