Class Management

1. General approach: The teacher as class manager

What should a class manager do in order to secure the high educational standards he expected and, at the same time, to augment pupils' (especially the Roma pupils') desire to join school everyday? What type of class management will lead to pupils' more ardent involvement in all the activities performed in and out of the classroom?

A possible answer to these questions would be the initiatives patronized by the Class Management component. The teacher's aim is to combine all the material and human resources, the pedagogic and psychologic logistic resources and creatively configure them in the classroom he coordinates.

2. Description

At this level, the initiatives' target was to make the professorial staff acquire those ideas, principles, techniques, methods, and instructional procedures able to create an open and fertile culture and climate adequate to pupils' intrinsic involvement in the class activities. Cooperative learning, both objectively and pragmatically understood - a concept that was proven to be highly efficient in the previous project - represents another keystone imperative for the following steps of the new project. At the instructional level, the desired outcome should be the use of learning based on project.

3. Technical assistance

The Class Management component is mainly focused on assisting the professorial staff in:

• accomplishing major changes in the culture and the climate of Roma pupils' classrooms, in order to provide a firm and solid ground, based on democratic principles, to the didactic initiatives;
• becoming the main agent of change in the interaction semantics of the classroom, in order to secure Roma children equal opportunities in acquiring high educational standards;
• initiating new instructional strategies that will encourage collaboration, tolerance, an increased confidence in their own forces, and pupils' improved school performances;
• creating and using the class' projects in the didactic process.

4. Activities

A good example was offered by the Training Seminar held at Ploiesti, on 7-8 December, that reunited teachers from primary and secondary schools coming from six different schools in Ploiesti and Mizil. The training subject addressed: class educational context, culture and climate - symbols of the teacher's pedagogic conception; cooperative learning - an effective mode for improving Roma pupils' school performances; project based learning - an instructional solution that can receive various forms in order to fit each community expectations regarding class learning.

The first session tried to explain the participants what is the role of shaping the community's feeling in the classroom, in order to create an educational climate capable of offering equal opportunities to the Roma pupils belonging to these classrooms. The participants positively answered to the pragmatic aspects regarding the translation of culture, climate and community theoretical notions into concrete initiatives that will lead to configuring an adequate environment where Roma children can feel integrated, secure and valuable. Some exemplary situations invoked to identify these pragmatic solutions will constitute good examples to follow and adjust to the specific needs of the classroom they coordinate.

Regarding the cooperative learning, the exercises that were presented aimed to emphasize those key-aspects of team work and its attributes that make it a profitable solution for Roma pupils' performance improvement: "On respect" - 2nd grade; "Pollution sources and methods for reducing the pollution's effects" - 8th grade; "How to create dictionary entries" - 7th grade or 8th grade; "Winter (collage)" - 2nd grade.

The project based learning theme represented a natural outcome in edifying the practical finality of the training. The invited teachers and professors performed group, team or individual work in order to create a class(es) project that could follow three essential steps and adapt to the available (human, material, and physical) resources. This activity was carried out after becoming familiarized with and edified on the preparation, accomplishment and evaluation methods for such an activity. All these issues were brought into discussion, and the conclusions provided useful material for their projects. Here are some examples of class projects: "Elaboration of opinion polls and questionnaires addressing issues chosen by pupils, and their statistic evaluation", "Creation of a poster on the following subject: Music is my life", "The class magazine - Words Journey", "Using literature in teaching history in the secondary school", "Elaboration of an interdisciplinary dictionary". Exercising on various modalities for designing such activities was meant to offer assistance in this project implementation in the classes coordinated by the participants. In advancing such a learning method, it was emphasized its relevance for stimulating Roma children' involvement in the learning activities.

Each training seminar was followed at short interval by a monitoring period focused on the modes adopted in concretizing the practical ideas and suggestions received during the seminar.