During the fall semester of 2000 a graduate level class at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro met to begin a semester-long course. The course's purpose and objectives are detailed as follows:
Course Objectives:
As a result of completing this course, students
will:
- Define and provide examples of cognitive
and motivational components of student learning
- Explain and apply models of instructional
design/lesson planning
- Examine and analyze various classroom
discipline models
- Integrate knowledge about student
learning, instructional design, classroom discipline, and self-assessment
to develop personal discipline plans and assess their effectiveness with
particular cases
This course was supported in an on-line format. All resources were accessed on-line and while students met on campus throughout the semester, they also reflected upon and synthesized their understandings while participating in on-going threaded discussions. As a culminating assignment, groups of students met to plan the construction of a website. The website was meant to share "the best" of the resources that we had "uncovered" and examined during the course of our meetings. Additionally, students were to include resources that they themselves had discovered and deemed significant. While knowing that no one website is "all inclusive" the members of the class feel that it provides a number of resources that will help teachers in their ongoing quest to better facilitate more meaningful learning in school classrooms while managing their classrooms in efficient and productive ways. I would like to commend them for their efforts to share their understandings with the education community at-large via the World Wide Web.
- Dr. Terry S. Atkinson
Department of Curriculum and Instruction
School of Education
The University of North Carolina-Greensboro
During the fall semester
2001, Dr. Barbara B. Levin taught this same course on the Interaction of
Classroom Management and Instruction (CUI 650) at UNCG. Using the Internet
resources the previous class had located as one of the "texts" for the
course, students in Dr. Levin's class participated in a form of cooperative
learning called a jigsaw. Groups of students became the "experts" on the
information related to classroom management that their predecessors had
found on the Internet. They read and summarized this information and then
regrouped so that each person in their newly formed jigsaw group served
as the expert resource for each topic. Their job was to teach what they
had learned to their peers. This way every student in the class was exposed
to all the information gathered by the previous class about classroom management
and instruction.
The members of the Fall
2001 class also decided to add more information to this website so that
future preservice and inservice teachers taking this class would have a
place to go to learn what was available on the Internet about topics related
to classroom management. They also hoped that this website would be useful
to them (and to others) during their time in the classroom - as student
teachers, beginning teachers, and veteran teachers. The topics they selected
to add to this website included: 8 additional classroom management models,
and information about building classroom community, cooperative learning,
learning styles, praise, resiliency, and survival tips for teachers.
- Dr. Barbara B. Levin
Dept. of Curriculum and Instruction
School of Education
The University of North Carolina at Greensboro
http://www.uncg.edu/~bblevin