Candidates manage the classroom learning environment to create success for all students.

Domain 3

Ultimately, students and teachers share responsibility for management of the classroom learning environment. However, teachers bear the responsibility of devising, introducing and implementing a classroom management infrastructure within which students can manage themselves. In that sense, teachers serve as guides, mentors, and facilitators for student self-management. The management of the classroom learning environment becomes collaborative, and students learn to self-monitor and influence fellow students to behave appropriately so that learning occurs more effectively. When students occasionally fail in this model, it then becomes the teachers responsibility to point the students back to the management system they have devised, and set things right.

Success in the classroom can have a collaborative but initially teacher-driven element. Combined with the strategies above, teachers need to implement a broad range of instructional strategies that have been proven effective. This is most easily done when they have a working knowledge of each students background. Teachers also need to provide regular and authentic opportunities for assessment. Students must take their own role in this collaborative process, by actually working out their learning, sometimes being allowed to fail before they succeed.

Student success and growth may be the ultimate goal of the teacher, but the teacher must remember that the student must make the choice to be the best he or she can be. The teacher needs to look at each student as an individual and teach to that individuals level. One must remember that not all students will always succeed. However, a reasonable level of differentiation, encouragement, and old-fashioned hard work in teaching will go a long way toward ensuring student success.