Behavior Management met on Wednesday nights from 6:00pm-8:45pm. Professor Molly Monaghan, a middle school math teacher in Henrico County, taught the course.
We spent the semester learning about different “Tough Kid” behaviors, pulling from our Tough Kid and Tough Kid Toolbox books, as well as from Professor Monaghan’s personal experience. We did not have much homework in the class, as the majority of the learning was gaining the first-hand knowledge from a real teacher’s current classroom.
In this course, we learned about three overarching “tough kid” behaviors, how to identify them, and how we can put in preventions and interventions for these behaviors. As an honors enhancement project, I did research on how art can be used as a prevention for these behaviors. A prevention is something that is put in place before the bad behavior occurs, while an intervention is something put in place to stop an already occurring behavior. In my research, I found different preventions and interventions that used art to aid in curbing bad behaviors.
The research I did was very interesting in the moment, but it can also have a lasting impact. As a future art teacher, this ties directly into my career. I will need to be able to implement preventions and interventions to maintain order in my classroom. Understanding how art can do these things will give me a big advantage going into teaching.