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If there’s one thing I like about my program (there’s definitely more than one thing, but this is the biggest), it’s that the professors really try to make you think of everything. I think a great example of this is the classroom management plan I just completed for my Tuesday night Student Teaching Internship course. As a student in Columbia’s Art Education MAT program, you will have to complete this plan in the fall semester of your second year. Allow me to walk you through it!Theories and Beliefs Statement

This is the first part of the classroom management plan. By your second year in the program, you will have developed a sense of what your personal teaching style is and how you want to incorporate various teaching philosophies such as Discipline Based Art Education (DBAE) or Constructivism, etc. While you may have a sense of how you want to teach, sometimes it’s difficult to put it all together in a paper. Writing it all out, however, really helps you practice how you would explain it in a job interview (hint hint)!

Classroom Map and Rationale

This is the fun part! I’m a nerd and love to play around with designing floor plans, so this was my favorite chunk of this project. This is where you design your ideal art classroom and explain what educational theories you used to support your floor plan and why you chose them.

Routines, Expectations, and Consequences

Ask yourself a few questions:

• If you were teaching now, how would you want to start and end your class everyday?

• Are there certain safety procedures you want to drill into your students’ heads?

• What kind of rules and expectations would you implement in your classroom, and how would you address the issue of a student not following those rules and expectations?

Throughout the course of the program, you will be learning different methods of managing your own classroom. This is the part where you explain which methods you intend to adopt as your own.

Family and Community Building

As an art teacher, building a support system of parents, other teachers, and hopefully your administrators is extremely important to establishing yourself in a school. How do you want to get parents involved in your art program? How will you get your greater school and neighborhood community involved in your art class?

My cooperating teacher for my elementary student teaching internship is amazing and has a rotation of parent volunteers who help her with displaying artwork around her school. They also help her prepare materials for the lessons she’s going to teach. She’s definitely got a strong base of parent supporters, and it was one of the reasons I asked to be placed with her for student teaching. I want to learn how to build that sort of community for myself!

Feel free to comment or email me at art.mat@colum.edu with questions!