SElf-paced classroom: learning to love the chaos

Imagine. Students in your class are working on different parts of the same unit, different units completely, testing, or working with you on a content skill. For some this may seem overwhelming and insane, and it can be but if you have system of tracking and seating in your room this system can be manageable.

In a self-paced system, it is possible for students to be in completely different parts of your curriculum. That means it requires the teacher to be more flexible and organized in their day-to-day classroom. It really is organized chaos. ​

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How to manage the chaos

Tracking System - This goes back to our previous self-paced post. Having a clear and organized system for tracking student progress on your end will make your life so much easier. The goal is to have system that allows you to easily pinpoint where students are at in your curriculum easily while you are up and working on all of the different pieces and have the students understand where they are at as well. 

Seating Plan - This doesn’t mean having a set in stone seating plan. What this means is having a room organized to allow you and the students be working on different pieces of content in the same room. This can definitely be difficult considering all of the limitations we tend to have. Like we discussed before in our seating arrangement post, we recommend having different zones for different types of activities that come up in your curriculum like a testing area, group work area, partner section, etc. Flexible seating is also something to consider as well, since self-paced naturally lends itself to individual work and flexibility.

Concrete, Clear Procedures and Content - This is by far the #1 piece to making self-paced or anything really work in any classroom. When it comes to the self-paced classroom, the teacher needs to spend quite a bit of time teaching the students the procedures for working in the classroom. This is typical for any teacher, but in this scenario you will more than likely need to spend a little more time since this system will be pretty different from what students are used to. Major things that would need to be covered beyond the usual:

• How to manage their time since you will not be directing every minute of their class time so basically working on self-regulation skills
• How to use the classroom. With a different type of set-up students will need to know where their resources are, how to use them, and when to use them.
• How to get assistance from you if needed. You will be pulled in a lot of different directions so to avoid the constant shout of your name, it is good for students to have a protocol for asking for help.
• How to track their progress through the content and monitor their learning. This is connected to self-regulation skills, but also goal-setting since students have to pace themselves through the content (with your assistance too). 

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What our day-to-day is like

Danielle's Classroom:
My classes usually start with me moving students to different work zones depending on their progress if they forget. Then I do a round of check-ins. I go to each zone and check in with students to see if they need me to sign off on work that they have completed, check what their goals are for class that day, and work on relationships. I then start on any administrative stuff I have to do like attendance or whatever. After that what usually happens is one of the following:

• Walking around the room working with different students that have called me over to review content and sign-off on material. When a student asks me to sign-off on material, I will review their work and then ask them some questions to check comprehension. If they are not answering the questions correctly, we talk about the content and either do a short activity together, or if I realize they just didn’t put the work in before they have to go back and do what they should have done first then we talk about it again.
• Walking around the room for classroom management purposes. This happens a lot in my more obnoxious classes. I basically just walk and sit with students that have a hard time staying on task.
• Working 1 on 1 or with a small group of students on a specific skill or review of content. I will have some students that just want me to work with on material or I will notice a need and pick out students that need to go over a specific concept with me.
• Waiting. This one doesn’t happen very often but occasionally the students are all just working and don’t really need assistance so I am just walking around waiting for the students to need something. I have a really hard time with this because this is when I feel like I am not doing my job but I am also proud because this shows that students know what to do and how to do and don’t really need me. I feel like this also means I need to create more small group activities to do to highlight my content so I am not having this happen too much.

My system is definitely not refined yet. I am still working out some things that I want to change and improve on for next year. I have to say though that I really am loving the chaos of seeing students make connections with the content and learn how to recognize their learning process and self-regulate their learning. Even though it is chaos, I have found that I do not have as many classroom management issues with my tough classes like I did before switching to this system. That does not mean that there still isn’t classroom management issues, but I feel like they are smaller and easier to deal with on an individual basis as opposed to having the whole class issues that can pop up in a more traditional system.