Teacher Interview

Link to Interview!

AEDU 303 Teacher Interview Questions
1.   What are your classroom rules? How do you make your students familiar with the rules? 
2.   How do you manage your time to get all your teaching duties done within schedule? 
3.   What is your teaching philosophy when it comes to disciplinary action? 
4.   How can you get students to be excited about learning? 
5. What are your behavior boundaries in class? Do you allow talking or kids on cell phones, tardies, or late assignments, etc.? How do you handle classroom disruptions? 
6. How do you incorporate the guidelines set by the administration into your classroom management style? 
The teacher I interviewed was Mike Panozzo who is a Physical Education teacher for 5 years at a Chicago Public School. He was out of town, so I sent him the questions and he recorded himself answering the questions. I chose Mike because he works for CPS and I feel his job is not typical and he has different situations that he must deal with that are out of the standard. His father is also a P.E. teacher who I observed last semester and his classes were pretty routine and typical.
Mike's classroom rules are unique since he asks the students what they think the rules should be; this means that each classes' rules will vary a little bit. The students make the rules and if those rules are broken then the student will understand what they did wrong and can accept the outcome. On page 512 the book talks about management for self-management and having the students create the rules goes in line with this idea. " if you teach your students to manage their own behavior and learning, you should have fewer management problems, less stress, and more time to teach, which would support your growing sense of teacher efficacy." (pg. 513).
Mikes teaching philosophy was to keep the students active and his disciplinary action focused on his philosophy. The students would receive warnings or writing assignments as a disciplinary action, but Mike was more concerned about keeping the students involved in the class. He spoke of a class where a good amount of the students would come to class not dressed in their gym uniforms which usually resulted in sitting out. Mike decided to allow the class to participate even though they did not have their uniforms because he felt this would cause the students to miss too many classes and defeat the purpose of keeping the students active. On a small scale, Mike uses removal punishment initially but decides that student continue to come to class unprepared, so he compromises his disciplinary actions to keep the students involved. On page 269 Woolfolk discusses "removal punishment because it involves removing (subtracting) a stimulus. When teacher or parents take away privileges after a young person has behaved inappropriately, they are applying removal punishment." The students usually do not want to miss P.E. class at this age and not allowing them to participate would be removing the stimulus. For the one class that always has students coming unprepared, he overlooks the punishment to keep his teaching philosophy a priority.
P.E. class is a time for students to release stress, play games with their friends, and is one of the only classes where students can talk to each other on a regular basis. I always enjoyed P.E. class especially through grade school because it was a fun class that everyone could succeed. Mike sets the rules at the beginning of the year but does not appear to be too harsh and adjusts throughout the year depending on the student. Mike focuses on maintaining a good environment for learning, emphasizing the importance of safety and participation. Talking with Mike I learned that it is important to encourage self-management and have the students control their own rules. I also learned that sometimes it does not pay to punish the students because then you are taking them out of the class you want them to participate in. There are so many variations to managing a classroom and creating a positive learning environment that a teacher needs to create rules at the beginning and decide later what is the most beneficial to stick to.

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