Because I completed my student teaching semester during the COVID 19 pandemic, our rules and procedures in the classroom looked very different than they would during a normal year. This resulted in students having to follow more rules than usual, such as wearing masks and maintaining distance, while also not having to follow as many “traditional” classroom rules because we began the year with such a small in person group.
While our in person group would eventually grow to 10 before I left, we began the year with just 6. This created a much more personal and laid back classroom environment , which meant that we did not strongly enforce some of the usual classroom rules. Rather than focusing on things like setting specific times when the students can or can’t do things like get water or sharpen their pencil, we used that time to begin teaching the new COVID 19 safety procedures.
These new procedures included students wearing their masks correctly all day (with the exception of eating or drinking), staying 6 feet apart in the classroom and hallways, not touching supplies or books in the classroom that aren’t theirs, washing hands or using hand sanitizer before and after each activity, and learning the directions of the newly labeled one way hallways.
Finally, while we might not have utilized some of the classroom rules that make managing a large class easier, we made sure to enforce to our students that respect is #1. Ms. Mays encourages students to always respect themselves, their teachers, their supplies, and their classmates. This general rule is an easy one for students to apply to many situations and is easy to reference when discussing behavior with students.
Learning To Teach 