From Tourists to Citizens in the Classroom

Freiberg, H. J. (1996). From tourists to citizens in the classroom. Educational Leadership, 54, 32-37

Synopsis:

In this article by Jerome Freiberg, a new structure to your everyday classroom is presented. Termed “Consistency Management and Cooperative Discipline,” this classroom management program emphasizes citizenship in the classroom through experiences and is meant to give students ownership of their learning by giving them important roles that contribute to the overall classroom community. What initiated this program was the observation that students typically exist in their school environments like tourists with “no involvement, commitment, or belonging (p.32).” This program aims to change that by turning students into citizens that have part in contributing to a positive school community. The overall goal of the program is to positively influence student behaviour through the incorporation of five themes within the classroom, and they are: prevention, caring, cooperation, organization, and community. Each theme focuses on an important concept that contributes to creating an overall positive classroom environment

My Critical Reflection:

This article does a great job of identifying five key elements (i.e. themes) that contribute to creating a positive classroom environment and in doing so allows readers to use these elements as a starting point for creating strategies to influence them. For example, the theme of organization highlights classroom management as being a student and teacher responsibility and emphasizes the importance of having an efficient organizational method in order to increase teacher and student learning time. An important element of this is one-minute managers. These are managerial roles appointed to students such as attendance taker or handing out papers. Students apply for these positions giving them an opportunity to learn skills related to attaining careers in the future and the roles are rotated so that everyone gets a turn at contributing. Overall, this article provides a good starting point for the implementation of a similar program in a school or for the creation of similar strategies that target student behaviour and positive classroom environments.