Using Case Analysis in a Classroom Management Professional Development Course

• In Event: 29.050 - Engaging Beginning Teachers in Classroom Management: A Discussion on Case Analysis

Abstract

This paper focuses on the practical use of a case analysis procedure called the Case Analysis of Classroom Cases (CACC), which was modified from a Case Based Learning (CBL) model for analysing classroom cases (Quek & Wang, 2014).

Case analysis activities were developed from a research study using 43 classroom cases (Quek & Wang, 2014). These case documents comprised beginning teachers’ reflections on Classroom Management (CM) problems they had encountered during their classroom teaching and included the actions and strategies that they used to solve the identified CM problems. These teachers had completed their pre-service education in Singapore and had at least two years of teaching experience in Singapore secondary schools. In this study, the CACC was designed by adapting five activities from the CBL model proposed by Quek and Wang (2014). Six classroom cases were adopted for use in a professional development course which was developed to teach Beginning Teachers (BTs) about CM. The procedure has been implemented by facilitators who conducted the CM professional development courses for beginning teachers at the National Institute of Education, Singapore, every quarterly in 2014.

The five activities of the CACC procedure which were carried out to enable BTs to learn how to solve problems that they encounter in their classrooms are as follows:
Activity 1 – Read the case document individually.
Activity 2 – Take note of all that the teacher did in managing all classroom problems he had encountered. These notes will be used for discussion later in Activity 3.
Activity 3 – Discuss in pairs and categorise the teacher’s actions or approaches in the two categories given below, based on the group consensus.
(a) Appropriate and useful
(b) Inappropriate
Activity 4 – Justify your responses given in Activity 3
(a) for each appropriate method used, give suggestions for further improvement
(b) for each inappropriate method used, give appropriate suggestions for action
Activity 5 – Final evaluation of all suggestions and produce your analysis of the case.

In the presentation, a worked example will be used to illustrate how the CACC procedure is used.
In order to evaluate the effectiveness of the CACC procedure, feedback was obtained from facilitators who conducted the CM professional development courses for BTs. The feedback included responses about the usefulness of the procedure, the suitability of the cases for learning of CM skills and suggestions for improving the engagement of BTs in case discussion. Email communication was used to obtain the feedback.
In summary, this session shares and discusses with the participants the conceptual and theoretical underpinnings of case analysis for case-based learning (paper 1), the characteristics of classroom cases (paper 2) and a procedure for classroom case analysis (paper 3). The ultimate aim of this sharing is to help beginning teachers become better problem solvers and classroom managers so that they can teach more effectively.

Author

• Siew Lian Chua, National Institute of Education - Nanyang Technological University