Italian vs. American Classroom Management

Participating in an Italian classroom for a month gave me so much time to make observations, conjectures, questions and even answer some of those questions. After only one day, though, I observed extreme differences between the way American and Italian teachers conduct a classroom. One of the biggest differences in the the discipline and class management setup by the teachers. In the classroom in Italy, I observed a lot of free time for the students when they were supposed to be doing book work and while some students had oral quizzes with the teacher. During this free time, students talked a good amount, but never moved from their seats or even got loud. The only form of discipline or management that I ever observed during the entire month from the teacher was yelling. When the students get louder than the teacher liked, she would bang her hand on the desk and yell at the students, when a student got an answer wrong, she yelled at him for about 3 minutes straight as the rest of the class watched. Granted, these particular examples are from one specific teacher, the other teachers I observed, though not as bad about yelling at the students, still had no other forms of classroom management in place.

After getting to know the school psychologist better during the school field trip, I asked her opinion about how the teacher discipline students. I was relieved to find out that not all teachers work that way, and that many teachers have problems with discipline because they have the same students throughout elementary school. The way many schools work in Italy is when students first come to elementary school, they are put in a class (1A or 1B, etc); throughout school they stay in the same class, with the same students, and the teachers move to them. Not only do they stay with the same classmates throughout elementary school, all the way to fifth grade, they also have to same teachers all the way through. With this class dynamic, if a teacher loses the respect or control of his/her students in the beginning, or at any time during the 5 years they are with the class, they cannot get it back. In the states, students move classes and teachers every year. This may cause some set backs with students discipline or even learning, if a student moves to an environment or teacher that doesn't cope well with them, but it may be better than a teacher's having no effectiveness with the students.

After my time observing in an Italian classrooms, I have realized that a teacher as a limited effectiveness and can lose it as well as his/her authority with the students if he/she abuses one specific method. By constantly yelling at the students, raising your voice to the students loses its effectiveness-leaving the students quiet only as you scream your lungs out.