Case Study Discussion

In my discussion group's last meeting, we decided to go back to the case studies that we spoke about in class on Monday since we didn't have as much time as we would have liked. One of the questions that our group found the hardest to answer was which of the three students should be chosen to participate in an advanced program. Although we could agree somewhat on the first two students, the third to join the program ended up being the hardest to pick because everyone had a different opinion as to what was most important for a student to have. In the end, we all seemed to agree that the process would be somewhat easier to determine who would or wouldn't particpate in the program if we knew the students personally.

It was just as difficult to determine what to do if we were in a situation where we were supposed to paddle a student. All of us seemed to agree that we never would have gotten into a situation that would require us to harm our students, even if it was permitted by the school and their parents. We tried developing some alternative ideas that could be used as a means of punishing students and maintaining behavior in the classroom without physical harm towards the students, but we felt that the children would only see us as weak or without power in the classroom if we tried any other form of non-physical punishment.

Surprisingly, the easiest question for us all to answer was how to handle budget cuts. If we were forced to choose one of the options, none of us would have cut AP or extended learning programs like the group in class chose to cut. Instead, we all decided it would be better to increase the classrooms by 5 students. This would be the best method, we all believed, since there would be no loss of additional programs. Also, we all commented that our class sizes in elementary school were around 30 to start with, so it didn't seem like a room of 30 children would be unmanagable.