Teachers' Planning Decisions for the Beginning of School. R&D Rep. No. 6152

Eleven middle school teachers' planning and classroom activities for the first day of the school year were examined through interviews, written lesson plans, and classroom observations. The purpose was to identify factors in planning and to identify relationships among planning and classroom management on the first day and throughout the first 8 weeks of school. Planning variables included goal emphasis, contextual factors and alternatives considered, content emphasis and level of detail of written plans, and teacher feelings of success and projected changes in future first-day planning. Results indicated that teacher written plans were not very detailed; however, teachers' activities on the first day were generally congruent with their written plans and their stated goal emphasis. Results also suggested that more comprehensive first-day planning is positively related to more effective classroom management throughout the first 8 weeks of school; that a procedural emphasis is most common on the first day but that teachers who restricted their first day activities to administrative tasks have less effective 8-week classroom management success; and that teachers who combine an affective and procedural emphasis on the first day have better 8-week classroom management results. (Author/JD)