Mereway Middle School

CLASSROOM ORGANISATION - REVIEW - January 1994

Classroom organisation is broadly satisfactory overall. In a few cases practice and systems within the classroom were good supporting the learning environment particularly.

In a minority of cases classroom organisation showed, some weaknesses and the standard of maintenance, in these, was modest.

Evidence

In classrooms where organisation was good the following observations were made.

i. Children immediately knew where equipment was and would therefore be able to resource themselves when necessary.

ii. The drawers of equipment were correctly labelled and organised in such a way to enable the contents to be checked at a glance.

iii. Children were allocated a drawer to monitor and everyone seemed aware of their responsibilities and could say, without reference, what items were in their care.

In classrooms where organisation was less satisfactory the following observations were made.

i. Drawer contents were in disarray, so to enable a check to be carried out the resources would have to be removed and tidied.

ii. Resources were not in a condition to be used straight away, but would require cleaning first.

iii. Items were not grouped together e.g. scissors could be in a number of drawers.

Overall, the standard was satisfactory but a review of systems within a classroom never comes amiss.

N.B.

If I was awarding a cup for this it would go to Carol.

*A complete stock check is required by all year groups during the week 21st - 25th March. Year groups should try to co-ordinate their checks.

A complete list of losses for the year group needs to be with me to enable re-ordering for the year 94/95.

Any excess stock - if not belonging to the year group, SHOULD be returned to me by 25th March. It was clear that several classes do have an excess of some items.

COMMENT

The review was carried out using set criteria in all rooms to allow for comparison. Practical organisation and procedures were focused on as these offered concrete evidence.

Where expectations were high the students had a large measure of responsibility for their rooms and responded well to this.

Similarly where advice and guidance given in the past has been followed organisation and maintenance was good:

There is some room for improvement, but how to achieve this without being too prescriptive/dictational, could be difficult.