The Reflexive Classroom Manager

Luke Lawson is a teacher and administrator in Vancouver, B.C.

Current trends in education suggests that learning from personal actions
and reflecting on those actions is of greater benefit to educators—new
teachers and student-teachers in particular—than merely reading how-to
texts.

The Reflexive Classroom Manager is an excellent introduction to the
educational field of action research, a methodology of researching
(understanding) and action (change) that is usually associated with some
type of reflection. In practice, action research involves the teacher
undertaking a period of time in a classroom or similar setting,
reflecting on that experience, and then suggesting how to change future
outcomes. To illustrate this three-step process—act, reflect, and
revise—the author provides a series of anecdotes drawn from the
experiences of elementary and secondary teachers.

The final chapters, including an examination of verbal and non-verbal
communication, are more prescriptive and add nothing to the main focus
of the book. Despite this, The Reflexive Classroom Manager is an
invaluable resource for new teachers.