Browsing by Subject "ryhmänhallinta"

Both touch and classroom management in school are topics that have been discussed in public debate in recent years. This thesis participates these discussions by examining teacher’s touch when disruptive behavior occurs in the classroom. The study focused on hand-on-shoulder touches where a teacher uses the touch to request pedagogically relevant behavior from a pupil. The aim of the study was to examine how the teacher’s hand-on-shoulder touch sequences were constructed and how the teacher used these touches in classroom management. By examining these topics, the aim was to gain a better understanding of the phenomena of touch and classroom management in school. The study examined video recordings from lessons in the preparatory class of a primary school. The video recordings were from the larger longitudinal material of the Long Second -project. The data for this study consisted of a total of five lessons and was analyzed multimodally through conversational analysis. The study was conducted as a part of Touch in school -project. The study showed that the data’s hand-on-shoulder touch sequences are prototypically constructed from three steps: 1. the pupil behaves disruptively 2. the teacher responds to the disruptive behavior with a hand-on-shoulder touch, and 3. the pupil responds to the teacher's request for pedagogically relevant behavior by orientating oneself towards a given task. This disposition is called the basic sequence in the study. Examining the multidimensional examples in the data, the basic sequence was supplemented so that in step 2, the teacher could also attach a verbal request to the hand-on-shoulder request, and in step 3, the pupil did not always respond to the request, prolonging the disruption sequence. From a teacher’s perspective, the hand-on-shoulder touch proved to be a common, and particularly effective, practice during the verbal teaching sequences, as it allowed deactivation of the disruption without interrupting the speech. Instead, touch between the two verbal teaching sequences and touch interrupting the speech were less common in the data. Overall, the hand-on-shoulder touch worked well as a request for pedagogically relevant behavior, as the teacher was able to use it to restore pedagogically relevant focus in most of the examples.