This paper is part of a larger study which focuses on reflective and critical aspects of teacher education and teacher internship programs (Doyle, Kennedy, Ludlow, Rose and Singh, 1994; Kennedy, Doyle, Rose and Singh, 1993; Singh, Doyle, Rose and Kennedy, 1997; Singh, Rose, Doyle and Kennedy, 1996).

In working with teacher interns during the internship semester, we found that some teacher interns were terribly concerned about the issues related to classroom discipline and management. They were spending a tremendous amount of energy and time worrying about these issues. This was stressful for some. Every day they seem to approach their classrooms preoccupied with a sense of fear which led them to believe that their students would do something uncontrollable. It seems that in some cases their fear bordered on phobia. We examined this phenomenon in a paper entitled, "Reflective Internship and the Phobia of Classroom Management" (Singh, Doyle, Rose and Kennedy, 1997). That paper describes the methodology, data collection procedures, concepts and theories we utilized in analyzing teacher interns' fear of classroom management and discipline.

There is no need to repeat the discussion of those items in this paper. Instead, this paper focuses on one need of the teacher interns which became clear while analyzing the "phobia" phenomenon. The fact was that the interns wanted to know "practical" things which would help them to manage classrooms. In a self-reflective manner they wanted to know what were the sources of their fear? What made them so fearful? What should they do to survive the Internship semester? What should not be done if teacher interns want to survive the Internship?

As internship supervisors, part of our effort was to bring the interns together for reflection. In the extended group reflective sessions (sometimes involving thirty interns and lasting for two full days), and in "mini" individual reflective sessions (involving one to two hours), we discovered another thing: in order to come to grips with their fear, some interns constantly criticized the theoretical nature of university courses and were critical of the university professors for not transmitting to them practical knowledge. This feeling, we realize, is often fostered by some cooperating teachers, as well as by many non-university individuals and some people within the university itself. When the interns were told that a good theory is more likely to be the best practical tool, they showed considerable doubt. Facing this, my colleagues and I were on many occasions tempted to subject them to a barrage of information on classroom management and discipline which has been readily available in professional journals and books, but we resisted that idea to some extent. It is not that we did not want them to know the professional literature available on this topic. In fact, on many occasions we referred them to the latest books and articles on the subject. When we did that, they often responded by saying that those things don't work anyway in real classroom situations. What is a real classroom situation, we asked? A real classroom situation is where some students or a majority of students don't do what you expect them to do and you don't know how to make them do those things. This was generally their answer.

So, from our own theoretical perspective, and in this particular context, we decided to encourage the teacher interns to voice their own concerns about classroom management and disciplines in reflective sessions and let them struggle with their own voices, as well as with the voices of their peers. In fact, we learned that this is what they wanted to do. They wanted to hear their own voices and the voices of their peers. And they relished the whole process very much. They felt empowered in the sense that they found solutions to many problems by themselves.

The critical and reflective question we pose is how can we, as teacher educators, wean interns away from a preoccupation with technical skills toward a process where they can feel safe to try to put their own work into practice in a wider social, cultural, and political context? We encouraged them to focus on what they do and don't do in their classrooms in a larger context and asked them to identify them. In this paper, then, I report what the interns say about the sources of their fear about classroom management and discipline, and what their do's or don'ts are.

We find it very interesting to compare teacher interns' responses to issues related to classroom management and discipline with the results of studies done by the professional social and behavioral scientists and presented in the second part of Dr. King's paper in this issue of The Morning Watch. Our colleague, Dr. King, summarizes the results of many studies as well as various models of the classroom management and discipline. It is not that hard to note, in many cases, similarities and dissimilarities between the interns' answers and the suggestions offered to teachers by the professional researchers regarding "do's" and "don'ts". Similarly, there are many commonalities between the interns' answers and suggestions made in a recent document produced by the Department of Education outlining policies on discipline in schools (1996).

What does this mean? We concur with many others in believing that there are many ways of knowing and there is always a loose fit between different ways of knowing. Nobody knows everything. Our knowledge about and of social phenomena is always partial and limited. There are no fixed authorities in an absolute sense. The role of "expert knowledge" to come to grips with complex social issues is perhaps very modest.

Further attention should be drawn to three forms of knowledge: commonsense knowledge ("amateur" theory), professional knowledge (scientific theory) and official or state knowledge (ideology). In order to be able to make sense of complex social and educational issues, each form of knowledge should be treated, more or less, equally in any plan of action. This attitude or belief toward knowledge, however, does acknowledge the utility of one form of knowledge over the other in a particular situation. In this sense it does not ignore the hierarchical nature of knowledge in unequal (stratified) societies.

We raise one final question: how do interns, more or less, end up saying and doing the things suggested by professional researchers? Is it that the interns have read books and articles written by professionals on their own? We really don't think so. Is it the case that professional knowledge is often used as a basis for their socialization at homes, in schools, in the work place, in media and in society at large? Is the professional knowledge hegemonic or overwhelming in this sense?

The institutions of higher learning, like the university, are involved in professional socialization of the teacher interns. Whether they realize it or not, their commonsense knowledge do seem to correspond to the professional knowledge, at least to some degree. Does this mean that we at the university do not teach anything of a practical nature to teacher interns, as some of them claim? Or is it that what we do at the university and in the Faculty of Education gets readily absorbed as commonsense knowledge, which in turn surfaces as "hidden curriculum" in the classroom interaction among professors, teachers and students? Or is it the case that commonsense, professional and official forms of knowledge overlap when we come to act on complex social policy issues? We believe the latter is the case. And it should be that way (Singh, 1991). Believe it or not, so we at university do teach students something of practical nature - by default or by design!

Below we present responses (voices) of the interns to the sources of fear about classroom management and discipline in the form of several practical points which they themselves have identified.

More Than 50 Sources of Phobia/Nature of Phobia

1. Students who don't pay attention.

2. Not totally confident in my ability to keep things under control.

3. The most anxiety comes from discipline problems.

4. I am used to silent classroom.

5. I am used to school when the teacher talked, no one else talked.

6. The kids that want to learn will get the abuse (i.e., they should be able to learn).

7. Kids do manage to be disruptive (no matter what you do).

8. To maintain control is the hard part.

9. Whether you can tell Jimmy to shut up and keep everybody else in tune.

10. How to keep them cooled down and what to do if they're not cooled down.

11. Want to learn how to be effective as a teacher.

12. What to do when things are really getting out of hand.

13. There's a lot of feelings involved in a lot of things... I have gone from being happy to ready to tear all my hair out.

14. It is a lack of respect for the teacher.

15. How to quiet them down.

16. How to make them do their work.

17. Classroom management.

18. Getting up there and actually having them listen to me.

19. I'm weak in the area of disciplining a student.

20. Grade eight students are hard to handle.

21. My first fear was that I would be put in a junior high school.

22. Teaching a wide variety of subjects, many of which I have little idea about.

23. The expectations that are built into education to teach junior high are the worst.

24. Fear that I might get thrown into a situation right out of university and right into a situation where it was going to be the hardest.

25. Adolescents do not know how to behave, how to act.

26. Don't want to experience teaching in junior high when I want to teach high school.

27. University is more idealistic. I fear that it does not prepare one for the real world situation.

28. Fear of being put off track in the classroom.

29. Fear of being disruptive four of five times a period.

30. Fear of being able to get back and to get our thoughts back on the right track after you have been disrupted several times.

31. Fear concerning not being able to take care of practical matters.

32. Classes are so big and a lot of kids don't want to learn.

33. Fear of being inadequately trained to deal with disciplinary problems in the classroom.

34. Students wandering around in the classroom.

35. Fear of cooperating teacher sometimes coming down a bit too hard.

36. Worry about confrontational aspects of classroom management.

37. Fear that I wasn't doing something right.

38. Fear of getting things done in light of disruptive behavior.

39. Fear that students may not be working to your particular teaching strategy.

40. Worry about what to do if things are really getting out of hand in the classroom.

41. Concern with how to face different techniques of control in the teaching situation.

42. Fear of not being able to establish yourself as a teacher.

43. Fear of not being able to get used to good and bad days of behavior in the classroom.

44. Concern with situation, specific discipline problems.

45. Fear of taking things too personally.

46. Fear of not being able to control my anger or stop being angry.

47. Concern with how to learn to appear angry without being angry, to put that face on you.

48. Fear of being or getting overly frustrated.

49. Worry about finding an appropriate discipline method that's going to work.

50. Fear of not being able to see myself as a professional teacher.

51. Fear of going up in front of adolescents, fear of not having confidence to stand up in front of students.

52. Fear of not being able to earn respect of students.

53. Fear of dealing with today's young kids because they seem to be so different.

54. Was anxious because it was my first class.

55. I found it quite frustrating dealing with my cooperative teacher. I never knew what she wanted.

56. My only fear was not being prepared.

57. My fear was not being able to find any equipment (e.g., audiovisual material) in the school.

More Than 180 Things Teacher Interns Should Do to Survive the Internship

Do's

1. Build a rapport with students.

2. Establish yourself as a teacher.

3. Be fair.

4. Don't give tests with bonus questions on them.

5. Be enthused or pretend you are enthused.

6. Think about incentives.

7. Use different types of incentives.

8. Sometimes learn to turn a blind eye to a lot of things.

9. Save your breath for something serious.

10. Try and establish a positive relationship with students.

11. Be flexible.

12. Be confident even when you are not.

13. Maintain energy.

14. Leave your preconceived notions behind you.

15. See what you can see.

16. See what the school has to offer.

17. Be open-minded.

18. Try and get an early gauge about your students ability.

19. Do what you are told (by others in the school).

20. Mould yourself to the situation.

21. Get along.

22. Be considerate.

23. Don't fight.

24. Take care of yourself physically and emotionally.

25. Take time for yourself.

26. Cool off before you have to deal with a problem.

27. Have a sense of humour.

28. Be friendly.

29. Take it easy in the school where you are welcomed.

30. Remember you are not working in the school, you are an intern.

31. You are more or less a guest in the school.

32. Get to know the students.

33. Get to know the staff.

34. Get involved with the guidance counsellor.

35. Talk to the guidance counsellor about the things to look for in children who have been abused.

36. Do get to know the kids.

37. Do get to know your co-op teacher.

38. Do get to know your principal.

39. Take the kids aside if you want to discipline them.

40. Take the good things from school home with you and talk about them to everyone you meet.

41. Tell everyone that you are proud of your kids at school.

42. Tell the kids that you are proud of them.

43. Be as understanding as possible.

44. Do try and work with resource people in the community as well as with parents.

45. Provide the best education for the children.

46. Try to make your classes as much fun as possible.

47. Make your class have as much variety in it as possible.

48. I should always try to be fair.

49. Always be thinking about do's and don'ts all term.

50. Take it (bad things in classrooms) with a grain of salt and start off fresh on another day.

51. You should try to relate it (the textbook) to outside things or use other different resources.

52. Use other textbooks as supplements because there's interesting stuff in them.

53. Any way you can avoid becoming attached to students, avoid it.

54. Get to know the other interns for sure, because we are all in the same boat.

55. Talking to others helps relieve some of the pressure.

56. Get things out of yourself.

57. Get to know all the teachers other than your cooperative teacher -- as many teachers as you can.

58. Use other teachers as resource persons.

59. Try to get a variety of opinions in the school.

60. Try to become involved with them (students) outside of the classroom.

61. Try to get involved in extracurricular activities and stuff like that.

62. Treat everyone fairly, even boys and girls.

63. Be relaxed.

64. Be yourself in front of the classroom.

65. Be patient with them (students).

66. Be understanding.

67. Make an effort to be understanding.

68. You get as much out of it as you put into it.

69. You have to put a lot of effort into it.

70. You have to make that extra effort to know their (students) environment which is all new to you.

71. Extra effort to be nice to them, know your purpose and place in the school.

72. Make an effort.

73. Set up a plan to talk to your cooperative teacher once a week.

74. Prepare everything before hand.

75. Do suck up.

76. Do everything that is asked of you and do more.

77. Find out all the information that's available to you.

78. Find out exactly what courses you're required to teach.

79. Find out exactly what the book's going to be.

80. Find out exactly how your cooperative teacher teaches.

81. Find out how to duplicate your cooperative's teaching and add a few of your own ideas in there.

82. Stay around in school after 3:00 p.m. for 20 minutes.

83. Go to school early in the morning.

84. Make sure you're in class on time.

85. It is not good for you and it's not a good impression on the kids to be late.

86. Be responsible.

87. Do everything humanly possible to make yourself an effective teacher.

88. Make sure how the school works.

89. Make sure you know who's in the school, what their function is, what you need to do, what you need to know, how do you get around things, how do you get information, whom to contact, who the resource people are, where all the duplicating materials are, and what available resources are in the school itself.

90. Must consider yourself a teacher.

91. Take some of the responsibility in the classroom.

92. You got to be firm and friendly.

93. You got to get involved in order to be a part of the staff.

94. You got to go around.

95. Make yourself accessible to the staff and be friendly and say "Hi" to this person and "Hi" to that person.

96. Make yourself speak to the people.

97. Get involved, that's one big thing.

98. Get involved during lunch time, if not in extracurricular activities.

99. Eat your lunch in the staff room and then go out with the students.

100. Make sure everybody gets to know you.

101. Get on a one-to-one basis with people.

102. Remember you're in school to learn.

103. Go through the gradual process to learn about your classroom and the school.

104. Slowly increase your role in what you do.

105. Remember, students are going to watch what you are doing.

106. Yes, go there (in the classroom) with an open mind.

107. Take each day as a new experience.

108. Go home and chatter with your friends and laugh and joke about what happened in the school.

109. You have to be able to accept criticism.

110. Put up with a bit of chatter in your classroom.

111. Sometimes you have to yell and talk loud.

112. Got to raise your voice every so often.

113. Be louder than them (students).

114. Dealing with students one-on-one (style of keeping control) works.

115. Take their privileges away from them. It is quite effective, e.g., computer time, gym time, etc.).

116. Have a lot of energy.

117. Move around in the classroom.

118. Use proximity control, i.e., move near students.

119. Be assertive.

120. Make your presence known in the classroom.

121. Be confident of yourself.

122. Pure silence works.

123. Use verbal and non-verbal cues to gain control.

124. Learn to appear angry without being angry.

125. Be calm.

126. Have patience.

127. Learn to deal with your frustrations.

128. Experiment with different techniques to get your ideas across or in maintaining control.

129. Use detention not too frequently. It doesn't work.

130. Think of yourself as a professional teacher.

131. Learn from trial and error.

132. Talk to other teachers.

133. Just try to talk to the students.

134. Just try to understand the students.

135. Get to know why students do what they do.

136. Slow down and write neater on the board.

137. Try to interact more with the students.

138. Ask the students more questions.

139. Remember words that are simple to you may blow students away.

140. Lay down the rules.

141. Try to earn respect of students.

142. Remember, respect is earned.

143. Get used to the juggling act, to deal with disruptive kids and get through your lesson is a real juggling act.

144. Lesson management is necessary, it leads to classroom management.

145. Be prepared to be a counsellor at times.

146. Just stand there, and look at students and be quiet.

147. Pinpoint the student with whom you are having a problem.

148. Learn to deal with students one-on-one for keeping control.

149. Make the class think that everyone is responsible for each others actions.

150. Forcing students to leave the room sparingly (occasionally.)

151. Think twice before you ask a student to leave your class. Remember, there will be days you will have good control and days when control will be bad.

152. Remember you are new in the classroom and the students will try you out and how they can challenge your authority as a teacher.

153. Learn to deal with classroom problems on your own.

154. Follow the proper procedures.

155. Get along with or have no trouble with the principal, the staff, the parents and the students.

156. Do your own self judgement and evaluation as to the severity of discipline problems before getting help from higher authorities.

157. Get students to admit to you that they're wrong, get them to tell you what their punishment should be and get them to tell you what they deserve and then deal with it.

158. Prepare your lesson well, doubly well.

159. Make an extra effort to find the material and equipment you need for your classroom, i.e., do good planning. Everything is planning.

160. Remember that some days students are not in the learning mode and nothing will work to calm them down.

161. Remember there's got to be a way to quieten down a particular student.

162. Talk to other teachers about a particular student you have problems with, get to know his family background.

163. Remember, that in many cases, potential dropouts are your problem students.

164. Potential dropouts are very disruptive.

165. Let potential dropouts have their little chit chat sometimes and get it over with.

166. Be a little bit more lenient with the potential dropout students, a little bit more lenient.

167. Remember if you threaten your students (dropouts potentially), a wall goes up, and then it is a fight, then you got a fight on your hands.

168. Give students multiple choice questions if they have problems with writing and reading. Sometimes make them write a bit but never threaten them.

169. Get yourself organized enough to answer questions that might be posed to you in different situations and to face those kinds of challenges.

170. Always address individual needs of students.

171. Handle the class by relating to students on an individual basis -- giving as much of yourself as you think is necessary.

172. Feel positive in the way you relate to students, to the whole class.

173. Present yourself in terms of your humour, use humour to make students relax in your class.

174. Create a good learning environment, one that's not overly stressful and that's not full of emotional problems in any way.

175. Make an environment that makes people feel comfortable and in which students can work.

176. Make your class as a game, as a place to have fun. Remember, too much education is boring and that's why we get so many disciplinary problems.

177. Remember some students are bored in the classroom and they don't want to be in it.

178. Remember that discipline problems stem from poor teaching.

179. Try to get students to do things themselves for the sake of getting out of school.

180. Remember students can put you on the spot in front of others.

181. Observe your cooperating teacher and learn techniques of classroom control from them.

182. Ask your students to make important decisions.

183. Ask students questions.

184. Ask your students to provide reasons for their actions.

185. Ask your students for future plans.

186. Be more conciliatory and adopt a democratic approach to teaching, where students have to think through reasoning.

187. Ask your students "what is the problem" if she/he is giving you trouble.

188. Let students know where you are coming from.

189. You have to look for yourself.

About 70 Things Teachers Should Not Do to Survive the Internship

Don'ts

1. Don't give tests with bonus points on them.

2. Don't be yourself right away, wait.

3. Don't be fake.

4. Don't freak out if somebody disobeyed or did something.

5. Don't take things personally.

6. Don't get frustrated easily.

7. Don't expect to get everything right all the time.

8. Don't waste your breath on everything.

9. Don't speak to students everyday for some minor infractions.

10. Don't be judgemental or don't be judgemental at all.

11. Don't try to change the situation right away because you can't change it.

12. Don't enter into one-to-one confrontations with students in a classroom environment.

13. Don't open your mouth unless you know what you are saying.

14. Don't speak before you act.

15. Don't get too stressed.

16. Don't push yourself beyond your own physical limits.

17. Don't ignore your own needs.

18. Don't question the principal.

19. Don't' make the principal look bad in front of the staff.

20. Don't reprimand or discipline kids in front of the whole class.

21. Don't take your problems home with you.

22. Don't put down other teachers or other students around the kids.

23. Don't forget that you're supposed to be a role model.

24. Don't forget that the kids are going through a lot more than just what you see everyday in school.

25. Try not to show your anger because if you do the students just play on it.

26. You don't want to try to be buddy buddy with the kids because they'll walk all over you.

27. You shouldn't get too upset if there's talking in your class because it is going to be there, so don't worry about it.

28. Don't expect a whole lot from kids at first until you get to realize their achievement.

29. Student interns shouldn't be too upset if they have a bad day because it's going to happen, probably more than once.

30. Try not to stick with the textbook a whole lot.

31. Don't become too attached to people and things in school. Don't become attached over everything.

32. Never yell.

33. Never embarrass a student.

34. Never take them out or draw attention to them.

35. Remember it is the cooperative teacher's class after all.

36. Don't try to take total control of it (classroom.)

37. Never override the cooperative teacher.

38. Don't argue with your cooperative teacher.

39. Don't run out of school at 3:00 p.m.

40. Don't be late in the class.

41. Don't depend on the cooperative teacher all the time.

42. Don't be shy even if you are shy.

43. Don't go into your classroom and rule with an iron fist as such!

44. Don't just sit down and be a passive observer.

45. Don't forget that students are going to look at you as a teacher.

46. Don't forget that you are going to be the role model for them (student).

47. Don't let things bother you.

48. Don't take today's things home, forget about it.

49. Don't keep bringing your day-to-day problems in with you and...

50. Don't take your problems home with you.

51. Don't be afraid to accept constructive criticism you know.

52. Don't be afraid to ask your cooperative teacher "is there anything I am doing wrong"?

53. Don't take students behavior personally.

54. Don't get angry.

55. Don't get overly frustrated if the class is not getting what you are saying.

56. Never assume that the students know everything.

57. Don't try to build Rome in one day. Remember it wasn't built in a day.

58. Make kids stay after the class today.

59. For something that happened on Friday or yesterday.

60. Even detention doesn't work.

61. Don't force students to leave the class excessively. It doesn't serve the purpose.

62. Don't be too lenient to students.

63. Don't be unprepared for your classroom.

64. Don't think you can handle the students everyday.

65. Don't single out one student in the class and never do that in front of his peers, i.e., scream at them.

66. Don't argue with the potential dropout students back and forth.

67. Don't threaten your students as a person, i.e., threaten their person.

68. Don't use games everyday.

Department of Education (1996). Programming for individual needs: Policy, guidelines and resource guide on discipline, school violence and safe school teams. St. John's: Government of Newfoundland and Labrador, Division of Student Support Services.

Doyle, C., Kennedy, W., Ludlow, K., Rose, A. & Singh, A. (1994). Toward building a reflective and critical internship program (The RCIP Model): Theory and practice. St. John's: Faculty of Education, Memorial University of Newfoundland.

Kennedy, W., Doyle, C., Rose, A. & Singh, A. (1993). Teaching internship: A reflective practice, in Partnership of schools and institution of higher education in teacher development (eds.). Hoz, Ron & Silberstein, Mose. Beer-Sheva, Israel: Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Press.

Singh, A., Doyle, C., Rose, A. & Kennedy, W. (1996). Collaborative research and the voices of seconded teachers as internship supervisors, The Morning Watch, Vol. 23, No. 3-4, Winter, pp. 65-79.

Singh, A., Doyle, C., Rose, A. & Kennedy, W. (1997). A reflective internship and the phobia of classroom management (forthcoming). Australian Journal of Education, Vol. 41, No. 2.