Assignment 2: Understanding of Topic and Research

I am going to be a teacher and I currently work in a kindergarten classroom full of 28 rambunctious and inspiring children. One of the areas that I struggle with every day is the behavior of some of my students. I see so much disrespect and aggression, I see children that want to be loved and cared for, and I see smart open minded children struggling to fit in, in a chaotic world. Every day I contemplate what makes the behavior extremes so different in each child. Are they neglected at home, have they been on the receiving end of aggression, or are parents just getting lazier in their parenting styles and not teaching these children right from wrong? What has caused the lack of respect for themselves, their peers, and their teachers? Based on this question I decided to research classroom behavior strategies along with parenting strategies.

I am from the era of Google. Have a question Google it, need and idea Google it, bored Google something. I also am a daily user of Facebook and Pinterest. You can link to all sorts of information from both of these apps/websites. So upon reading this week’s assignment I thought Google was the answer to it all. When I sat down to research my topic I decided to stay away from Google. I already know I can get a ton of information relevant to my topic and a lot of it would be opinion not so much scholarly. I decided to start with the Leatherby Libraries E-Reference.

I wasn’t too interested in the dictionaries that were listed so I skipped looking through those. I was familiar with EBSCO eBook Collection so I started there. I used the key words Discipline and Classroom. My search returned a number of results. After reading the titles of the books I decided to bookmark The Developmental Management Approach to Classroom Behaviour : Responding to Individual Needs and Approaches to Behavior and Classroom Management : Integrating Discipline and Care. They were books written by individuals with degrees and experience in the field. Skimming the books I found many helpful and interesting passages. I also liked the titles in the table of contents. There seemed to be many areas to pull research from.

I like books but sometimes I feel they can overwhelm with information. I have a preference for articles so I furthered my research base into the Gale Virtual Reference link. I wanted some information on types of disciple that parents can use. I did a broad search with the keyword discipline and it returned a number of articles on the topic. I decided on an article published in the International Encyclopedia of Marriage and Family titled Discipline. After skimming the article I was able to find three different and specific types of disciple that parents can use, plus the article was written by a credible source. After skimming I decided to further the discipline search to specific disciples searching for keyword Spanking. It returned an article titled Spanking, from the same Encyclopedia as the previous article so I also bookmarked this article for further reading.

My least favorite search method was Google Scholar. I found it to produce a lot of outdated articles and when I did find an article I wanted to read further it took me to snippets of the article and then wanted me to purchase the PDF or downloadable version of the article or eBook. I did locate two articles from this search engine using keywords discipline and behavior, Journal of Marriage and Family through JSTOR titled Paternal Involvement and Children's Behavior Problems and the other from Pediatrics Vol. 98 Advising Parents on Discipline: What Works.  To access these articles I had to create a profile and login information which was slightly inconvenient but worth it because I found the articles to be useful and pertinent to my topic.