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Picking Battles, Finding Joy: Creating Community In The "Uncontrolled" Classroom, Kerri Ullucci

Education Faculty Publications

Every educator has a handful of students who perpetually push his or her buttons. The challenge of creating a strong, nurturing classroom community is especially difficult if you are an urban school teacher. Not because children in an urban area are inherently more wild or difficult to teach. Rather, there is a mythology about how to best "control" urban children that infects many city schools. This article discusses ways to control classrooms in urban schools and contains the following sections: (1) The Carrot and the Stick--Behaviorism in the Urban Classroom; (2) The "Uncontrolled" Urban Class; (3) Classroom Mantras; (4) I …