Archive for April, 2011
The Iris Center – An Amazing Resource for Classroom Management and More
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Today I spent the day at my Alma Mater, Claremont Graduate University. They had a workshop for Master Teachers, to better prepare us for when we have student teachers in our classrooms next year.
Today’s topic was classroom management. This seems to be the biggest problem that student teachers face in those early years. That’s why many teachers leave the profession after 3 years.
Without classroom management, students can’t learn, the teacher gets frustrated, and eventually loses his/her love for the job.
I was very impressed with the session, because it introduced me to a great resource called the Iris Center.
One of its founders, Dr. Deb Smith, was there to walk us through the program and its website.
I enthusiastically recommend that any new teacher or student teacher looking to improve their classroom management skills take a look at this site, and especially the section on classroom management.
Each section has modules that take you through a classroom scenario, then gives expert advice on how to handle these situations.
I went through the module called: Addressing Disruptive and Noncompliant Behaviors (Part 1): Understanding the Acting-Out Cycle.
In this module, experts discuss what to do when you have that student who is really defiant, the cuss-you-out-in-class student. Unfortunately, you will have those. Thankfully, I haven’t had to deal with such an incident in a while, but I noticed that as I was going through the module, many of the preventative measures mentioned are exactly those that I have incorporated in my teaching style. Yay!
Here is a little of what I found in the module:
1. There is an “acting-out cycle” with several stages that if you can recognize these stages, you will be able to “interrupt” the cyle.
2. The phases to the cycle are: 1. Calm 2. Triggers 3. Agitation 4. Acceleration 5. Peak 6. De-Escalation and 7. Recovery.
3. There are actions that the teacher can take at each phase that can either prevent the student from acting out or understand why it happened and make it a teachable moment.
Here’s a quick, very quick, summary of what I learned about the different phases: Continue reading “The Iris Center – An Amazing Resource for Classroom Management and More” »
Making Vocabulary Practice Less Boring – What I Did Today
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Today, I had to go over some key vocabulary terms in preparation for an upcoming test, but as you know, I hate boring lessons, and vocabulary activities can be boring sometimes – well , most of the time.
So I was thinking of how I could make this lesson less boring, and here is what I came up with:
I called it the ISYGK Treasure Book activity.
Right away, the kids are curious about what this is. I guess I could have called it, Vocabulary Practice, but you can guess what kind of reaction I would have received from my 8th graders.
The kids know by now that I use acronyms in my lesson names, so they started to try and figure out what ISYGK stood for. Finally, I told them.
ISYGK means, Important Stuff You Gotta Know.
Duh! Continue reading “Making Vocabulary Practice Less Boring – What I Did Today” »
My Top Ten Classroom Management Tips
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Here are my Top Ten Classroom Management Tips. I teach 8th graders, so classroom management is something that I’ve had to work on if I wanted to survive. I hope these tips are helpful.
1. Give at least one warning.
They’re kids. Kids aren’t perfect. I call the name of the student who is disrupting the class, and I say, “That’s one.” Most of the time, that’s all the student needs to straighten up.
2. Don’t try and teach over the noise.
A lot of the student teachers I’ve had are guilty of this. I was guilty of this also when I first started teaching. You have a plan that you have to get through. You see a few students actually paying attention to you, so you don’t want to stop, even though you know the kids in the back are doing something other than listening to you. You can’t go on. You have to stop and either wait till you have all their attention or you have to deal with the students who are taking attention from you. Continue reading “My Top Ten Classroom Management Tips” »
