Favorite teaching strategies (activity, complain, county, middle school)
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Great stuff here! I am so glad you mentioned Love & Logic....I don't know how I could ever have succeeded at behavioral management with out Cline/Fay! Plus they remind me of the import of sense of humor!
I have the parenting with love and logic series but I've never used the teaching with love and logic materials. What are some of the strategies that have worked best for you?
My biggest behavioral issue is kids who don't want to be in my class, are angry because they're being made to take my class, who don't care about their grades and aren't deterred by punishments.
I have one student who thinks my class is nap time. I end up sending him to detention where he just puts his head down and goes to sleep. The only positive is I'd have six kids sleeping in class if I let him but he ends up out of class. Remarkably, he still does ok on the tests but the test material is going to start getting harder. When he is awake, he, usually refuses to do any work. I find that his behavior for the day often determines the mood of the class. If I could get him on board, I, probably wouldn't have issues with the rest of my class.
Great ideas, everyone. JPS, I particularly like your suggestions. I wish C-D would let me spread more reputation points more often to you and some other great commenters who routinely post on this forum.
1. I find one of the trickiest things about teaching to be calling on all students in an equitable way, particularly since some students are prone to being quiet, others are dying to talk all the time, and still others have learning challenges that make being called on a personal nightmare. I love the "think, pair share" strategy for this reason. When I have a problem for students to solve/question to answer, I ask them to partner with a neighbor, discuss what they think the answer is, and then share either their own thoughts or their neighbor's ideas with the class. This is particularly helpful for kids with processing difficulties. It also helps to engage children who would rather just wait for others to answer questions.
2. Research tells us that cooperative learning is great for students of all ages. Yet most of us hated it, as do our students and their parents. I really like the jigsaw technique for overcoming the common problems of group projects while still providing a great structure for learning. I think jigsaw projects are particularly well-suited for social studies and science lessons.
3. For classroom management ideas, I love the Responsive Classroom (Northeast Foundation for Children) and Teaching with Love and Logic approaches. These programs have solutions for the children who aren't affected by punishment or motivated by the small rewards we can offer them. They also help teachers recapture control, energy, and a love of teaching.
4. Learning spelling and vocabulary are important to building literacy. Yet, so many teachers resort to memorization and drill-and-kill approaches to this type of language arts instruction. Then we grit our teeth when our students don't remember spelling words from two weeks before or fail to employ new vocabulary in speech and writing. Words Their Way offers a much more meaningful, research-based constructivist method for teaching vocabulary and spelling. It's also super adjustable for mixed ability classrooms where some students might be ESOL and others might be reading years above grade level.
I could go on, but I'm excited to see what other ideas pop up here.
This was one of the things that I was best at when I was teaching. The only drawback is that after a while, students stop raising their hands b/c they know that you won't call on them simply b/c they raise their hands.
I found that calling on all students only worked when we were doing textbook exercises, which are especially important in Spanish in order that everyone had a turn to practice reading/speaking and answering [in Spanish].
WRT group activities, I never had students work on important assignments in groups. In fact, only once did I assign group presentations, and each group was only allowed to have two students. However, when I graded the presentations, I graded students individually (you could usually tell when one person did more work than the other). But even then, I didn't feel that a teacher could fairly evaluate students' work in group projects (there are so many uncontrollable factors).
I found that group work was effective for games (in which there were 4-5 students per group) but always limited other activities to pairs. Forutnately, most students were at similar levels and chose partners with whom they worked well. But I am still wary of group work and would continue to use it sparingly. I found that I had the most success with charades, at all age levels.
I have a great book here called The Motivation Breakthrough: 6 secrets to turning on the tuned-out child. It talks about how kids are motivated by different things, which is why you need several ways to reach the kids in your classes. One kid may be totally indifferent to prizes, but crave a well placed compliment. The things that could motivate your kids are: praise, power, projects, prestige, and prizes, and kids who are people oriented. It has some interesting ideas and there is a great chapter about building rapport with your students, which can solve a lot of your discipline problems. As a sub, if I failed to quickly establish rapport with my classes, I was in for a difficult day!
I have a great book here called The Motivation Breakthrough: 6 secrets to turning on the tuned-out child. It talks about how kids are motivated by different things, which is why you need several ways to reach the kids in your classes. One kid may be totally indifferent to prizes, but crave a well placed compliment. The things that could motivate your kids are: praise, power, projects, prestige, and prizes, and kids who are people oriented. It has some interesting ideas and there is a great chapter about building rapport with your students, which can solve a lot of your discipline problems. As a sub, if I failed to quickly establish rapport with my classes, I was in for a difficult day!
Thanks. I think I'll order that one. I have a handful of students I just don't know how to motivate and they can, quickly, take the rest of the class down with them.
So far, I know grades don't matter to them and punishements are more like a prize. Nothing happens when they go to detention other than they go to detention and sit there and do nothing. In their eyes, they got out of working for the day. Unfortunately, I have 4 of this type of student in one class. Used to be six but two got expelled. That class had me wishing I'd never gone into teaching.
I find if there's only one or two, they, eventually come around. Being THE person dirsrupting class when your classmates actually want to do their work gets old really fast. Unfortunately, having the support of others who don't want to do the work either adds fuel to the fire.
I have the parenting with love and logic series but I've never used the teaching with love and logic materials. What are some of the strategies that have worked best for you?
Haven't read the parenting series, but I imagine that if you like the Parenting with Love and Logic philosophy, you'd like Teaching as well. It's far too rich a resource to capture quick ideas here. If you have a chance, pick up the book and flip to the last chapter. It has a 16 stage (I think it's 16, at least) approach to intervention with challenging students. Love and Logic emphasizes a steadily escalating response that requires humor and empathy on the part of the teacher and a lot of thinking on the student's part. It also doesn't require that you extinguish every problem every day. Nor does it say that you will always "win" on the fist try. The authors realistically acknowledge that children bring a whole lot of issues to school and that there's only so much you can do to overcome the strong influences of family, friends, and society. If you read the last chapter and it seems to mesh with your philosophy/interests, then the rest of the book gives more concrete examples on how to bring the program into your classroom every day.
Haven't read the parenting series, but I imagine that if you like the Parenting with Love and Logic philosophy, you'd like Teaching as well. It's far too rich a resource to capture quick ideas here. If you have a chance, pick up the book and flip to the last chapter. It has a 16 stage (I think it's 16, at least) approach to intervention with challenging students. Love and Logic emphasizes a steadily escalating response that requires humor and empathy on the part of the teacher and a lot of thinking on the student's part. It also doesn't require that you extinguish every problem every day. Nor does it say that you will always "win" on the fist try. The authors realistically acknowledge that children bring a whole lot of issues to school and that there's only so much you can do to overcome the strong influences of family, friends, and society. If you read the last chapter and it seems to mesh with your philosophy/interests, then the rest of the book gives more concrete examples on how to bring the program into your classroom every day.
Thanks. I ordered the books off of amazon last night. Now to find time to read them, lol.
However, how true that Love & Logic is too rich to distill; it's a philosophy rather than a system.
Thanks.
Most of these have been tried. My worst offender simply refused to write the letter. They gave him detention for a day...which is nap time to him.
I'm aware that love and logic is a philosophy built on natural consequences. This is where I'm struggling. These students don't care about the natural consequences. My biggest offender, surprisngly, manages to pass the class in spite of not doing half of the work. So his mom says he shouldn't have to do it. (Zilch in support from home here. Mom's orders are for me to quit making her son mad.)
Right now, he's given a choice of doing the work or going to the office where he'll be sent to detention and having to make up the work later. Flip a coin on which he chooses. Depends on if he likes what we're doing. Detention is nap time for him and he makes up nothing. Homework/classwork, is a small enough portion of the grade that a student could not do it and still get a decent grade. Tests are 50% of the grade and he, usually, passes them with a high B so he passes the class.
One of the things that makes him difficult to deal with is, gradewise, he gets away with not working. If he'd study, he could handle the regular chemistry class but has no desire to take it so there's no sense putting him in there. He could be pulling an A in my class if he tried, which is really sad because I believe mine is the only class he's passing. Obviously, there's something he likes about the material. But I can't seem to hook into that to motivate him. He really needs to be in the other chemistry class to be challenged but he doesn't want to be there. He sees no value in learning chemistry. If he had it his way, he wouldn't take chemistry at all. He's one of my students who are angry that the state is making them take chemistry. Under the old system when chemistry was an elective, he would not have elected to take it. He doesn't want to be there.
Natural consequences also work against me if there are enough disruptive students. If they can get the class derailed, then less material gets taught and they have less work to do. This is especially true in my classes where I only have a class set of books. If it happens in a class where kids have books, I just plow on and they, quickly, figure out that all that happens when they disrupt class is they do the homework without getting all of the teaching first and it's harder that way.
In my other classes, taking away work time in class or even cutting a leacture or doing examples short works. I'll say, if you're not going to pay attention, I'm wasting my time up here. We can just go on to the next section if you'd like and they'll, usually, decide to pay attention. Of course they have to test the waters to see if I'll really do it early in the year but once that's over, it's a pretty good strategy for getting class back on track.
I really struggle with my lower level classes. It's funny. I was worried because they have so many special ed kids in them but it's not the special ed kids who give me grief. For the most part, they are my workers. It's the kids who choose this class because they don't want to take the regular chemistry class who are looking for that chemistry check mark for the least work possible who are my problem children. I need to find a way to motivate them.
It's amazing how just a handful of kids can really make teaching unpleasant. If I could hand pick 10% of my kids to take out of my classes, I could teach a lot more and I'd like this job.
I presently teach 2nd grade, although I have experience at grades 1-4 & years as a guidance counselor.
Some of our favorite classroom successes are:
1. "Brain Break" with music & movement
2. Gold Box Cheers- a box with cards of "hurray-for-us"-type cheers
3. Kagan Cooperative Learning structures
Thanks for the ideas! All of these are great and can be easily modified for different grade levels.
I was wondering with all your useful advice and experience how many new teachers you are asked to mentor? It is probably quite a few.
My son's teacher uses a funny type of brain break. She is teaching the kids the Thriller video. Her classroom is filled with kids who are above average intelligence but with some other issue that can interfer with learning. Most of her kids are behind their peers on gross motor skills so she hits several issues at once. I was wondering how to translate that focused quick break into a class with older kids, then you wrote about brain breaks. When I searched the term, wonderful ideas came up.
A nice middle school alternative to the cheer box is a raffle drawing a collegue uses. When a student does anything great, like their best test score or excellent work in a lab, she gives him/her a raffle ticket. Once a quarter she draws one name from the raffle for a prize. Not everyone gets into the raffle, and many kids get in there multiple times. The kids act pretty excited just to be called out for earning a raffle ticket.
And, those Kagan cooperative grouping resources are really impressive. I am a firm believer in cooperative group work with teacher defined groups and roles. The Kagan website had resources for all the grades and subjects I have taught. I did not realize they offered so many products!
I teach 7th life science/biology. On of my favorite labs is extracting DNA from Bananas or Strawberries. There are several web sites that have instructions and videos. If you have not tried this before, your students will love it.
Shoot, I am teaching mathematics this spring.
Students really do seem to respond to unusual hands on labs like this. A collegue uses eggs with their shells disolved to teach many different concepts. That is always a hit and less messy than you might think.
Do you have any more goodies like this banana lab? Please???
Last edited by msm_teacher; 01-02-2010 at 06:29 AM..
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