Thursday, January 26, 2012

Thoughts About Classroom Management

What sorts of advice are you getting for managing your students? Interested in what other people are thinking about this? Edutopia has set up a New Teacher Academy and the first lesson is on this especially challenging issue for all teachers. We are happy to share this article with you from Edutopia. Lisa Michelle Dabbs, the facilitator of the New Teacher Connections group at Edutopia writes, "Classroom management is a term used by teachers and educators to describe the process of ensuring that classroom lessons run smoothly despite potentially challenging or disruptive student behavior. The term also implies the prevention of this kind of disruptive behavior. Many teachers find that classroom management is possibly the most difficult aspect of teaching; indeed, experiencing problems in this area causes some to leave teaching altogether. It can be even more challenging when you're a new teacher!"

This probably resonates for many of you. Read on and feel free to post any comments and thoughts.

New Teacher Academy: Classroom Management

By Lisa Michelle Dabbs
1/17/12

Lisa M. Dabbs M.Ed. (@teachingwthsoul on Twitter) is the facilitator of Edutopia's New Teacher Connections group. She is also the founder of the weekly #ntchat for new teachers on Twitter, and blogs about supporting new teachers at Teaching With Soul.

Welcome to the first week of Edutopia's New Teacher Academy! I'm so happy to be here sharing my passion to support and mentor new teachers. I hope that you will come back each week and join us as we look at five key topics that will offer resources to new teachers in five key areas.

1/17/12 - Classroom management
1/24/12 - Lesson planning
1/31/12 - Delivery of instruction
2/7/12 - Working with parents
2/14/12 - Building relationships

We will also be collaborating in more detail on these five topics on my weekly New Teacher chat on Twitter.

Classroom Management: An Introduction

Classroom management is a term used by teachers and educators to describe the process of ensuring that classroom lessons run smoothly despite potentially challenging or disruptive student behavior. The term also implies the prevention of this kind of disruptive behavior. Many teachers find that classroom management is possibly the most difficult aspect of teaching; indeed, experiencing problems in this area causes some to leave teaching altogether. It can be even more challenging when you're a new teacher!

Our first guest contributor is Justin Stortz. Many thanks to Justin for sharing his humor and great resources on the blog this week!

Justin Stortz teaches fourth-graders to read and write better in McKinney, Texas. He strives to teach with authenticity, humor and technology. He has amazing energy and is very eager to share, collaborate and offer support to new teachers. He blogs at Pursuing Context.

Classroom Management with Justin Stortz

Classroom management was the last thing on my mind as I graduated college. Little did I know it would be the first thing to kick my rear when I taught my first class. How you and your students manage your classroom will make or break everything else.

Here's what I've learned so far:

1) Realize You Need a Plan

Don't hold it all in your head. Start writing things down. What's working in your room? What's not working? What exactly do you want students to do?

Get your class involved, too. Ask for their input and thoughts on the classroom atmosphere. Let them see you writing those things down. Take their suggestions and write a plan on your own, or collaborate to make a plan together. Take some time to think of the behaviors you want, those you don't want, and possible consequences. My early classroom management plan came from reading the classic First Days of School.

I use Evernote to help me collect school plans, notes and lesson ideas. I don't do so well with the paper, so it's nice to have all of my thinking in one spot. See if it helps you.

2) Throw It in the Dumpster

Set the classroom expectations and test drive them for a bit. Get rid of things that aren't working. Or revise them. It's okay to add as well. Talk to your students about it, so they'll know what you expect.

I created a behavior stoplight for my kindergarteners. It was big, bold and colorful. I redesigned it when I moved to first grade, and I completely threw it out when I started teaching fourth graders. Now I just have one small poster and rely on my verbal communication to do the heavy lifting.

3) Be Consistent

This is important once your plan gains traction. State your expectations clearly and often. Students shouldn't be surprised by them, so you need to be consistent. If you let certain behaviors slide once or twice, then be prepared for an encore.

I love the idea of being a velvet-covered brick. Be soft and approachable on the outside but firm and solid underneath. Ideally, your expectations will turn into an external presence that is not affected by your mood or energy level. Coffee always helps.

Some of The Essential 55 might be a good place to start when thinking about what behaviors you should expect from students.

4) Laugh... a Lot

One of the best ways to manage your classroom is to laugh. A lot. Laugh with your students, and laugh at your goofy self. You'll make lots of mistakes. I know because I'm still making them. I don't have it all figured out, and I've never met anyone who does. Accept that and move on. Fill your classroom with laughter. Life will be easier. I promise.

5) Ask for Help

I have a problem with this hulking, ugly monster called pride. I want to think that I know it all and don't need help with my students from anyone. Dead wrong. I need all the help I can get, and so do you. Ask someone on your team, reach out to a veteran teacher on your campus or talk with your mentor.

There are many online communities as well. You can ask questions on Twitter with the #ntchat tag. I participate in #4thchat. Check out Cybraryman's Twitter chats for even more educational chats.

Best wishes to you on your classroom management quest. Get out there and go make a difference in someone's life!

Tuesday, January 10, 2012

Here are some terrific ideas to help you feel connected and to avoid feeling isolated in your schools and your classrooms. These are from a great article posted on Edutopia.org

And here is another tip! Come and join us and establish some new connections at any of our New Teacher Community Events! The next one is Saturday, March 24th.

http://www.edutopia.org/blog/avoid-teacher-isolation-stay-connected-rebecca-alber

Six Ways to Avoid Feeling Isolated in the Classroom

By Rebecca Alber

Rebecca Alber

Edutopia consulting online editor and online education teacher at Stanford

1/9/12

In her work with UCLA's Graduate School of Education, Rebecca Alber assists teachers and schools in meeting students' academic needs through best practices. Alber also instructs online teacher-education courses for Stanford University.

It's easy to get caught up in the worlds of the tikes, teens, or tweens we teach. I remember after a couple of years of teaching eleventh graders, I would fall into speaking teenspeak to my friends. They would give me a funny look as I said, "And you know, it's like, whatever."

Unlike our friends and family working in the private sector, we teachers spend 98 percent of our time, not with peers, but with children and in our classrooms. So it's easy to forget to reach out and have adult conversations during our workdays. (Taking breaks from the room where you teach is also important.)

Sure, PLNs and other online social networking groups are fantastic and definitely serve a purpose, but we are human -- and we need human contact and connection.

And especially with humans are own age. (There's nothing more disconcerting than making a reference to pop culture you think kids you teach will know. I recently referenced the singer Prince. The students stared at me blankly...FAIL!)

With budget cuts being what they are these days, less and less professional development opportunities are happening for teachers during the workday. So it's even more important to get proactive and create time to collaborate or just connect with your colleagues.

Here are some suggestions:

Arrange to eat lunch with a few colleagues at least twice a week. If you are inviting kids to your room, or sitting alone in your classroom with your thoughts and turkey sandwich, fine, but just not everyday.
Create a time once a week or every other week where you merge your class with another teacher's. Meet outside, in the cafeteria, or library to read together, do writer's workshop, or practice speech debate.
If a secondary teacher, co-teach once in awhile during your conference time. The other teacher can do the same, lending you a helping hand. Follow the visit with a reflective conversation sharing how you think the lesson went.
Create a walking club with a group of teachers and office staff. Walk the block or campus during lunch or recess.
How about a lunch time book club?
Host a round robin share once a week with a group of colleagues you admire. Sit in a circle and each share for 3 minutes a strategy, activity, or project that really shined that week in your classroom. Leave 10 minutes after the round robin for one on one time to give specifics for those wanting more information.

If it's just too difficult to do much with other adults during your workday...

Visit a museum or gallery with a colleague after work, or see a film related to education or your content and follow it up with a coffee/cocktail and a chat
For early risers, have breakfast together or a cup of coffee before the start of the school day
Sign up with a colleague for an evening class or weekend conference

The key here is that isolating in your classroom can be a fast road to feeling low efficacy, lonely, even unhappy -- in plain, to burning out. And burn out is the great hazard of our profession. Staying connected, in real time, face-to-face, with your teacher colleagues is essential.

About his research on happiness, Harvard psychology professor Daniel Gilbert puts it this way:

"We are by far the most social species on Earth," explains Gilbert. "If I wanted to predict your happiness, and I could know only one thing about you, I wouldn't want to know your gender, religion, health, or income. I'd want to know about your social network -- about your friends and family and the strength of the bonds with them."

How do you stay connected with colleagues on your campus? Please share!

Monday, January 9, 2012

Happy new year! We hope that you have all returned to your classrooms refreshed and excited. It's progress report time for many of you---good luck. Let us know if you need help with ways to say delicate or difficult comments. We're here for you.

Hmmmmmmm.... Think alouds as an assessment tool? Yes! Critically listen to your students solve problems. "The advantage of think alouds over graded student work is that they allow one to observe the process of thinking in a raw, unvarnished state. Think alouds reveal not only what a student thinks but also how she came to think it. Think alouds expose the stumbling, the hesitations, the blind alleys, the good ideas entertained and abandoned, the inner workings of a mind trying to make sense...." Here's a fascinating article about this (the quote is from the article) written by a university history teacher that has relevance for any classroom teacher:

Think Alouds Shed Light on How Students Grapple with Content

By Maryellen Weimer, PhD

One of the enduring legacies of the classroom assessment movement (thank you Pat Cross and Tom Angelo) is that most faculty now realize that if they want to know how well something worked to promote learning in the classroom, they can't just rely on what they think. They need to support what they think with feedback from students and, if that feedback doesn't agree with what they think, they need to listen carefully to what the students said.

Building on that foundation, the scholarship of teaching movement has shown faculty that they can "study," as in systematically inquire about, what's happening in their classrooms. Increasingly, instructors' examinations of their teaching and their students' learning are finding their way into the pedagogical literature. One of the side benefits of these scholarly endeavors is the importing of a number of interesting assessment techniques mostly developed in psychology, cognitive psychology and educational psychology. Think alouds is one such technique and Lendol Calder describes how he used this approach in an introductory history course.

Think alouds were originally developed by cognitive psychologists as a research tool to study how people solved problems. Calder used them in his course "to measure changes in thinking patterns over time for selected individual enrolled in my survey [course]." (p. 1367) At the very beginning of the course he gave students a number of historical documents (somewhere between seven and ten) pertaining to the battle of the Little Big Horn. Students were supposed to try and figure out what the documents meant. They did so by talking out loud to themselves. "Their verbalized comments were recorded and transcribed for later analysis to determine patterns of cognition used to make sense of the documents." (p. 1367) Students participated in the same exercise at the end of the course only with a different set of historical documents.

You could do the same with papers written before and after a course, but Calder thinks that the think alouds have distinct advantages. "." (p. 1368)

But Calder identifies another advantage that's even more compelling: "Listening to my students think out loud as they tried to make sense of documents is the single most eye-opening experience I have had in my years as a teacher." (p. 1368)

Could changes in student thinking be detected in the before and after of these think alouds? "What my studies revealed is that even in a short, ten-week course students on average make modest to occasionally dramatic gains in all six aspects of historical thinking taught in the course." (p. 1368) I should note that Calder's course is your not typical history survey course — his article describes a course design that deviates significantly from how history courses are usually designed and taught.

It's such an interesting assessment strategy. Even if you didn't want to use it in a rigorous study design, the idea of listening to students as they try to deal with content has got to be revealing. In the cognitive psychology research, think alouds have been used to differentiate expert and novice knowledge and thinking processes. As I have pointed out in previous posts, it is so easy for faculty experts to forget how novices think about the content. Yes, it can be depressing, even frightening, since most students do not think all that deeply about our content. But knowing where they start allows for a more efficient journey to where they need to be. As Calder's experience shows, you can then design a course, in his case one where he used the content to explicitly teach six cognitive habits: questioning, connecting, sourcing, making inferences, considering alternate perspectives and recognizing limits to one's knowledge. (p. 1364).

Reference: Calder, L. (2006). Uncoverage: Toward a signature pedagogy for the history pedagogy. The Journal of American History, March, 1358-1370.

Lesley University New Teacher Community