11 simple ideas that can make a big difference to you, your students, and your students' families.
1. Send a postcard to each student a week or two before the first day of school. Introduce yourself and mention some of the activities you've planned for the year. Suggest a great book or a silly assignment for students to complete before school begins.
2. Every Friday during the year, send home a note describing the next week's schedule. Include special events, birthdays, tests, quizzes, important assignments, field trips, parents' nights, assemblies, and so on.
3. When you create your seating chart, use small sticky notes with students' names on them. They're easy to move if you want to rearrange the class -- or move a single student.
4. Set up a Morning Corner, and stock it with activities students can do as soon as they arrive each day. Some ideas for settling them down -- and in -- include the following:
o Pose a few brain teasers on index cards or on the board every morning.
o Provide writing paper, and suggest a few people that students might write to -- a friend, a relative, a pen pal, a newspaper editor, or a person in the news.
o Write the days' events in code, and have students decipher it.
o Laminate an assortment of crossword puzzles, anagrams, word searches, and number puzzles from newspapers or magazines, and display them with washable markers.
o Fill a Challenge Box with extra-credit activities related to their classwork.
o Turn a shoebox into a Suggestion Box, and invite students to use it to ask for help, submit complaints or problems, or suggest ideas for classroom activities.
5. Have students make a school passport or sports trading card. Ask each student to glue his or her photograph to a notecard or an index card and then encourage students to add personalized information, such as interests and goals, likes and dislikes, family members, and special friends. Keep the passports at your desk. Students can use them as hall passes, and you can use them to learn your students' names. (Keep a disposable camera handy to take those pictures -- and others.) Can you think of other interesting hall passes?
6. Create a class jigsaw puzzle. Cut large sheets of paper (enough to cover a bulletin board) into interlocking pieces. Provide each student with a piece of the puzzle and ask students to draw pictures of themselves engaged in a favorite activity. Encourage students to include words, phrases, or symbols that relate to the activity shown or to their feelings about it. When the puzzle pieces are done, have students assemble the puzzle on the bulletin board. (It's a good idea to write identifying numbers on the back of the puzzle pieces as you cut them and to keep a map of the correct arrangement -- just in case.)
7. Purchase a sheet of white melamine from a local building supply store, and cut it into 12-inch squares. Sand rough edges, and provide each student with an individual dry-erase board. Keep paper towels and odorless dry-erase markers on hand.
8. Write each student's name on a craft stick, and store the sticks in an unbreakable container. Use the sticks to call on students during class activities and discussions to make sure everyone gets a turn. Or use them to pick partners or groups for cooperative activities.
Other items veteran teachers use to assure random selection or to create pairs or groups include the following:
o clothespins labeled with students' names
o oversized playing cards
o computer-created "business cards"
9. Begin each day or class period with a brief reading -- a short poem, a famous or funny quote, a surprising fact or statistic, or an inspiring message.
10. Computerize as many school tasks as possible: Record and compute grades; file lesson plans, teaching masters, tests, quizzes, and notices; keep records of significant events, student incidents, parent conferences, and so on.
11. Play classical or instrumental background music during study periods or seat work time.
12 more steps teachers can take at the beginning of the year to promote effective classroom management.
2. Be consistent. Be consistent. Be consistent.
3. Be patient with yourself and with your students.
4. Make parents your allies. Call early and often. Use the word "concerned." When communicating a concern, be specific and descriptive.
5. Don't talk too much. Use the first 15 minutes of class for lectures or presentations, then get the kids working.
6. Break the class period into two or three different activities. Be sure each activity segues smoothly into the next.
7. Begin at the very beginning of each class period and end at the very end.
8. Don't roll call. Take attendance with your seating chart while students are working.
9. Keep all students actively involved. For example, while a student does a presentation, involve the other students in evaluating it.
10. Discipline individual students quietly and privately. Never engage in a disciplinary conversation across the room.
11. Keep your sense of perspective and your sense of humor.
12. Know when to ask for help.
Techniques for maintaining control without confrontation:
· Establish eye contact.
· Move around the room and increase proximity to restless students.
· Send a silent signal.
· Give a quiet reminder.
· Re-direct a student's attention.
· Begin a new activity.
· Offer a choice.
· Use humor.
· Provide positive reinforcement.
· Wait quietly until everyone is on task.
· Ask a directed question.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment