Are your students truly paying attention to you?
 
 
Are you forever struggling with classroom management issues? (i.e., student behavior, students disrespect, or other disciplinary problems)
 
 
Do you sometimes get the feeling that your students are doing you a favor by opening their books and notebooks at the start of a lesson but don’t really participate in the lesson?
 
The teacher survey results showed that teachers also need more help in engaging their students as part of an effective classroom management plan. At the risk of sounding too critical, allow me to put this in new teacher terms.  Sometimes new teachers take themselves too seriously in the classroom and I’ll let you in on a secret: When it comes to interacting with students,
 
Students want to be engaged with the lesson
 
But all too often new teachers are so worried about looking professional and intelligent in front of students to gain their respect, that they think they need to save face by adapting teaching styles such as authoritative (”I say, you do”)  or, they might want to be friends with the students very quickly. This however can create even more distance.
 
At least this has been my experience. Put another way, students may give you the impression that they are listening to you, but they are not engaged. There is a difference. 
 
This shouldn’t come as a complete surprise to you if you just take a moment to remember how you’ve responded during interesting lessons in school. You were engaged because the lesson truly spoke to you. 
The bottom line is, if you find yourself struggling with lack of respect, that is an indication to you that one or more of your classroom management systems isn’t in place. What exactly therefore are you doing to encourage students to be on-task or engaged? Encouraging students is a recipe of three main ingredients:  motivation, respect and trust.

Yes, trust.

Students need to feel they can trust you in order to feel they can succeed. 

When they’ve earned your trust, you’ve given them a reason to be engaged.  

 
 You can’t afford to struggle with establishing with the system of trust if you want to engage your students more effectively.

If you are still finding yourself struggling with this issue, I can show you some tricks of the trade to help you engage your students more much effectively.  My eworkbook of tips of the trade for handling discipline problems will shortly be on the teacher product page. So be on the lookout.

Take a moment to reflect and consider your next steps. If you have a lingering question or comment, leave one in the comment box. I’ll respond to it.

Your responses to the two teacher surveys revealed a few BIGGIES that I would not have guessed without your support. The first BIGGIE by a landslide was diversifying assessment as part of engaging students. Other BIGGIES I will continually address all this coming week together with tips, ideas and advice.

Every engaging teacher can (and should) diversify assessment in order to continually engage students and improve his/her teaching. Usually, when students are bored and unchallenged, they can become potential discipline problems or simply passive, which you may have noticed already.

Differentiating assessment can [and should] begin with small incremental steps and shouldn’t be left at the point when you are already assessing your students. 

Soon, I’ll be offering an online course involving a number of interactive media on How to Succeed with Mixed Ability Classes, which will include a powerpoint presentation, lesson planning sheets, tons of ideas and activities as well mapping and assessment pages intended for differentiating assessment. If you are interested in participating in this course, please send me an email at sasson92 at gmail dot com together with your name stating your interest in this course and the grades you currently teach, subject and location of your school. I will send you the course information.

If you’ve been putting off differentiated instruction and assessment because you aren’t sure how to go about implementing it, start by discussing with your class the importance of accepting differences and diversity. Use a lesson plan of Shel Silverstein’s “No Difference” to help you tackle the issue of diversity in a creative and inductive way.

As you continue to get to know your students and their abilities, use a general three-way group lesson planning and tracking pages (high-middle-lower)  as a way to provide options for students to demonstrate their new knowledge.  When you know what students are capable of doing, you then can validate their knowledge in assessment. In his podcast, Rick Wormeli suggests “that assessment is the first step to differentiated instruction in the classroom.”

Again, various assessment options should be used such as alternative assessment (projects and performance tasks) Lower-performing students should be paired or grouped with stronger students that they feel comfortable working with.

Click HERE to listen to a three part podcast with Rick Wormeli from Stenhouse Publishers on Differentiated Instruction and Assessment.

For more information on differentiated instruction, click on the side bar topics for more information.

As teachers take control over the differentiated learning concept, they in fact, give the control to their students over the learning and assessment process.

Have a question on your mind? Leave your question or comment in the box. I’ll respond to it. And don’t forget, you CAN give your students the control they need to become more engaged. I can show you how.

When I go subbing to new schools, I always notice that many teachers complain of the stress of teaching and how many discipline problems they have in their classrooms.

First, new and seasoned teachers who are just starting to build a relationship with students in the classroom are frustrated that they can’t really teach and the discipline problems simply wear them down. 

Almost always they end up reporting students’ behavior in the hallways and in the teacher’s lounge.

And they are also frustrated by the stress of just thinking “how can I improve the standards of student achievement if I have so many discipline problems in my class?”

Many of these teachers need a deeper focus/plan for their classroom management and classroom organization because they they relate to 1-2 smaller discipline related incidents and turn them into classroom issues by putting too much attention on them during the lesson.

But, by far, the most common stress I’ve noticed is how to take control of the discipline problem issue without it taking control over their teaching careers.

The teachers I talk with almost always question how they can really teach some of their students who are discipline problems even though we both know that reporting discipline problems is not always the solution.  

If you’re a new teacher trying to sink or survive and you are feeling constantly frustrated, then you’re not alone. Every new teacher experiences these issues. Every seasoned teacher sometimes feels like a new teacher. All over again.

The difference I’ve noticed between teachers who spend more time disciplining and those who teach and nurture positive student-teacher relationships, is that the successful teachers find ways to connect to their students and never get to a point where discipline problems constantly interfere with their teaching and classroom management plans.

For each teacher, the process is different and there’s no magic recipe I can give you for this to happen.

What do you need to do without reaching the point where discipline problems are constantly interfering in your teaching?

How can you teach more effectively without the stress of discipline problems?

It IS possible to teach without the stress of discipline problems. See how far you go. Take time you need to observe, reflect, record and think… but remember….

Make sure you have a general plan of action, so you don’t have to face the discipline blues all over again come Monday morning.  As a teacher trainer and teacher, I can show you how to do this effectively without letting the class take control of you! Keep your eye on the teacher product pages for more information about my ebooklet of classroom tips and ebook on succeeding with the discipline problem in mixed ability classes. 

Remember, “if you fail to plan, you plan to fail.”

Still have a question or a comment still on your mind? Email me or feel free to leave one in the comment box.

Have a great weekend!

Dorit

What kind of glasses are you wearing today?

I’m talking about the glasses that help you see things up close or far away.

 If you choose to keep your distance, then don’t be surprised when discipline problems begin. That’s usually a sign that you’re not engaging them enough.

You may say: “Well, they’re listening to me.” But there is a difference between listening and being engaged. 

 Just because you’re working the ropes of classroom management and lesson planning, doesn’t mean you can’t make a difference. All it takes is wearing the right kinds of glasses and how and what you choose to see through them.

The spark of many teachers I’ve worked with over the years diminished with time. They enter the teacher’s room frustrated and exhuasted. Students find their way to me and say:  “She/He hates me. She/He doesn’t know how to teach” or “I hate this subject.”

 I don’t have the right words to respond.

I can’t tell you how you should change so as to avoid burnout early on or what you aren’t doing effectively with your classroom management strategies. (unless you email me) But I can tell you a few things in the meantime:

• As a teacher, you choose to make important and great changes in the lives of students.
• As a teacher, you choose to take action instead of handing over the action to somebody else.
• As a teacher, you are intent and purposeful not critical.
• As a teacher, you can reach resolutions and solutions, not pave the way for more conflicts.

In short, you have the tools to make small but major changes. Maybe you are way too consumed by discipline problems and classroom management issues. But in order to keep your sanity in the classroom and keep that “spark” going, you must wear the right glasses.

Just for today, choose to focus on a small element of your classroom management system. Use the following questions to guide you:

• What did I do today to take action and make a difference with my classroom management system?
• How did I take steps to engage my students and stimulate them?

Make a chart that shows your progress and over time, you will notice that small differences equal change. But you’ve got to wear the right glasses to start !

On teacher forums and discussion groups, I often read posts containing pleas from teachers on how they can engage a group of students, a particular student or an entire class.

When students aren’t listening, it’s usually because  of one main thing: they are not engaged with the setup of the classroom and how the lesson is structured.

Thanks to your responses on the last survey, it is clear to see that many new teachers are looking for strategies on how they can engage students as part of an effective classroom management plan.

As you may already realized, when students don’t understand the rules and procedures in your classroom, they could be already on their way to taking control in the classroom. And you know what that means, right?

As a new teacher, you’ll want to set up three simple systems in your classroom that help with the task of effectively engaging your students. Plan on reinforcing these simple systems consistently all throughout the year. Simple systems help your students become more self-directed.They know how your classroom is run and feel safe with a sense of a routine. Simply put, your students know in their hearts that they can succeed and won’t challenge your authority because they WON’T need to.

Here are three basic systems which you should implement from the first day of school:

• Set up your expectations for success in the classroom so students always know exactly what to do.This goes for every task, rule and procedure.
• Set up a system of rules and procedures. Teach and reinforce those rules and procedures that are most crucial for running your lesson effectively. Ideally, you should have three or four rules and a variety of procedures for running your classroom effectively.
• Cater to a variety of learning styles and abilities. Using differentiated instruction, teachers cater to a wide variety of varied interests, cultural backgrounds and world knowledge which results in more dynamic classroom interaction. In a differentiated learning environment, students feel safe because they know they will learn something in your lesson. 

 Keeping students engaged for an entire lesson IS possible. With simple systems, you can help your student succeed.

To learn more about how to implement simple systems, click here to find out about my new ebook on “Succeeding with the Discipline Issue.”

Dealing with discipline issues effectively involves using specific strategies that engage students. You need to use these as much as possible during the lesson sometimes as much as 90% during a lesson. You need try not to “loose it” no matter how much you’re tested.

So how exactly can you NOT loose your cool?

You’ll want to use a strategy that reinforces rules and procedures but also shows a bit of your personal side. You know you’ve lost at the discipline game when students see they’ve angered you. And this is NOT what discipline is all about.

So before you go reporting discipline issues, adopt a strategy that really speaks to your students and engages them right at the very beginning of a lesson.

Have you answered the very QUICK teacher survey (upper right hand side of this blog?)I’d like to analyze the results and learn how to better serve your classroom management and lesson planning needs. Thanks a lot!

If you’ve ever taken loads of paperwork home, you know how time consuming it can all be. Plus, all that checking and marking prevents you from planning lessons, and you are constantly speeding up with the curriculum and the textbook to grade as many assignments as possible.

Teachers need to also be facilitators and allow students to make their own choices, grade their own work and learn from their own mistakes. New teachers find this part difficult because they feel they are giving up their authority. But by giving up control, students take over the learning process.

When students are encouraged to grade their own work for example, they soon learn that the teacher’s grade alone does not give the confirmation they are seeking of their own abilities.

Read on for five new teacher tips on how to spend more time teaching and effectively engaging your students in their own learning.

1) Distribute answer sheets after students completed an exercise. In order to save paper, have students complete the assignments individually in their notebooks. Then they share with a partner or in small groups and finally checking their answers in small groups.

2) Create rubrics using rubrics.com. Students can suggest categories for assessment, self-check and assess their own work and their partner’s work. Also, if you will be doing a lot of essay marking, teach and use a correction key and encourage students to correct their own mistakes. You’ll be glad you did.

3) Encourage student teaching and presentations. Students learn best when they are motivated to learn about a subject that interests them. Students can prepare 10-15 minute talks or teach the class about a subject that interests them.

4) Have students create their own tests. Based on the material you taught, students can prepare in advance test questions. You guide students on types of questions and language use and then collect their questions. Choose a number of questions and then students can take a traditional test or talk about their answers in groups. By doing so, you can then give an individual and a group grade averaging all the grades together.

5) Do Jigsaw Reading. As students acquire more vocabulary and reading skills, involve students in the reading process using jigsaw reading. Have students choose to answer questions based on a certain reading passage. In expert groups, they go over their answers. Then they teach the contents of their passage back in home groups (different representatives of different texts) so that each member of the group knows the main idea of the other passages. In doing so, they are able to answer the other questions relating to different passages.

Using these tips should help you encourage more learning independence and reduce your marking load. Any other tips? Please share in the comment box to encourage other teachers. Many thanks!

Don’t miss out! To receive your free ebook on classroom management and lesson planning tips, sign-up at the box in the upper left hand corner.

When you do, you’ll also receive a free monthly newsletter containing news, tips, information on a wide variety of areas for new teachers such as succeeding with mixed ability classes and diversifying instruction.

Need a workshop on Succeeding with Mixed Ability Classes? Spaces are filling up quickly. Click here to find out more signup details and how you can take control in the classroom.

The question is out: how many of you new teachers (1-5 years of teaching experience) in fact overplan your lessons? As a new teacher 12 years ago, I overplanned my lessons constantly in order to ensure that ALL students were engaged even if it meant restructuring the lesson.

In general, overplanning is a good habit to develop especially when they are used as back-up plans to support parts or even an entire lesson.

The problem however with overplanning becomes even more complicated and tricky during those unexpected moments. How do you know just exactly what activity to use? And for how long? How many activities? This is where experience and knowing the students and their abilities can play a strong role in deciding which activities are appropriate to use. Sometimes you might surprise yourself with your own little spontaneity and find out that you know more than you actually gave yourself credit for.

Overplanning is part of the new teacher’s “hit and miss.” When coping with difficult classes, I constantly overplanned because I eventually wanted to start “hitting” the right level, motivation and interest of my students. When I missed, I started pushing the panic zone leading to more overplanning and general overload.

But just for argument’s sake, let’s take the following classroom situation:

Let’s say you’ve planned twenty minute independent reading session for your middle school students but for some inexplicable reason, they are not focused. You later learn (in an indirect way) that they don’t have the some of the more important reading skills to cope with the story you’ve instructed them to read. More specifically, there are too many unknown words and the theme of the story is rather sophisticated for their middle school years. Then what?

So before you start wipping out those backup plans, make sure you have the following in order:

1. Make sure you plan strong transitions. Look at transitions like “glue” holding the pre-middle-post parts together. Weak transitions are a sure sign that you might loose a few students along the way. You’ll also want to ensure that the transition really does serve their purpose and help connect the introduction to the main part of a lesson. Transitions do not necessarily need to be an additional activity; it’s enough to say a few sentences as “cues” to hint to students what is in store for them.

A new teacher might say to his/her class after they’ve predicted some of the story’s contents and preteaching new vocabulary: “okay, so now let’s confirm some of your predictions and see how many new vocabulary words are in context.”

2. Don’t extend too many of your originally planned activities beyond the original set time. This is where experience will make you a pro and yo’ll be able to eventually distinguish between real or “money” time of trial and error. How much time do students really need to accomplish the task effectively?

In make sure you have enough time for each part, vary the time sequences. The main bulk of your lesson should be no more than 25 minutes while plan activities for just 5 minutes or so. Plan multiple lessons on the same topic if need be so you are not pressed for time.

3. Carefully take note where students are starting to lose focus and become off-task. Ask a fellow colleague or teacher mentor to give you honest solid feedback that aims to improve your teaching. Here is a checklist of general troubleshooting areas.

4. Do you overplan your lessons to include some differentiated instruction? For each level and ability, make sure you have at least 1 activity you can pull from a hat as needed. Write that actiity down and make note of its success. Save the experience for a later date.

If you need a workshop on Succeeding with Mixed Ability Classes then click here to find out more signup details and how you can take control in the classroom. Spaces are filling up fast.

Consider the fact that perhaps the students weren’t focused, which is another classroom issue altogether and requires a different set of actions.

So the question again, is: how many of you new teachers (1-5 years of teaching experience) overplan your lessons? In which classroom situations do they help? Why do you do it? Are other tips you may give to new teachers?

As always, please let me know in the comment section if any of these or previous tips have helped. They’ll give encouragement and support to others. Thank you!

I like to compare teaching to auto-racing.

Ever notice how teachers are constantly on the fast track and never have time to slow down… even in the teacher’s lounge?

It is this fast paced mentality that often brings us away from our students.

Students need to feel a sense of belonging in your class. Don’t let their misbehavior get to you.

Behind every student, there is a person that you don’t know who “has potential.”

But you’ll never really get to find it if you teach on the fast side.

Trying working on a slower side for a while.

Slower paced teachers value student-teacher relationships and do their best to nurture them as much as possible as a means to successfully engage students and subsequently help raise academic performance.

But how is it possible for a new teacher to do this successfully with all the additional pressure of classroom management and lesson planning?

The key to doing this successfully is to something to organize the class with an attitude that shows you mean business, but also affirms a human side to your personality.

So before the bell rings, stand by the door and greet your students.

Or introduce your lesson with more personal statements like: “I can see so many blank faces, does this mean we didn’t do our homework?”

Walk about the room and express something reaffirming to your students.

If you start to have discipline problems, use those situations as difficult as they may be, to build a stronger connection; don’t report the discipline problem right away. Always present the situation as a choice: “You can do X or Y, but yet I see you chose to come to class and do your homework. So what’s wrong?”

You won’t be able to win 100% of your students, but you’ll have engaged them so much more. You’ll be amazed how a little attention getter can go a long way and how engaged your students will soon be.

Try it! You CAN take control of the classroom. All it takes is persistence and an open mind.

Need a workshop on Succeeding with Mixed Ability Classes? Spaces are filling up quickly. Click here to find out more signup details and how you can take control in the classroom.

Like other classroom tasks, adapting textbook activities to suit “tiering” can solve problems of motivation, students becoming bored, students needing a challenge, etc.

This post will provide you with the tips you need to get started in order to “tier” the core activities of your textbook WITHOUT having to make up additional activities. To receive your FREE differentiated learning charts, please email me at sasson92 at gmail.com dot com.

So what exactly is “tiering”?
You may have already come across tiering in your reading. An easy practical application of tiering is providing enough input so that all students CAN work with the same key learning goals but at different “degrees of difficulty”. In an ideal differentiated classroom situation, each student is working at a level of challenge appropriate to his/her readiness needs. In a differentiated classroom, teachers can tier assignments, projects, learning centers, homework, and even assessments.

(taken from Carol Ann Tomlinson, An Educator’s Guide to Differentiating Instruction. Houghton Mifflin, 2006)

As a new teacher you want to aim to engage ALL students in your class. A natural starting point is the textbook. However, not all textbooks cater to tiering. And, it is often the middle group that is most often ignored.

This is where YOU come in as a teacher.

So what can you do?

Use the planning template below to help get you started. You can also receive FREE planning charts via email. My ebook Succeeding with Mixed Ability Classes shows how a differentiated classroom works and what you as a new teacher, need to do in order to continually engage your students. Spaces are also filling up quickly for my workshops on Succeeding with Mixed Ability Classes. Find out here if there is a workshop located in your area.

Name and level of textbook: __________________________
Grade and level of students: ______________________

Procedure:

1.Open your textbooks to a unit/page your class is currently working on.

2.Write down the skill(s) the activity reinforces: (Examples: finding the main idea, working with phonics)

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

3. Now look at the level: What level does the activity specifically cater for? (lower performing, middle, strong) What level(s) is/are not accounted for?

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

4. In pairs or groups (according to similar grades/levels/abilities), try and come up with 1-2 activities for each level/skill. You can email me for a chart I prepared to help organize your information.

5. Now expand on the content part of your activity (#4) and organize HOW and WHEN students will be engaged. (Examples: pair work, group work, individualization) Again, please email me at sasson92 at gmail dot com and I will send you your FREE differentiated learning charts.

If you have any questions or comments, you can use the comment box or email me your questions and I will try to provide quick and timely answers.

And don’t forget… You CAN take control in the classroom. Try it today!