Sit Down and SHUT UP!

(Obviously the title is meant to be humorous instead of factual)

Classroom management is an issue that i saw very well, and very poorly handled at Cherry Creek. SOme teachers had no control over the behavior of their students and others had such well-behaved classrooms that I thought they must have been slipping benedryl into the water fountains.

My wife has simple classroom rules, but the kids know that they are to adhere to them. The best part about it is that the rules are developed by the students the first day of class. This past year it boiled down to 4: Be respectful; have fun; try your best; always listen to the teacher. That is all that they have to remember. Simple. The beauty of it is that other aspects of classroom behavior fall under these simple rules: Don't call out answers instead of raising your hand; walk quietly in the hallway; whisper when you need to talk to your neighbor. The kids police themselves a great deal as well.

If, for example, someone calls out there is usually a hissed "raise your hand" and the offender raises their hand. If they are noisy in the hallway the line leaders take care of it because the line leaders (switched every day) get rewarded for handling their lines well. That was the other thing that I liked, the reward system was based on line leaders, lunch leaders and materials leaders. Every day the roles would change and whichever leader was the most efficient and quiet in getting their job done would get points to be used on various rewards.

There are other things that I may implement but her methods worked well for her and her students were well behaved and clearly knew what was expected of them.

All Systems... ENGAGE

    Student Engagement is one of my focuses. I detested the cookie cutter way that teachers worked when I was in school. Worksheets, question and answer, quiz. SNORE.
    I shadowed a few different teachers during my observation time and the best one for engaging his students was a second grade teacher named Mr. Sedgewick. The main thing he did was make things fun. Rather than sitting in awkward silence he would have kids shout out the answer and start picking good points out of the air and writing them down. Worksheets were basically abolished unless it was a team race on the worksheets. The thing that impressed me most was that he would include all the answers he got, even those blatantly wrong, and make them work.
   I have seen kids get discouraged in atmospheres where they get a wrong answer but in this format he was able to make everything work, even wrong answers by pulling some aspect of right out of it. The kids weren't afraid to speak up and they enjoyed participated. It was very refreshing.

The hardest hat a teacher wears.

Teachers play a lot of different, and challenging roles. I think the hardest role they play, or in other words the hardest hat they wear, is one of truly caring about their students.

Let me explain, I have seen my wife in tears countless times in worry about one or more of her students. Whether it be a student who has difficulty learning, a student who is bullied or a bully, or a student with a hard life at home, my wife is empathetic to them and their needs and wants solely to help them. Where is the line drawn between caring and caring too much? Who and what can she let go of? This is an answer we have yet to come up with.

A teacher, as I have seen, Loves their children. Loves them and wants the best for them. A teacher thrills in their students' successes and wallows in the students' defeats. I've seen my wife wrack her brain repeatedly to find ways to alternatively teach a lesson. I have also seen her worry over the best way to reach a troubled student.

Honestly, I think empathy, sympathy, and love are the hardest things a teacher has to juggle.

Entry 4: Assesment

Something that I admired about this teacher was that assessments were informal and fun, therefore the students didn't know they were being assessed and didn't have that pressure hanging over them. Instead of having a paper with questions about the water cycle they were given a blank paper and had access to crayons, pencils, rulers, art supplies, etc, and asked to diagram the water cycle however they liked and present their idea to a small group.

Creativity ran wild and each project looked slightly different from the rest, but they all showed the students understanding of the concept. I do not know if this is necessarily possible with the majority of assessments that need to be done, but it was extremely effective in this instance.