Most important thing?

This is kind of a difficult question and I've been sitting on it for a couple of days. I thought of all sorts of things that I've observed, both good and bad, and the best advice I can give myself or any prospective teacher is to be Patient.

Patience is something that to me is the basis for all the other teaching skills that I've seen. Be patient. Step back and evaluate what is really going on. Is there a behavior issue? Is the child asking for clarification or asking what the deeper meaning of the lesson is? Are there extracurricular issues impeded or increasing a student's learning ability? Is there anything else that I can do to aid the learning process? Is there anything I can do to better control my classroom?

Be patient. School is hard. Life is hard. Students have so much going on that sometimes they can't be completely present. Be patient. Control, don't react. Be patient. Be an adult. In all things be patient and everything else will be easier sorted out.

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.

Exceptional Exceptions

Of the several previously mentioned students with exceptionalities, two really stood out as needing modifications in the school room to enable them to succeed. Alex has a lot of trouble staying on task, but when he does get down to it REALLY dislikes disturbances. To accommodate him, the teacher has set up a project table where he can go to work on his papers/tests/reading without worry of having a wiggly or otherwise distracting neighbor. The teacher would then ensure that he knew exactly how much time was left so he didn't have a melt down when it came time to put things away and do a different activity.

Betty, on the other hand, needed to have a student next to her who was ahead of the curve and could explain and reexplain things when Betty got lost. Long lists of instructions are lost on Betty and she does not much care to have an adult speaking to her in a one on one situation, due to her previous abuse. It has been found however that one of several children in the classroom can help bring her potential out as they have a good grasp on being able to break things down more simply for her than the teacher could. She's happy and tries, but just doesn't get the harder subjects... or any subject, really... without someone holding her hand every step of the way.

Group Work Shmoup work

     I had the opportunity to work in a small group this past week while giving a presentation on reptiles to the 4th grade classes.
     Group work is not usually how I do these lessons, but this time it was necessary because the classes had different activities that they were doing and didn't have a solid block of time that they could all be gathered. It was funny to me that there was one or two kids in every group that set the tone for that group. If the group had serious students in it, they stayed on task, had intelligent questions, made connections between what they'd been previously taught and the animals that were in front of them.
     If the group was full of 'goofballs' the questions were more along the lines of  "where do lizards poop." I say one or two students because that's all that it seemed to take to change the tone altogether. One group had 2 boys that were really interested in reptiles and how reptiles lived and moved etc. The other group I worked with had a student who, I'm told, gets sent to the office everyday for making disturbances to get the other students to laugh.