Positive Classroom Management

I love this topic. It is heavily related to the previous post about student engagement. If students are engaged, discipline problems are much less likely to pop up. Students often misbehave because they are bored or because they don't understand the lesson. In first grade, it is all classroom management all the time. Positive management is definitely my style. It is amazing how quickly students shape up when the good students start getting attention. Why not give attention to the good students and ignore the bad behavior? Of course I can't ignore all the bad behavior, but positivity helps. This week I tried something new called "mystery student". I told them that I would be picking mystery students throughout the day. If they did what they were supposed to do, the whole class would get a point. Points earn fun time for the students. It worked like a charm. As soon as I would mention that I picked a mystery student, they would all get super studious. It was a great week. Thanks for the idea, Dana!

Student Engagement

Student engagement is the meat and potatoes of teaching. If students are not engaged, they are not going to learn. The days of passive listening are over. We are a multitasking society. Students must learn while doing. An added benefit of an engaged class is that everyone is having a good time. A positive atmosphere goes a long way. Of course, there are many ways to engage students. Some strategies will not be everyone's favorite. Writing, for example, is hard for many first graders, especially the struggling readers. They still need to practice the skill, but we make sure to do many other engagement activities as well. One of my favorites is whole body movement. Spelling time is a great time for whole body movement. I like to break up our reading block with spelling in the middle. Not only do the movements help students learn to spell better, but they also get the students out of their seats and get their blood flowing. We like to clap our spelling words based on the type of letter we are spelling. This also doubles as handwriting practice. Letters which go to the top line are clapped over the head. Letters hitting the middle only are clapped in front. Letters going under the line are clapped down. For example, the word, "bag" would be clapped up, middle, and down as we say the letters and spell the word. All teachers struggle with classroom management. It was definitely something I struggled with when starting out. One veteran teacher warned me, "If you don't have classroom management, you have nothing." Then she proceeded to run her classroom like a bootcamp full of robots. I tried this approach, but we were all miserable. There had to be a better way. What I've found is that a positive, structured classroom full of engagement opportunities will eliminate most behavior problems. Engagement is the key. For my most recent peer observation, I had a math lesson all planned out. We were using work mats to relate addition to subtraction. We chanted, "part-part-whole," and used our arms to show adding to the whole and subtracting from the whole. The students really got the lesson, which was a big improvement from my attempts to teach the concept last year. I felt good about the lesson going in because I was prepared. I was still worried about that unknown factor: how would the kids behave? Would I get 85% engagement? It turns out, I didn't need to worry. Both my peer observer and observing administrators had nothing but positive feedback. They said my greatest strength was classroom management. That felt really good!

STEM

I was excited when the topic of STEM came up in my student teaching group. All I knew was that it stood for science, technology, engineering, and math. I didn't know how to implement it. Since we do science first semester at my school, it was good to see how the process works. I will be brainstorming a first grade project for us to try after fall break. In the meantime, I decided to use the evaluation process of plus and delta to a writing project we were working on. We are learning how to write personal narratives. After a few days of writing rough drafts, the students traded papers. They were asked to write a plus and a delta on their neighbor's paper. It was fun to incorporate this into a writing assignment.