#teaching tips

This sounds like a gofundme.

It's not a gofundme.

Basically, I'm a teacher who teaches 12-15 year olds during the weekends. It's not a paid job, it's more of a paid-volunteering gig, but I really really enjoy teaching so I've been doing it for a couple of years. However, this year, I got a promotion of sorts and bumped upto teaching from 6-8 yos to 12-15 yos.

sO.

I've had previous bad teacher experiences in the past (read: My School's Local Mafia Boss), and though I can smoothly engage little children during lessons, teenagers are a different story. ...Cuz I'm a teenager myself. Like, I'm 2-4 years older than the oldest ones in class max.

I really, really want to be a good teacher. And I'm tryingggg, but making lesson plans for older students is harder than younger students. I WAS WONDERING, do any of you have any interactive and interesting ideas for engaging classrooms??? I genuinely want to be a good teacher and nothing like the shit ones I've had in the past. I care about my students and I really want them to have fun in my classes while also genuinely learning content.

What tips would you give a new pre k teacher to help them handle challenging scenarios with children with ASD? I wasn’t given any training specific to this. I want to help these children in productive ways that also keep them feeling safe.

For instance, a child who dreads washing their hands (but we aren’t allowed to provide wet wipes or hand sanitizer.) What do? I’ll usually wash my hands with them and talk to them the whole time and explain everything. “I’m going to give you soap now, I know you don’t like it, but it will get rid of the germs. When you go potty, you get germs on your hands that can make you sick. I don’t want you to get sick because I care about you.” They will cry the whole time, but go through the motions. Should I change any of this?

What if we thought about our syllabus as a form of communication instead of as a contract?

It’s that class development time of year! Okay, maybe it should be “class revision time of year” or “putting final touches on my class” time of year . . . But teachers are busy, so if you’re writing your syllabus right now, I wanted to share some thoughts on how to use it as a communication tool that speaks directly to your students. This post comes from a tip I wrote for the Teaching Tips…

Remember that they have long days at school too. A lot of the time, if they’re fighting you on something because it’s “boring” or they “just don’t want to,” - they need a break. Let them have five minutes to draw or tell you about their day. Something unrelated to music. They’ll likely be a little easier to work with after they have a breather and know that you understand what they need.

Another thing is that kids can have incredibly fixed mindsets. I know for sure I used to, and it took me a long time to grow out of it. These kids are so scared of making mistakes or not being perfect on the first try that they just won’t try at all. Yesterday I had to spend a good chunk of time explaining to one of my students that I’m not here to judge her. She’s gonna make mistakes, she has to. It’s part of the process, it means she’s learning. If she was perfect at piano right off the bat I’d be out of a job.

Be careful about how you say things. I know it’s obvious, but a lot of people don’t realize the power of changing how you speak to children. “Nice phrasing, let’s go back and look at a couple of those notes real quick... you know the ones? Yeah you know the ones.” Vs. “you played three wrong notes go back and try again.” You see what I mean? And while it might seem kind of silly, phrasing instruction like this does a world of good for making your student feel comfortable and like they can actually accomplish these crazy things you’re making them do.

Of course, kids are hilariously unpredictable things and you can’t always avoid a bit of conflict. But I’ve seen too many kids stop playing music because their instruction time was too forced and stressful.

School of Dehradun and colleges are progressively investing in academic technologies to enhance institutional efficiency, enhance learning, and higher prepare learners for the demands of the twenty-first century, with substantial growth in technology-supported learning and a myriad of recent technologies released every year.

In the wake of this ed-tech revolution, many innovative approaches to using technology have full-grown in style among educators, including; 

Virtual lecture rooms, wherever instructors deliver content on-line using resources such as PowerPoint shows and YouTube videos, and students submit assignments by uploading assignments via on-line portals.

Flipped learning, wherever educational content is delivered to students on-line, and learners study the content ahead before coming into class, enabling lecturers to maximize class time by engaging learners in the discussion, group work, and analysis.

Blended Learning, an approach that merges the distance learning on-line surroundings with the normal face-to-face classroom to integrate technology to support students to realize academic objectives.

The Possibilities

While VR is often an incredible resource for teaching history by bringing lost civilizations back to life and enabling school students to explore these cities and witness the means of life' first hand', there are masses a lot of applications for VR besides field journeys. Virtual reality is often employed in several areas of the syllabus, as well as Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Maths, English, and Languages, with interactive simulations that enable learners to engage with advanced theories and ideas.

Virtual Reality technology might conjointly give a chance for students to participate in exchange programs with faculties from alternative parts of the globe. Imagine taking your students on an exchange trip to a school in Asia or South America for the day. - what the right way to increase multicultural understanding among young students!

Alongside pre-developed curriculum and activities offered by ed-tech firms, these resources conjointly give innovative tools for teachers to develop their own VR lessons tailored to their learners' needs. Lecturer's resources also embrace tracking systems to record and analyze every one of the students' progress through the virtual environment to make sure learners stay on task and benefit from these resources.

The advantages

When implemented and appropriately applied, there are a multitude of advantages for students learning with virtual reality technology.

Learning is active instead of passive: One of the cornerstones of modern education theory is that learning is more practical once it's active rather than passive. VR technologies give excellent opportunities to interact actively and engage with educational content.

Immersive experience avoids distraction: Students are often distracted by all manner of interruptions, but within the virtual reality environment, these distractions are removed, and students are encircled entirely by engaging educational activities.

Engaging for twenty-first-century learners: This generation of students have full-grown up surrounded by technology, and many respond to computer-generated learning higher than traditional ways. Virtual reality learning allows students to have interaction with the subject matter in a way they're comfy with.

The VR experience helps learners understand complicated ideas: Within the same means that student's understanding of advanced scientific concepts is greatly enhanced through the participation of experiments in the laboratory, students' virtual reality experiences can support their ability to raised understand complex theories, during a wide selection of various subjects.

VR Learning is well matched for different learning styles: Differentiated learning in the ancient schoolroom, to make sure that students with totally different learning designs are all engaged, are often extremely tough to implement. Virtual reality assisted learning can increase teachers' abilities to have interaction kinesthetic learners and visual learners in new innovative ways in which support their learning a lot of effectively.

The Future

It may still appear a long way off, but the probabilities are that virtual reality technologies can, like smartboards and tablets before them, become a typical feature in modern faculties within the next couple of years, are you ready?

Everyone knows that the social and emotional well-being of a child is just as important as their academic skills.  In fact, our district just put “Culture and Climate”  at the top of our teacher evaluations.  If a student doesn’t feel safe and loved in each classroom, they they aren’t going to learn. Period.

Sure, there many ways to build a positive culture in your classroom, such as standing outside your door while students are coming in, giving them opportunities to define the rules in your classroom, letting them choose their seats, going to their extra-curricular activities, giving them a survey, etc. However, one of the BEST ways (in my opinion), is to spend time really getting to know your students on Day 1 of the school year. That being said, you need to spend time getting to know them every. single. day. of. the. year!  

For the first five or ten minutes, my class never started with silent reading or a writing prompt; it started with an attendance question.  Each day, I would ask a question (you can see my list below of questions), and I would take attendance by having each student answer the question.  My students told me they love this part of the class because it gives their brain time to transition from one class or subject to the next.  They also explained that this was a great way to get to learn about each other...who has similar answers, funny answers, and/or were extremely creative each time.  In middle school, you never know what answers you are going to get.  One year, I had a group of boys that somehow worked in a Morgan Freeman answer every single time.  Last year, a boy answered with something about curry each day.  

So, what does this look like? Up in the front of my classroom, I have a podium with a “special stool,” and on that podium is my list of questions and a print out of student’s names.  For the first week, I tell the students my question, and I call on each student for their answer.  When everyone is done, I tell them my answer to the question.  (You’ll learn that if you give your answer first, you will have at least ten other students give that same answer.)  This is a great way to learn the names of students as well.  It is always my goal to learn every single name by the end of the week, even when I have 170 students.  There is no way I could do achieve this without doing the attendance question first.

At the end of the first week and for the rest of the year, I have a different student each day that does the attendance question.  Obviously, this would be more difficult if you teach students under third grade, but here is why I do it. The students LOVE sitting in the special chair up front with this responsibility (yes, even teenagers).  It also gives me time to sit at my desk for five minutes while I am doing the attendance on my computer at the same time (yay, a chance to sit down), or I am spending that time passing back papers and handling individual student needs.

Some of you may question whether you can give up those five or ten minutes of class.  My answer is yes!  When you build a positive culture and climate in your room, you are saving yourself time from discipline problems later on in the year. Maybe you have that one student that makes you want to poke your eye out, and then you learn that you both share a love of horses.  What better way than to connect with that student. I have also learned that the students start to feel like a family and become protective of each other, as long as you don’t allow negativity or snickering during the attendance questions.  I stress that there is never a wrong answer; every one gets to feel how they feel. Kids are vulnerable, and it’s important to set up that safe place for them. If you allow students to make fun of an answer, you are actually killing the positive culture in your room, and NOW you are wasting your time in the beginning of class.  Have you ever met a person who doesn’t like to share something about themselves? No, me neither.  

This year, remember that the social/emotional part of a child is just as important as the subject that you are teaching.  You may find that students never want to leave the room during the attendance question.  There is a reason for that. Create that classroom where kids may pause before wanting to leave the room.

Feel free to use my list of questions.  At the end of the list, I also have “Would You Rather Questions” that I use when I have less time and only want a one-word answer.  This list is always a work in progress, so if you have questions that you think would be great to add, please let me know.  I almost have you covered with enough questions for the whole year, though.

Here is the link to the questions: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nEwWvnacTYUvlm7i3kqGmhY0BKuOjcKxFznZxPfTHOY/edit?usp=sharing