Category Archives: Best Practices

Articles that gives ideas or suggestions for best teaching practices.

Cruising or Crashing: What’s Your Experience with Technology in the Classroom?

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OC turn 3-1Having devoted nearly three and a half decades to perfecting my practice, I’d love to feel as though I could cruise leisurely through my finely-tuned lesson plans until I sail languidly into the port of retirement. However, like many teachers at all stages of their career, I feel instead that I am racing at breakneck speed through a vast ocean of technological innovation, hanging on for dear life lest I be knocked overboard into a sea of electronic devices and internet resources. Will I drown? Will I be eaten alive? Which devices and resources are the lifesavers, and which ones are the sharks? It’s hard to say.

Here is an four-minute YouTube video that demonstrates the urgency to finding the answer to this question:

I recommend searching out an innovative program at your local university. Having gotten my feet wet swimming in the pool of courses in Educational Technology offered by Cal State Long Beach, I can truly say I have found a beacon and a buoy. The skills I have learned there, the leadership of a remarkable team of professors, and the collaboration of my fellow learners—these have become my best life preservers.

Don’t flounder around out there on your own! Once you have found the leaning community that best meets your needs, hang on, employ your most tried-and-true survival strategies, and enjoy the ride!

What We Can Learn From Successful Teachers

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TeacherAppleTN1[1]One of the most recent blog posts I shared talked about the characteristics of great teachers. This post generated a great deal of interest. Many teachers enjoy reading stories about remarkable teachers, but more than anything they are looking for ways to improve their own practice. For this reason, I thought I would share another article that I came across on the internet which talks about the characteristics of great teachers. This one was written by Beth Lewis, a graduate of UCLA, and fellow educator. I hope you find the thoughts she expresses in this essay valuable.
What We Can Learn From Successful Teachers
by Beth Lewis

The teachers I admire most are those who remain intellectually curious and professionally vital both inside and outside the classroom for decades. They avoid stagnation at all costs and maintain an enviable passion for children and the learning process. They remain vivid in the students’ memories forever because of their creativity, sense of fun, and compassion.Here are the qualities I feel contribute most to a successful, durable, and happy teaching career:

1. Successful teachers hold high expectations.
The most effective teachers expect great accomplishments from their students, and they don’t accept anything less. In education, expectations form a self-fulfilling prophecy. When teachers believe each and every student can soar beyond any imagined limits, the children will sense that confidence and work with the teacher to make it happen.
2. They think creatively.
The best teachers think outside the box, outside the classroom, and outside the norm. They leap outside of the classroom walls and take their students with them! As much as possible, top teachers try to make classroom experiences exciting and memorable for the students. They seek ways to give their students a real world application for knowledge, taking learning to the next action-packed level. Think tactile, unexpected, movement-oriented, and a little bit crazy… then you’ll be on the right track.
3. Top teachers are versatile and sensitive.
The best teachers live outside of their own needs and remain sensitive to the needs of others, including students, parents, colleagues, and the community. It’s challenging because each individual needs something different, but the most successful teachers are a special breed who play a multitude of different roles in a given day with fluidity and grace, while remaining true to themselves.
4. They are curious, confident, and evolving.
We’re all familiar with the stagnant, cynical, low-energy teachers who seem to be biding their time until retirement and watching the clock even more intently than their students. That’s what NOT to do. In contrast, the teachers I most admire renew their energy by learning new ideas from younger teachers, and they aren’t threatened by new ways of doing things on campus. They have strong core principles, but somehow still evolve with changing times. They embrace new technologies and confidently move forward into the future.
5. They are imperfectly human.
The most effective educators bring their entire selves to the job. They celebrate student successes, show compassion for struggling parents, tell stories from their own lives, laugh at their mistakes, share their unique quirks, and aren’t afraid to be imperfectly human in front of their students. They understand that teachers don’t just deliver curriculum, but rather the best teachers are inspiring leaders that show students how should behave in all areas of life and in all types of situations. Top teachers admit it when they don’t know the answer. They apologize when necessary and treat students with respect.
6. Successful teachers emphasize the fun in learning and in life.
The teachers I admire most create lighthearted fun out of serious learning. They aren’t afraid to be silly because they can snap the students back into attention at will – with just a stern look or a change in tone of voice. I often think of Disney Teacher of the Year Ron Clark who made one of his Essential 55 rules be “Do not bring Doritos into the school building” simply because he hated Doritos himself! This irreverent rule (sneaked in amongst the more important class rules) shows a silly, human side of the teacher while modeling for the students that we can have fun while we get work done.
Next Steps.
For those of us aiming to increase these qualities in our professional lives, it can be intimidating to think that we have to do everything all at once. Instead, I recommend choosing one of these qualities to focus on each school year and expand your repertoire slowly but surely. Even the most successful teachers have to start somewhere!

Creating a Memory Book for Your Class

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TeacherAppleTN1[1]At my school, every teacher on staff has a Homeroom class. Our school is built for 4,000 students, and the concern is that with a student population that large, a kid could get lost in the shuffle. In Homeroom, the teacher strives to connect with each individual student, fosters team-building among the students in the group, and nurtures those relationships from the first day of their freshman year until the day they graduate. Today, I am going to share with you a strategy I use with my own Homeroom class. It’s a scrapbooking idea, and if you like it, you can adapt it to fit your own class needs, whatever they may be.

For this memory book, you will need a photo album or a large three-ring binder, 8 1/2″ by 11″ scrapbook pages, some page protectors, and some colored papers. I recommend you use acid-free pages and papers available at your local Michael’s or scrapbooking store. You could also invest in at least one acid-free journaling pen. If you’re into decorating stickers and such, you can buy some ready-made, but personally I prefer a rather simpler-looking page.

At the beginning of each year I ask a colleague to take a photograph of me and my class, and then I print a copy of the roster from the attendance program. These items go into the class memory book. Throughout the year, I add photos of students engaged in our weekly Homeroom activities. If the lesson calls for a written response, I collect a few representative examples and place them in the scrapbook, too. Also, if attend their extra-curricular activities, I take pictures and include those, too. I try to make sure that there is a visual record of some kind of each and every student in the group. At least once a year, I invite the students to create their own personal page to add to the scrapbook.

Since we have the same Homeroom group for all four years they attend high school, I am able to add to the scrapbook every year until their graduation. The memory book becomes a sort of yearbook of just this one class, and it shows how they have physically and socially grown over their high school years. At the end of their senior year, I offer to make color photocopies of the pages in the book and then I have the pages spiral bound. I only ask that they pay for the printing and binding costs, which is approximately $10 per copy. After the copies are made, I place the names of every student in the class in a bowl, draw out one name, and give the original scrapbook to the winner. Or you could keep the original as a memento for yourself, if you would like. By the time they graduate, you’ve probably bonded pretty closely with the kids and would like to keep the memory book to remember them by. Or you can use it as an example for the next group.

I like to put the memory book on display during Open House and Back-to-School Night. Parents love to thumb through the pages and look at the photos and writings of their own kids. Additionally, this scrapbook was very useful when we were going through the accreditation process. It was a visual record of the kinds of things we are doing in Homeroom, and it substantiated our claims that in Homeroom we are forming important relationships with our students.

I have gotten a lot of positive feedback to the scrapbook idea throughout the years. Feel free to create a scrapbook for your own class. Your students will love it!

What Makes a Great Teacher? Chris Lehmann Shares His Thoughts

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When I established this blog, my intention was to recognize and celebrate great teachers. There are many loyal readers of this blog who are, I am sure, interested in the stories about these talented and gifted educators. But I am aware that, more than anything, classroom teachers want to know how they themselves can improve their practice, and so today I would like to share with you an article that I stumbled across on the internet yesterday. The article was written by Chris Lehmann, the founding principal of the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia. He wrote this article a few years ago when he was a teacher at Beacon School, a progressive public high school in Manhattan. Here is Lehmann’s answer to the question What makes a great teacher?
lehman_chris_promopic[1]What Makes a Great Teacher?
by Chris Lehmann
What makes a great teacher? Sort of an important question, right? I’ve seen teachers who worked for hours on their lessons, who were scholars in the field fail miserably, and I’ve seen teachers who, if you give them five minutes before they walked in to glance over their material, they could run a class for an hour on any topic under the sun. In the end, what makes a great teacher? I wish I had a magic eight-ball that allowed me to figure this one out, but it’s something I’ve really given a lot of thought to… and I think what follows are at least some interesting ways to think about the profession. So what makes a great teacher?

1) Passion for teaching. This can manifest itself so many ways. I’m the “jump around the room” kind of teacher, and sure, that comes from a lot of passion, but some of the best teachers I’ve known have had a passion that students had to be quiet to catch onto.

2) Love of kids. You laugh, but it’s true! I’ve seen people come in and talk about teaching and talk about how much they love their subject and know about their subject, but they never mention the kids. Worse, we had an interview once where the teacher clearly knew his stuff, but he basically admitted that his classroom management style was fear and intimidation. Not who I want teaching kids I care about.

3) Love of their subject. Again… pretty important. I spent four years dropping by Mike Thayer’s classroom because to watch him explain physics or calculus was, for me, to understand how you could have a passion for something that was always a mystery for me. Great teachers not only love their subject, but they love to share that joy with students.

4) Understanding of the role of a school in a child’s life. High school is more than the sum of the classes the kids take. It’s a time to grow, explore, try on identities, find joys that might just last a lifetime. Sometimes the best teaching we do happens on basketball courts, in the halls after a class, at a local coffee shop or in a drama studio. The best teachers know that they are teachers for much more than the time they are in the physical classroom.

5) A willingness to change. This one gets overlooked sometimes, I think. I’ve written about this before, but it bears repeating. We talk about how schools should be transformative for kids, but I think they can be just as transformative for teachers. If you expect kids to be changed by their interaction with you, it’s got to be a two-way street.

6) A work ethic that doesn’t quit. It’s a hard, draining job that will demand all that you can give sometimes. You’ve got to be able to have some balance in your life, but there are very few teachers who can be effective by cramming everything they need to do into the hours allocated by the average teacher’s contract. (And for the record, the overwhelming majority of the teachers I’ve met put in hours well above and beyond the contract.)

7) A willingness to reflect. You’ve got to be able to ask why things went the way they did… both on the good and the bad days. And you have to be able to admit when the reasons it went bad were because of what you did, not what the students did. (Equally important is the understanding that often things go right because of what the kids brought to the table, not because your lesson plan should be bronzed.) Teaching requires a willingness to cast a critical eye on your practice, your pedagogy and your self. And it can be brutal.

8) Organization. My personal Achilles heel, and one of the things I’m always working to improve. My Palm Pilot helped, really. But I hate paperwork and official looking documents, and it kills me. I am amazed at the people like Dale Lally who seem to get his papers handed back before the kids hand them in or seems to be able to put his hands on every unit he’s ever taught within a moment’s notice. Kids know what to expect, they know he’s going to be organized and have a structure to his class… and he’s still creative and spontaneous and interesting. I can only imagine how much better of a teacher I’d be if the structure of everything I did was just a little more organized.

9) Understanding that being a “great teacher” is a constant struggle to always improve. I think I’ve had some moments of great teaching in my career, but I also still see all the holes in my teaching — sadly, often times mirroring holes in my self — and I still want to get better… because I think I’ve got a long way to go to be a great teacher every day. And even if I get better at everything I see as weaknesses now, I can only imagine what new challenges will face me on that day.

10) Enough ego to survive the hard days. The tough days will leave you curled up under a desk, convinced that you can’t teach or the world is too hard for these kids or the work is too much or whatever the problem was that day… you have to have enough sense of self to survive those days.

11) Enough humility to remember it’s not about you. It’s about the kids. If your ego rules your classroom, if the class turns into “me vs. them” or if you can’t understand that a sixteen year old might be able to tell you something you don’t know, then don’t teach. Or at least, don’t teach high school.

12) A willingness to work collaboratively. Sure, there are some great teachers who close the door to their classroom and do what they want, but I think you send a strange message to the kids that way sometimes. Teachers are part of a school community, and even where that community can be flawed (and lots of schools are), a great teacher should be willing to work to make the community a better place.

Anne Sullivan Macy: The Strategies She Used to Achieve Helen Keller’s Miracle

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$RDT5O7NAlmost everyone has heard of Anne Sullivan Macy, the remarkable teacher who worked with Helen Keller, an extremely intelligent blind and deaf child from Tuscumbia, Alabama. The relationship between the teacher and the student is explored in The Miracle Worker by William Gibson, an iconic piece of American literature that is frequently taught in public schools. This award-winning play depicts the exact moment at which, due to Anne’s expert instructional efforts, Helen was able to grasp the concept of language. This knowledge unlocked a world of isolation for the little girl, allowing her to connect with her fellow human beings, and making it possible for her to earn a university degree at a time when educating women was rare. The scene is sweet. But what strategies, exactly, did the miracle-working teacher use in order to achieve this breakthrough? After extensive reading on the subject, I think I may be able to identify a few of them.

First of all, Anne read every bit of published material available in her day about the education of handicapped students. Knowledge of pedagogy is the first step to effective practice. In addition to this, Anne had the “advantage” of personal experience, as she herself had wrestled with severe vision impairment as a result of trachoma. I’m sure at one time or another, we’ve all met an educator who is particularly effective at working with students who are facing the same challenges the teacher himself faced as a youngster.

Second, Anne was a keen observer, and she made it a point to watch the normal processes of language acquisition. She then replicated those processes as best she could to fit the particular circumstances and needs of her student. Today, we would probably call this strategy recognizing brain-based learning, and coordinating teaching strategies to fit the way the brain naturally learns. Also, experts generally agree that much of Anne’s success in teaching Helen language was attributed to the fact that the teacher always communicated to her student with complete sentences. Concrete nouns such as water or spoon, verbs such was pump or run, or adjectives such as hot or smooth,  may be easy to convey. But abstract ideas such as beauty or truth, or certain parts of speech such as pronouns and some prepositions are much more difficult to impart to an individual unable to see or hear.

Third, Anne was especially adept at incorporating experiential learning into her lesson plans. The effectiveness of “learning by doing” has been well documented, but in a day and age when most instruction consisted of rote memorization without necessarily comprehending, Anne’s insistence on teaching through constructed experience was truly innovative. Wading through the creek water, climbing the tree, holding the chick as it hatched from the egg—experiences like these were the staples of Anne’s instructional program.

I have included an abbreviated but concise biography of this amazing teacher in my book, Chalkboard Champions, which can also be found at amazon.com at the following link: Chalkboard Champions.