It’s your first teaching job, and you just got the shiny (to you at least) key to your new classroom. You have a blank canvas to work with and a lot of energy (bless you). Or maybe you’ve been teaching in the same room for six years, and you’re looking for a revamp. […]
If you walk into a classroom full of students on the first day of school and start barking orders, don’t be surprised if you’re met with resistance. We are long past the time when a teacher held the respect of students simply because they were the adult in charge. Today, gaining the respect of students […]
A majority of communication is nonverbal, yet we, as teachers, sometimes forget the power of a look or gesture to communicate our message. When managing a classroom, establishing nonverbal signals not only saves us time and effort (not mention our voices), it can teach students to pay more attention to the world around them. Here […]
There’s no way around it: getting bad feedback is hard. Getting bad feedback that you think is unjustified is even harder. Sometimes it’s just a bad day: you ran late in the morning and were still preparing after the bell rang. Your kids arrived from an assembly wired up and couldn’t settle down for 20 […]
Having the perfect, smoothest running classroom seems like a pipe dream when you’re standing in the middle of chaos and you still have 80 minutes left in the period. You planned your lessons with care, spent an hour or so preparing materials and rehearsing each stage, and within 10 minutes you’re caught up in students […]