Pre-School Jitters

I'm starting my second year on Monday... and I'm scared out of my mind. I'm sure things will be great and I'll have students I'll instantly connect with, but I'm not sure of how many. Luckily I'm new at the school, so students haven't heard anything about me.

I'm also worried about how my ideas will pan out. Will my laid-back-ness make them completely unruly? I don't want to be a dictator, but will they be crazy without it? I don't know, but I'm going to stand by my philosophy that if you connect with the students, then good classroom management will inevitably follow because students will be willing to do what you ask. We'll see how it goes...

I'm also worried about trying out an Assessment For Learning classroom. (Read the book by the same name if you don't know what that looks like.) It is definitely non-traditional (yay!) but will it work with 30-36 students in each period totaling up to almost 200?

Well, most of these fears will either be realized or dispelled next week.... :s

Another book done: Assessment for Learning. And what I'm going to do about it.

So I finished another book on using formative assessment to change your classroom procedures. It is called Assessment for Learning by Paul Black and a bunch of other people. If follows a similar vein to Embedded Formative Assessment. It reads a lot like a research paper. They got a group of teachers together and had them come up with assessment strategies to use in their classrooms and they tried them out. The study covered the course of two years.

I didn't find this book as engaging as Embedded Formative Assessment, but it was definitely more real. This involved real teachers using strategies they collaborated on with real students. The authors were also real about the implications of their study: the teachers had success, but there is no "one size fits all" strategies that they can prescribe to all teachers. Everyone has different students and each teacher has a different style. So the strategies that one would use is different from the ones another teacher would use.

Reading this book brings me to my final conclusion before starting school next week: I need to pick a few (2-ish) strategies to try out and implement right away. I need to make changes slowly which is completely against my typical tendency to just go crazy with ideas.

My strategies to try first:

• No hands up. Pick students/groups at random.
• Provide feedback that is useful, meaning students will be able to make improvements on their work based on what I wrote.

Even this will probably be too much at the start. We'll see. I just need to remember not to give myself too much to do.

So what do you think? Do you ever want to try out a bunch of ideas all at once? What are your suggestions on not going nuts with all of the "shiny new toys"?

Article about someone else changing from a traditionalist

Read this article called "Never Say Anything A Kid Can Say." It is a lot about questioning techniques, but I wanted to focus on his shift from traditionalist to non-traditionalist point of view.

My favorite quote form this article is My definition of a good teacher has since changed from "one who explains things so well that students understand" to "one who gets students to explain things so well that they can be understood." I thought that was fantastic. We teachers aren't the best when we're talking, we're the best when we can get students to talk.