Tuesday, June 9, 2009

Thoughts

Would you recommend this book to another teacher? Why or why not?

Chapters 15 & 16: Make it Cool to Care and Clarifying Your Core

Identify your core beliefs about teaching. Share one or two with our blog community and explain its importance to you.

Chapter 14: What About These @!$#* Standardized Tests?

What things are we doing at our school that are not measured by standardized tests but still vitally important? Are there things that the standardized tests measure that we as a school are not doing? What behaviors must we agree on in order to ensure success on standardized tests?

Chapter 13: In Every Situation, Ask Who is Most Comfortable and Who is Least Comfortable

How should teachers apply the "most comfortable/least comfortable" ground rule when dealing with belligerent parents?

Monday, June 8, 2009

Chapters 11 & 12: Random or Plandom? Base Decisions on the Best People

Think of a teacher who taught you in whose classroom events always seemed carefully planned. Was this teacher effective? Describe a teacher you had or know who always considers his/her very best students when making decisions regarding teaching and learning. How do you feel your teaching approach would compare to this teacher's?

Chapter 10: Ability to Ignore

What are behaviors that we should regularly overlook which often occur in the classroom? When should we go with the flow and when should we stop and take a stand? How do you determine which disturbances are trivial and should be ignored and which should be responded to? When responding how do you do so without escalating the situation?

Taking It Back: Would you be willing to have a lesson videotaped (15-30 minutes) for you to review and conduct a self-analysis this year? Monroe will NOT do the videotaping!

Chapter 9: Don't Need to Repair-Always Do

Read the poem "The Builder", which is reprinted below. Discuss how the themes of the poem relate to the themes of Chapter 9 'Repairing and Building'.

The Builder
I saw a group of men tearing a building down,
A group of men in my hometown.
With a heave and a ho and a mighty yell,
They swung a beam and a side wall fell.
And I said to the foreman, "Are those men skilled?
The type you'd hire if you wanted to build?"
He laughed and replied, "Why, no indeed."
He said, "Common labor is all I need.
Why I can tear down in a day or two
What it takes a builder ten years to do."
And I thought to myself as I walked away,
Which of these roles am I going to play?
(Author Unknown)

Extension Activity (for the gifted among us) Try your hand at rewriting the poem for the role of a teacher, creating 10 rhyming couplets, but keeping the final couplet as it is in its current form. Share.

Chapter 8: The Teacher is the Filter

How can great teachers counteract colleagues who are prone to complaining about school, teaching, students, etc.?

Read this sentence: FINISHED FILES ARE THE RESULTS OF YEARS OF SCIENTFIC STUDY COMBINED WITH THE EXPERIENCE OF YEARS.
Now, count aloud the Fs in the sentence and count them only once. Do not look back and count them again. How many did you count? Many people count three or four, but there are actually six. The reason that nearly everyone undercounts is because the mind automatically filters out the F's in the word of, which is included three times in the sentence. Like the word of, negativity can be rampant; if we focused on every of or negative thing we hear, we would miss the big picture- the meaning of what it is that we are involved in, whether that is reading or teaching. How is this activity analogous to filtering out the negatives at school?

Chapter 7: Ten Days Out of Ten

In this chapter, the book emphasizes that focusing on the positive elements of our classrooms and schools will give us more drive and energy as we face our daily work. Let's 'raise the praise' and 'Fill the FVES bucket!'. Share positive and productive things happening at Faucett-Vestavia in our classrooms and throughout the school.