The five essential skills I referred to in that other entry involve the following: creating a unified management plan, investment plan, tracking system, backwards planning, and creating an efficient, transparent grading system.
I'll explain the unified part at the end, but first, the management plan. You need to know the exact type of behavior that you want your students to exhibit at all times, make your expectations abundantly clear, and have a plan for every possible situation. I think this is one of the reasons why your first year of teaching is so difficult - because you're just finding answers to each of the different situations that arise. Not only do you need to know how you want your students to behave, but you also need to know what the consequences are going to be for each situation - and beyond anything at all, you have to be completely consistent. As soon as the students know that they can get away with a certain behavior without consequence, they will exploit it. They've very smart.
As far as specific management resources go, seriously, my biggest word of advice is to be completely consistent in everything that you do, as well as invest a lot in the front end on building relationships with your students. My first year was really difficult, because I felt no matter how I tried to build my relationships with my students, I still felt a lot of anger towards their behavior. This year has been completely different, in the sense that even though they often behave in a manner that drives me crazy, even when I'm reprimanding them for some behavioral infraction, I can still feel my love for them, and I know they can feel it as well. It somehow takes the edge off of things.
In my credentialing program last year, we used a book called "Tools for Teachers" by Fred Jones. I read the entire book last year, attempted everything that he talks about, and it completely failed for me. Last year. However, this year, I tried everything again, and it totally has worked for me. That's not to say that my classroom management is perfect - far, far from it. However, so many things in that book have been incredibly effective - especially Preferred Activity Time. If you're wanting something to read, I'd suggest that. And when you want to hear some specific lessons that I learned from it or how I made it work with my students, I'd be glad to offer specific advice. And again, lest you find the information in the book to be ridiculous and ineffective, know that I have heard from teachers who've been in downtown Oakland, Compton, Watts, and other notoriously rough school districts, and heard them say that these other schools don't even compare to what takes place at our school. So, if it works here, I strongly believe it will work anywhere.
The second key skill is implementing an effective investment plan. By investment, I mean that your students actually care about participating in class, learning, and demonstrating mastery. This takes some time - for me, about 3/4 of my first year of teaching - to figure out what it is that motivates students to want to learn and participate in your class. There is no silver bullet here, but the key to this one is to never give up, and to continually evolve your incentive structures because student's interests are going to keep changing.
The third key skill (the one that boggled the district people) is creating a detailed tracking system. In California, there are key educational standards. Here's an example:
Algebra and Functions 4.1 (AF4.1): Solve two-step linear equations and inequalities in one variable over the rational numbers, interpret the solution or solutions in the context from which they arose, and verify the reasonableness of the results.Now, mind you, this is a single standard. However, how many skills could you extract from this single standard? Here's a couple just to get started:
- Solve linear equations (one step) with addition/subtraction
- Solve linear equations (one step) with multiplication/division
- Solve linear equations (two steps) with multiplication, addition/subtraction
- Solve linear equations (two steps) with division, addition/subtraction
- Do all of the above, but with inequalities (and know the specific rules that apply)
- Define a rational number
- Identify whether a number is rational or not
I mean, the list could go on and on.... I literally have to assume with my students that they know the VERY basic of mathematics, and even at that, I'm often way off. We still struggle, consistently, with the basic arithmetic operations.
Anyhow, that's a lot of material to cover, and a lot of potential points of failure. On the district benchmark assessments that they give us, they will include maybe 2-3 questions on this standard. However, with students who are at the level that you'll be working with, odds are that they'll miss all the questions on this standard, and when they do - how does knowing that 100% of your students got 0% on standard AF4.1 help you determine where they have misunderstandings? Was it with the one step equations? Rational numbers? Inequalities? There isn't a lot of resolution.
So you take all the standards, and break them up into very, very basic, easily digestible pieces of knowledge that can be taught in simple steps. Then when you write your assessments, write them in such a way that you can determine if a student has mastered a particular skill. So, using the list I created above, assume that you have a test addressing the 7 skills I listed above, and you have two questions for each skill. Suppose that a student gets 2/2 on skill 1, 2/2 on skill 2, but then 0/2 on skill 3, and then again 2/2 on skill 4. Immediately, I know that there is some basic misunderstanding that this student has dealing with multiplication in two step equations. And I can work with that - it gives me useful information. This is information that knowing my student got 0/3 on standard AF4.1 would never tell me. You'll learn all about this at institute, but that was a brief priview.
The fourth skill is called backwards planning. I'm not sure if you're familiar with this, but I had the good fortune of taking two years of college courses where literally, this is all we talked about. Anyhow, the basic idea of backwards planning is just taking a look at where you want your students to be (for the sake of this article, let's assume the you want your students to ace the state competency exam), and then to literally create a path that will make it possible for your students to achieve your goal for them. So, in my instance, I looked at the state 7th grade math test, and looked at the skills that I felt would give the most "bang for the buck" (most questions on the test) that I ALSO felt were the most relevant life skills for them to learn in mathematics. Then, knowing what I wanted them to get out of my course by the end of the year, as well as the type of test questions that I want them to be able to answer, I mapped my entire year out so that starting with day 1, I knew exactly what lessons I was going to be teaching for every day of the entire year, how long my units were going to be, and where I could afford some flexibility for those unpredictable days that will certainly come along.
Truly, backwards planning is all about knowing where you want to end up, and then creating a feasible plan to make it happen. This has proven immensely challenging with education, because there are sooooooooo many factors that are completely out of my control. But then at the same time, it's been incredibly beneficial, because I have a clear vision of how I want my classroom to run, and it turns out that it creates strong structure and expectations, which students actually crave. Again, you'll be all over this at institute, but if you're really curious and want to get a jump start to be prepared, do some Google searches and look for more - this is definitely a key skill.
And finally. Figure out how you want to do your grading early on, and then stick with it. And be extremely transparent with your students, and make sure they know at all times how their actions affect their grades, and make it clear exactly what those grades are. It is easy to quickly become inundated with papers and student work. Come up with a plan of how you want to handle it. I came up with a system that has been super effective in my classroom, and a number of the teachers at my school have since picked it up because it's worked so well. It provides an opportunity for my students to be cognizant of their grade and see how everything (participation, homework, behavior) relate back to their grade in my class. I know school isn't only about grades, but it gives you another point of leverage to work with students if you can get them invested in their education. And truly, ultimately, that's what it all comes down to - helping them to become successful, and take charge of their education. Also, this part can really salvage your sanity, so it's definitely worth putting some thought into.
Now, back to the unified part. The reason I say unified is because truly, when it comes down to it, everything that you do in the classroom is going to be linked together. It really starts with creating a strong backwards plan, breaking down the standards to allow you to know what you're going to teach, figuring out how you're going to teach it, how you're going to track it, how you're going to get your kids to care about learning it, how you're going to reward them for doing so, how they're going to behave as they're learning, and how you're going to give them consequences for disrupting their education and that of their peers. It all needs to be tied tightly together, because they're very, very interrelated.
I hope this gives you a starting point. There are about a million more things that I could say, but this is already sufficiently long. Best wishes! Feel free to reach out to me with any other questions you may have.
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