A repost from 2008: People don’t get that unpredictable words come up in class. They don’t trust that ideas will occur naturally during the conversation, and they try to be in control of the class, so that they can teach certain words. Thus, the natural flow and emergence of the content of a story is […]
Some kids are seriously rude these days. What do you do if some really power-hungry sophomore (it’s usually sophomores in high school) chuckles when you try to make the Classroom Rule process work for you? Such a thing would rarely happen in the first week. Usually the oppositionally defiant kids wait and hide until going
Here is the website for a new kind of school, one that says they do CI but don’t. They are talking the talk without walking the walk. http://www.wmmhs.org/academics/academic_departments/world_languages Please take the 95 seconds needed to watch their promotional video. Here are my comments on it, because it raises all sorts of red flags in my
Let’s just say it. Bullies are alive and well in our schools. They often call themselves administrators. They are not in all schools, but in many of them. They’ve been doing it for a long time. They are not always white men – there are women bullies too. And not always white, either, but you
I got this from one of my Zoom group members who really gets the new Ultimate CI Book (1 of 6) concepts on how to use the Star Curriculum: Hello, teacher! I wanted to share my first experience working with the Star. This morning I got an idea while talking with my sister about how
A repost. I think this is an important read, though lengthy, to get teachers clear about what they are going to do this year in terms of classroom management. Or not do. It is a kind of pep talk on classroom management. If we don’t internalize and apply in the first two weeks of the
First. Two. Weeks. Dealing. With. Bullies. Act. Now. Read More »
Have you ever noticed in teaching that there seems to be some kind of unwritten rule that we’re not allowed to really know what our kids are thinking? I mean, it would be so easy to just ask them, if the world were an honest place and direct honest discourse between teacher and students could
The point about being happy – everyone in the classroom being happy – is at the crux of our work. For many in the CI world, it isn’t. The work has been too much focused on student gains and how the teacher can focus on how their own skills and wonderfulness can bring them about.
I’m posting below something that Sean sent to me via private email this morning about this whole racism thing, and then this can be the final post on it here so we can get our focus on where it belongs – on good CI teaching. What Sean expresses below pretty much sums up my position
e. e. cummings has said: …I’d rather learn from one bird how to sing than to teach ten thousand stars how not to dance… This makes me reflect on the notion that we can learn from the pure birds/students in our classes how to respond to them with respect in our teaching. Such kids are
I moved the text below from the comment fields to be a post: Jack you are right the main problem we face is how do we take action to mitigate the facts that though we say everyone has equal protection we as a larger society do not act in a way that those who have
There is a a system of popular psychology called Transactional Analysis (TA). It is based on the idea that one’s behavior and social relationships reflect an interchange between parental (critical and nurturing), adult (rational), and childlike (intuitive and dependent) aspects of one’s personality. All people, even children, have these three aspects of personality within them.
