Classroom Management

My philosophy: Every teacher needs strong classroom management skills. As a class, we must understand and follow basic norms and routines in order for the classroom to function and information to be effortlessly exchanged. In addition to establishing the basics, we must learn socioemotional skills to cultivate a strong learning community. This means understanding things like how to be kind to one another or maintaining a growth mindset. Most importantly, I must build a strong relationship with students. This means getting to know them on a personal level and being very involved. For example, I would run the track, play basketball, or play four-square with them. I make myself relatable to the students by sharing parts of my life with them. I might even tell them about my own struggles in school growing up. If I make a mistake while teaching, I acknowledge it. I check in with the students and ask them about their interests. When you care about the students and the students care about you, they will be more receptive to your teaching and be motivated to learn.

Scaffolding and Differentiating Student Learning

Because every class has a diverse set of needs, I think of different ways to make it accessible and engaging.

Poetry: To improve student literacy, I implement poetry into my ELA curriculum. The predictable format allows students to easily learn spelling patterns, figurative language, connotation, and so much more. I also don't choose arbitrary prompts. If it's spring, we will go outside, record observations, write words on the whiteboard, and generate our poems. To further give ownership, I have students produce the poems on Google Docs, print it out for them, and ask them to illustrate over the copies. The results look like something out of a Silverstein book.

I'm always on the lookout for anchor texts that students can "steal" from. To write beautifully, we must read beautiful things. Good writers are always excellent readers. Below, we have numerous poetry anthologies, whether it be popular poets like Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost, or children's poems. I might read pages from these each day, and ask them to read them on their own time.

Scaffolding writing: It's always important to provide students with as many resources as possible. I can give them anchor charts (e.g. transition words), annotate exemplars with them, or generate ideas together.

Cornell Note-taking:  Student must produce the essential questions, key details, and summaries. We primarily use this for factually dense material such as social studies. Informational text is always challenging for students, so this helps them read more closely and retain the information. This is a high-school/college level skill, but I believe in holding students to the highest standards and exposing them to tools that give them more ownership over their learning. The notes below were written by a 4th grader!