Concentrating on something intently enough to learn is hard work, meaning that learning something requires someone to pay attention. Most teachers and psychologists would therefore agree that the ability to focus and sustain attention is crucial to student success. I remember being told years ago that the maximum attention span of an adult was 45 […]
My mother was a teacher, and met my father when he, too, was briefly teaching. When they were both teaching they wore gowns as daily uniform, and had to shake chalk dust off them when they left their schools. They were about as calm, tolerant, middle-class and focused on education as it was possible for […]
If you have to share a classroom with 30 young people, it’s an awful lot easier to get things done if there is an understanding between you, a tacit contract that you will treat one another with respect, that the students will let the teacher teach, and the teacher will help the students learn. […]
So you’ve kept Joe, or Leah, or Sam back after a lesson where they pushed you to the point where you had to issue a detention. You didn’t engage in discussion about it in the lesson, but now is the time. This is the point at which you have an opportunity a) to confirm that […]
So you’ve kept Joe, or Leah, or Sam back after a lesson where they pushed you to the point where you had to issue a detention. You didn’t engage in discussion about it in the lesson, but now is the time. This is the point at which you have an opportunity a) to confirm that […]
On EduTwitter I read a lot of discussion about how teachers shouldn’t need to be liked by students; they should simply be able to expect obedience and compliance from their classes, and schools should have ways of dealing with the students if they don’t comply as expected. And I agree. There must be an expectation […]
You can decide to like a class. We’ve all been there – that knot in the stomach when you have to face 8S again. The faces which swim into your head, those of the students who need somehow to be ‘managed’, to be cajoled into compliance or manoeuvred quickly through the sanction escalation ladder […]
All students need to be treated equitably. This emphatically does not mean that all students should be treated the same. But all students should feel that they are fairly treated in the classroom, and part of that is that they should all feel that the teacher is including them in the lesson. There […]
1. Be polite: Be polite to everyone, including the most annoying student in the most annoying class, the one which you have come to dread when you see it on your timetable, the class which makes your stomach clench as you see them lining outside the room. If you have a quick wit and a […]
As every teacher knows, your behaviour management starts at the moment in which your students see you. Particularly important are the routines which you set at the classroom door. It goes without saying that every lesson is a clean sheet as far as behaviour management is concerned. Whatever happened in the last lesson, however badly […]
