A Colorado school district does away with grade levels | csmonitor.com

A Colorado school district does away with grade levels | csmonitor.com:

"Westminster, Colo. - School districts across the US are trying to improve student performance and low test scores. But few have taken as radical an approach as Adams 50.

For starters, when the elementary and middle-school students come back next fall, there won't be any grade levels – or traditional grades, for that matter. And those are only the most visible changes in a district that, striving to reverse dismal test scores and a soaring dropout rate, is opting for a wholesale reinvention of itself, rather than the incremental reforms usually favored by administrators."

Tips in Motivating Students

Tips in Motivating Students:

"Maintaining student motivation during classroom discussion is the most difficult steps in delivering educational subject matter. Here are some tips to maintain student's interest. Most of the time, intelligent student stay with you during lesson proper while the average student can lost their attention due to their classmate or friends noisiness.

Classroom management is an skills that teacher learn gradually. Normally, teacher will acquire this after one full year of experience. Knowing this technique will helps teacher easily adjust to the teaching and learning situation."

40+ Tips to Improve your Grammar and Punctuation - Dumb Little Man

40+ Tips to Improve your Grammar and Punctuation - Dumb Little Man:

"After all these years you finally have the courage and opportunity to write the email announcing that you and you alone have single handedly saved the company from utter disaster. You're excited, you type it, you spell check it, and you hit send.

Everything is great except that your gold star memo has dangling modifiers, double negatives and run-on sentences colliding with each other.

Now I am no grammar whiz but I know a good resource when I see it. Purdue University maintains an online writing lab and I spent some time digging through it. Originally the goal was to grab some good tips that would help me out at work and on this site, but there is simply too much not to share.


Learn and enjoy!"

Five New Teacher Tips For De-Stressing Before and After the Holiday Vacation

Five New Teacher Tips For De-Stressing Before and After the Holiday Vacation:

"Embracing a more simplistic lifestyle for new teachers means balancing the time between work and more quiet domains of life. Bringing back simplicity means reconnecting with extended family and friends and rediscovering the pleasure in the small things you used to do for yourself. Teachers are constantly wound up by so many little yet important areas of planning, teaching and assessing that by the time they reach home, they are still thinking about school and find it difficult to disengage from school mentally because planning takes so much time and effort."

Ten Important Classroom Management Tips and Strategies

Ten Important Classroom Management Tips and Strategies:

"- Always aim to model the desire behavior. - Modeling is important for setting the expectations of both behavior and learning procedures.

- Creating opportunities for personal contact with students. - This includes providing tutorials and positive reinforcement whenever needed.

- Taking the student seriously. Students sense when they are taken seriously by the little things a teacher does in the classroom. Teachers can communicate this in a variety of ways using positive reinforcement, communicating expectations, and motivating pep talks.

- Being supportive, encouraging, helpful and available.

- Sharing information and ideas with the students.

- Accepting students' feelings especially regarding assignments and tests."

How New Teachers Can Be More Spontaneous in the Classroom

How New Teachers Can Be More Spontaneous in the Classroom:

"Much of the success in the classroom for a new teacher depends on how much a teacher is willing to go beyond what is written in her lesson plan and to read the students. This takes many years of practice and persistence. But it is important to get into the training of learning to listen to teacher intuition. Having a bank of activities is not always enough. The same goes for sticking to the book. It is important to experiment and try new things. Reach out to the students. They will provide you with the answers.

Spontaneity is putting your lesson plans aside and do something on the spur of the moment. While this assumes considerable classroom experience and perhaps some guts to an extent, a (new) teacher has got to start somewhere."

A New Teacher's Guide to Effective Instruction

A New Teacher's Guide to Effective Instruction:

"As a beginning teacher, you'll find that what you teach is just as important as how you teach. You'll find probably find that as you get to know your class better, your teaching skills will considerably improve.

Those floppy lessons aren't so bad even if they give you great heartache and frustration. In essence, they provide you with valuable information on how to strengthen your lesson plan.

Reflecting on your lesson and your teaching can be very productive and helpful and can leave you with valuable insights. Use the experience to reorganize your lesson plan setup based on the following list."

The Ups and Downs of Lesson Planning For New Teachers

The Ups and Downs of Lesson Planning For New Teachers:

"The type of activity (group work, pair work, individual and the task involved) was the main consideration for assessing how much time students would need. Different tasks need different time orientations. But at the time however, I did not know that too many activities in one lesson would spell d-i-s-a-s-t-e-r. Students felt they were sentup the wrong pipe; many suddenly became confounded when they were introduced to a new activity rather quickly."

New Teacher Tips - How to Deal With Discipline Problems

New Teacher Tips - How to Deal With Discipline Problems:

"Teaching is hard, no matter which angle you view it. You will have difficult days and you will have easier days. But it all boils down to how you can use your power as a listener (one of our many roles as teachers) to help foster positive communication, which will offset discipline problems in the class by 99% once you do it routinely and you mean what you say.

Step 1. Echo. Listen to the person talking. As soon as s/he finishes, repeat what s/he has said. Try to use almost the exact words. Then ask one of the questions: Did I hear you correctly? Do you want to add something?

Step 2. Confirmation. Let the person know that you understand the important of what s/he just said. I can see that... I understand that you feel ...

Step 3. Empathy. Try to see the other person's side. By showing empathy you let the person know you really hear him or her. I feel that.. I understand..."

Preventive Tips For the Hard to Handle Class and Student

Preventive Tips For the Hard to Handle Class and Student:

"There are all kinds of hard to handle students. My purpose is to try and find a hook and connect. If you find you are having difficulty with a particular student, perhaps it pays to find a hook and connect. Observe the following:

When is the child quiet and concentrating? What time? What is s/he doing?

Talks can prove to be effective. Tie it into learning. What does that kid like? What is s/he good at?

I am a believer in preventing problems before they happen. This is why I believe observation and the direct and individual process help me minimize classroom management problems.

Here are some other preventive tips:

Be careful how you seat students.

Be consistent and follow up. Make sure you have a plan on how you deal with those students.

Reward good behavior."

Confidence Building Tips 101 - For New Teachers - What Works and What Doesn't

Confidence Building Tips 101 - For New Teachers - What Works and What Doesn't:

"When new teachers experience a difficult or challenging classroom experience, they quickly loose touch because that one 15 minute segment of an unsuccessful lesson simply tore them down. They quickly forget all those positive classroom teaching experiences. Since new teachers lack the confidence seasoned teachers work hard to establish, it then becomes very hard for new teachers to rebuild a positive flow of teaching energy. The worst thing for a new teacher to do is to start a Monday by bringing a bundle of nerves and and jitters into the classroom. It becomes a no win situation.

When you are able to shift the focus away from yourself and to your students, you are able to focus on true teaching moments of HERE and NOW. Even in the early Monday morning hours after you've prepared a well-prepared lesson and finished marking all those papers yet find yourself absorbing in a series of 'what if's,' stop yourself and ask: What is the most important thing my students need right now? How can I effectively cater to them?

It's hard to do this because much of what happens in the classroom is often determined by a new teacher's personality. But there are tips and tricks of the trade that you can use RIGHT NOW that will help you adapt to new classroom situations and develop the confidence you need."

Classroom Management Tips For New Seating Arrangements

Classroom Management Tips For New Seating Arrangements:

"For a new teacher's classroom arrangements, the classroom seating chart might look typically standard - usually with frontal rows. With a new class, this is probably a good option as a new teacher needs to teach first and talk later. The frontal classroom seating arrangement is probably the best way to go in terms of getting to know a new class and exercising classroom control.

There will naturally come a time however when a teacher will want to opt for group or pair work as one of the primary activities in the lesson plan. If you haven't until now, you might want to plan for a brief 'getting to know you' activity. Experiment a bit. Are the pupils familiar with each other? Who haven't they gotten to know yet? This is a good way to 'test' different classroom arrangements and see how well they appeal to you and your classroom management style."