July 2019 – Happy Schools

Don’ts and Don’ts of Teaching (Part 2)

July 25, 2019

Don’t send kids to the office. No matter how many times a principal says, “just send them to me,” it’s not a good idea. When you send kids out, it soon becomes the only thing they’ll respond to. So you might be thinking now, “what should I do when students are misbehaving?” I have no pat answers about the complex question of how to handle challenging behaviour but I do know that if you avoid the mistakes I mention here, you won’t have as many discipline problems. Unfortunately, if you do make these mistakes, anything you try to do to fix your discipline problems will be as ineffective as sending kids to the office. Don’t allow students to shout out…

Don’ts and Don’ts of Teaching (Part 1)

July 18, 2019

Stevef

Effectiveness

One piece of advice that I’ve seen in numerous books about teaching is to always phrase classroom rules positively. Instead of phrasing a rule as “no talking,” for instance, teachers should phrase it as “talk in turn.” The theory is that when students are told not to do one thing without being told what they should do instead, they may not know their options. Proponents also argue that phrasing rules in the positive is less confrontational; rebellious students will be less apt to break a positively stated procedure than a negatively worded rule. I don’t buy this. For new teachers, especially, classroom rules need to be rules, and a rule should be stated in the clearest way possible. Many of…

Keys of Prioritisation

July 4, 2019

Stevef

Efficiency

Staff in schools often feel we have too much to do and not enough time to do it. We often feel we are asked to do more, with less. Utilising our time well is therefore imperative. Peter Drucker, the grandfather of today’s management consultants and time management gurus, says today’s challenge is that we know we have ten things needing to be done, but we only have time to do six of them. The real challenge is picking the right six to do and then going home at night and not worrying about the four that you had to let go and didn’t get done. The negative self-talk about the tasks that we have NOT done adds significantly to our…