Teaching Outside the Box E-Book

LouAnne Johnson

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Bildung
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 659

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

Bring a fresh perspective to your classroom

Teaching Outside the Box: How to Grab Your Students by Their Brain, Third Edition integrates practical strategies and engaging advice for new and experienced teachers. Whether you are preparing for your first year of teaching or have been working in the classroom for decades, this conversational book provides you with answers to the essential questions that you face as an educator—how to engage students, encourage self-directed learning, differentiate instruction, and create dynamic lessons that nurture critical thinking and strategic problem solving. This updated edition includes expanded material that touches on Project-Based Learning, brain-based teaching, creating smooth transitions, integrating Common Core into the classroom, and other key subject areas. Questions for reflection at the end of each chapter help you leverage this resource in book groups, professional development courses, and in both undergraduate and graduate classes.

The art of teaching is one that evolves with changing educational standards and best practices; to be the most effective teacher possible, daily self-reflection is critical, along with a need to see things from a different perspective. This means we must step outside the box—moving our focus from 'fixing' the students when a problem arises to helping a teacher improve his or her practice.

• Improve classroom management, discipline, motivation, and morale
• Explore strategies for arranging your classroom, engaging students, and avoiding the misbehavior cycle
• Create an environment where students learn and teachers teach
• Leverage insight from teachers and students

Teaching Outside the Box: How to Grab Your Students by Their Brain, Third Edition is an essential resource for teachers at any stage in their careers.

Leseprobe

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Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Introduction

Begin Reading

List of Illustrations

Chapter Four: The Big Three: Preparation, Preparation, Preparation

Figure 4.1 Modified U Seating.

Figure 4.2 Flexible Seating.

Figure 4.3 Pair Share Seating.

Figure 4.4 Double Semicircle.

Figure 4.5 Mobile Classroom.

Figure 4.6 Establish a Private Zone.

Chapter Five: Start with a Smile

Figure 5.1 Three Procedures For Oral Responses.

Chapter Seven: The Three Rs: Reading, Reading, Reading

Figure 7.1 The Taming of the Shrew.

Teaching Outside the Box

How To Grab Your Students By Their Brains

Third Edition

LouAnne Johnson

Copyright © 2015 by LouAnne Johnson. All rights reserved.

Illustrations copyright © 2015 by LouAnne Johnson. All rights reserved.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Johnson, LouAnne.

Teaching outside the box: how to grab your students by their brains / LouAnne Johnson.—Third edition.

pages cm

Includes index.

ISBN 978-1-119-08927-8 (pbk.)—ISBN 978-1-119-08921-6 (ePDF)—ISBN 978-1-119-08922-3 (epub)

1. Teaching. I. Title.

LB1025.3.J6395 2015

371.102—dc23

2015026173

Cover Design: Wiley

Cover Image: © CSA Images/Getty Images

Acknowledgments

Thank you to the teachers who taught me to believe in myself and follow my heart: Mary Ellen Boyling, Evelyn Hodak, Eleanora Sandblade, Caroline DeSalvo, Jerry Novelli, Jim Miller, Mary Ann Greggan, Diane Herrera Shepard, and Jane Allen.

A shout out to my posse—the unforgettable, lovable, “unteachable” students who taught me how to teach.

Muchas gracias y abrazos fuerzas a los estudiantes en mi primer clase de Limited English, especialmente Isabel Jimenez y Francisco Diaz. Their English may have been limited, but their desire to learn was unlimited. They taught me what a joy teaching can be, how to teach nonnative English speakers—and how to speak Spanish “like a Mexican.”

Special thanks to all the teachers who tested the techniques from this book in their own classrooms and reported their results along with suggestions for improvement. And special thanks to Pam Prosise, Lori Montejano, and Cindy Detler for sharing their own creative teaching strategies and providing much-appreciated moral support.

The Author

LouAnne Johnson is the author of nine nonfiction books about education, the young adult novel Muchacho (Knopf, 2009), and two illustrated books for young readers. At present, she teaches English language arts full time at a public high school in rural New Mexico.

A native of northwestern Pennsylvania, Johnson served nine years on active military duty, achieving the rank of Journalist First Class in the Navy and 2nd Lieutenant in the Marine Corps. She holds a BS in psychology, an MAT in English, and an EdD in educational leadership.

Prior to earning her teaching license, Johnson worked as a newspaper reporter, ballroom dance instructor, and executive secretary. In 1989, she began teaching as an intern at a Northern California high school. Two years later, she was appointed head of the school's program for at-risk teens. During the government evaluation of ten similar pilot programs, Johnson's group rated first in academic achievement, increased self-esteem, and student retention. Her memoir about those early teaching years, My Posse Don't Do Homework (St. Martin's Press, 1986), was adapted for the 1995 hit movie Dangerous Minds (directed by John N. Smith), starring Michele Pfeiffer, and has been published in eight languages, including Italian, German, and Japanese.

After teaching high school for six years, Johnson returned to graduate school. Subsequently, she served as lead ESL instructor at Lexington Community College in North Carolina, adjunct instructor of developmental reading and writing for Western New Mexico University, adjunct English instructor at New Mexico State University, and associate professor of teacher training at Santa Fe Community College. In 2014, she returned to her first passion—teaching teenagers.

In addition to teaching, Johnson has also designed and presented workshops in classroom management and motivation for teachers across the country. A staunch advocate of school reform, limited testing, and student-centered teaching, Johnson is a popular keynote speaker. She has presented keynote addresses to over one hundred organizations, including the National School Boards Association, the National Council on Curriculum Development, the Association of Texas Professional Educators, the National Council of Teachers of English, Stanford University, Texas A&M University, National Hispanic University, the Puerto Rico Department of Education, and the European Council of International Schools. She has appeared on several television shows, including Oprah, CBS Eye to Eye, NBC Weekend Today, Maury Povich, and CNN Talkback Live.

Introduction

When I faced my first class of students twenty-six years ago, I could not have stated my teaching philosophy in one simple sentence. I was too busy trying to organize paperwork, plan lessons, referee arguments, convince students to cooperate, find a disciplinary approach that worked, maintain my sanity, and extinguish the thousand tiny fires that erupt in every classroom every day. A disenchanted student helped me focus my thinking. When I was assigned to teach a class of sophomores whose regular teacher suddenly decided to retire, I entered the classroom with high hopes and boundless energy and found myself facing a group of students with zero hope and subzero motivation.

“It don't matter what we do,” the girl complained. “Before she left, our teacher done flunked us all. Wrote a red F in the grade book beside everybody's name.” At the mention of the grade book filled with Fs, I watched the students collectively slump their shoulders, droop their heads, and issue a giant group sigh.

I could feel their hopelessness, so I hurried to assure them that I didn't have their previous teacher's grade book and that I intended to start everybody in my new grade book with an A—in red ink. It may sound melodramatic, but I swear I could hear the hope fluttering in those students' hearts. Every face turned toward me, even those who insisted that they didn't care one fig about school.

From the back of the room, I heard a boy whisper, “She's lyin'.”

“Shut up!” another boy shushed him. “What if she ain't lyin'? I ain't never had a A before.”

In that moment, my philosophy of teaching was born, and it has served me well. That philosophy is based on one simple belief:

When students believe success is possible, they will try.

Once I learned how to put that idea into action and succeeded in convincing every student in the room that he or she was an intelligent person capable of learning, teaching became so much simpler and infinitely more enjoyable. My students stopped fighting me and started learning. Before long, they were hooked on learning, and I was hooked on teaching.

During the following years, using student behavior and achievement, along with ongoing research and self-reflection, as my guides, I developed new philosophies about discipline, grades and exams, motivation, classroom management, positive discipline, and how to use simple psychology and brain science to engage students' attention. I developed a toolkit of successful strategies and practices. Thousands of teachers from around the world have generously shared their own theories, strategies, and experiences with me. I'd like to share our combined wisdom. What I would really like to do is sit down for a few hours and talk with you about teaching—why we chose to be teachers, why we still teach considering all the frustrations of the job, our best and worst practices, and how we can help each other be more effective, more confident, and more satisfied with our work.

This book is my side of our imaginary conversation—my attempt to share everything I have learned about effective teaching in one practical package for future teachers, beginning teachers, and experienced teachers who have lost some of their shine and are seeking moral support and inspiration. Instead of writing a formal standard textbook, I chose to write a more conversational, anecdotal text that would serve equally well as a guidebook for individual teachers or as a text for teacher training or staff development courses. My hope is that this book will be a helpful tool in your quest to become the teacher you have always dreamed of being.

Chapter OneDear Teacher: An Open Letter

Dear Teacher:

Thank you.

Thank you for being a teacher, for choosing to use your time and talents to teach when you had so many other career options, most of which offer better pay, more comfortable working conditions, and much more respect from the general public than the teaching profession does.

Thank you for taking yet another exam to prove your competence, although you have already completed five or more years of college and hundreds of dollars' worth of standardized tests.

Thank you for getting up at 5 or 6 a.m. every day to work in a graceless room bathed in artificial light or a windowless closet or a dilapidated trailer that has been desperately labeled as a learning center—and for continuing to teach higher-level thinking skills and advanced academics, in spite of having test after test after test added to your curriculum requirements, without any additional instruction time.

Thank you for coping so often with ancient, malfunctioning, or nonexistent air conditioning and heating, and for eating your lunch out of a paper bag in a sparsely furnished lounge where a working coffeemaker is a treat and a functioning microwave oven is a luxury.

Thank you for spending your so-called time off grading papers; making lesson plans; and attending professional development conferences, committee meetings, restructuring meetings, parent–teacher conferences, school board meetings, and continuing education classes.

Thank you for working countless hours of unpaid overtime because it is the only way to do your job well and because you cannot do less—and for not reminding people constantly that if you were paid for your overtime you could retire tomorrow and never have to work again.

Thank you.

For spending your own money on pens and pencils, erasers and chalk, paper, tissues, bandages, birthday gifts, treats, clothing, shoes, eyeglasses—and a hundred other things that your students need but don't have.

For accepting the achy back, creaky knees, tired legs, and sore feet that go with the teaching territory.

For consistently giving respect to children who don't know what to do with it and don't realize what a valuable gift you are offering.

For caring about children whose own families don't care—or who never learned how to demonstrate their love.

For spending sleepless nights worrying about a struggling student, wondering what else you might do to help overcome the obstacles that life has placed in his or her path.

For raiding your own children's closets to find a pair of shoes or a jacket for a child who has none.

For putting your own family on hold while you help a struggling student.

For believing in the life-changing power of education.

For maintaining your belief that all students can learn if only we can learn how to teach them.

Thank you.

Thank you for giving hopeless children enough hope to continue struggling against the poverty, prejudice, abuse, alcoholism, hunger, and apathy that are a daily part of so many tender young lives.

For risking your job to give a child a much-needed hug.

For biting your tongue and counting to a million when a parent insists that your incompetence is responsible for the misbehavior of his or her undisciplined, spoiled, obnoxious child.

For taking on one of the most difficult, challenging, frustrating, emotionally exhausting, mentally draining, satisfying, wonderful, important, and precious jobs in the world.

Thank you for being a teacher.

You truly are the unsung American hero.

You have my respect and my gratitude,

LouAnne Johnson

Chapter TwoAre You Teacher Material?

“How can I tell if I'm really teacher material?” a teacher candidate asked me by e-mail. “Can I learn to be a good teacher? Or is it something you have to be born with?” She went on to explain that she had recently abandoned a well-paid position in advertising to pursue her dream of becoming a teacher.

“I know I will make a lot less money as a teacher,” she wrote, “and I have accepted that reality, but now I'm wondering what will happen if I get my degree and get a job, and then I hate teaching. What if I find out that I just can't do it? I have a feeling that teaching is going to be very different from being a student teacher or observing experienced teachers. I guess what I'm asking is: Do you have any advice that might help me make the right decision about becoming a teacher?”

To teach or not to teach? is a question that stumps many people. Far too many of us know bright, energetic people who spent five or more years earning a bachelor's degree and teaching credential only to quit after one or two years in the classroom. New teachers give up for a long laundry list of reasons, but the most common complaints include disrespectful and disruptive students, apathetic administrators, overwhelming stacks of paperwork, lunchroom politics, parental pressure and pestering, and mental or emotional exhaustion.

Those complaints are valid. I have to say that I have worked with some excellent administrators, and their support enabled me to be a better teacher. But even with good support, teaching is very demanding and difficult work. Children today suffer from a host of emotional, mental, and physical challenges that affect their behavior and ability to learn. And unfortunately many of their role models encourage them to treat themselves and others with disrespect. Dealing with children requires abundant reserves of patience and tact. An indestructible sense of humor also helps. Government regulations have created a testing and accountability monster that consumes mountains of money, paperwork, time, and energy—and teachers have the task of feeding the monster. The monster is fickle, too, so if last-minute changes upset you, teaching will tax you to the limits of your flexibility. If you don't bend, you will definitely break. Of course, you already know that the pay is atrocious, primarily because people outside of education view teaching as babysitting with books. Thus, if wealth and prestige are important to you, teaching will be a disappointment. And teaching can be physically painful: hours of standing on your feet, bending over to read small print on small desks, and lugging boxes of books and papers to and fro can send you home with tired feet, an aching back, and a heavy heart.