Management

I can not help but not think about my sanity this year, and the biggest is my style of management.  Last year was a disaster.  By 11:30 I was exhausted and I had only taught two English classes.  Those first two classes were made up of 30 kids (split between the two periods) of kids that followed each other throughout the day and shouldn’t have.

Regardless, if I want to achieve my goal of meaningfully integrated technology on a daily basis, I can’t and will not allow the distractions, interruptions, behaviors and so on to occur that happened last year.

I was blessed this summer by two things this summer.  The first was a post by Larry Ferlazzo, “When a “Good” class goes “Bad” (And Back to Good Again!) The idea that I really liked was telling the kids that he was going to call home in a week and needed wanted to share some good things about them.  I did something similar to that for a few years and that was to make a point just make contact with the home on a good note.

My second blessing was taking a week long workshop, The Responsive Classroom.  I love the modeling, the language, the reminders, redirecting and the simple reminders that I forgot, like be calm, be brief and don’t lecture.  All good stuff.  I will need to do some tweaking for a middle school, but it will be great.  Looking forward to a great year is where I am at.

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