Tag Archives: Pembroke Publishers

Administrivia & Classroom Management: Update for Monday, 28 November 2011

After I presented a lot of admin-related info we got down to the business of considering how to effectively manage your classroom.  Here’s a rundown:

Admin

Paperwork

  • EDUC 315 TC Feedback Form:  If you have not yet submitted your completed form, please do so by the end of Tuesday, 29 November 2011.  It is OVERDUE.
  • Inquiry One-Pager Posted on VISTA: Please have your post up by Wednesday, 30 November 2011
  • SRL Consent Form:  Please hand in your completed form to Dave or I ASAP.
  • Videotaping & Still Images Consent Form:  In order to videotape a lesson and collect still images of students or their work, you need to get parental consent.  Please use this form – Permission for Classroom Videotaping & Still Photography Form – and personalize it with your details.  Hand this paperwork out and collect it on the 2-Week Prac so you are ready to videotape and what not when your 13-week in-school experience gets rolling.

Unit Planning

  • Performance Standards:  The BC Performance Standards are a great source for rubrics and work samples in the areas of writing, reading, numeracy, social responsibility, and healthy living.  Don’t spend hours creating a rubric of your own.  Stand on the shoulders of giants and tweak an existing rubric.

LLED 320

  • Student Diversity, 2nd Edition Textbook:  I showed you the text we’ll be using in class and noted that you can order it directly from Pembroke Publishers.  Also, I indicated that they have a Book of the Month preview on their website.

Bits & Pieces

  • EDUC 310/316 Coping Fees:  Please bring $5 in coins to Wednesday’s class.  In class we will indicate the Term 1 copying fees and we’ll collect the amount of money owed by each TC.
  • SD43 Usernames and Passwords: We gave you your U & PW and urged you to change your password immediately upon logging on to the SD43 system.  You can access the SD 43 home page here.  Click on the “my email” link to access your SD43 email account.

Classroom Management

Your EDUC 315 reflections indicated to Dave and I that classroom management is on the minds of many of you.  As such, we wanted to take some time to introduce you to some management related materials that should help you on your 2-week prac in January.

The materials we presented today were adapted from Classroom Management: A Thinking and Caring Approach by Barrie Bennett & Peter Smilanich.  The PPT slideshow below supported Dave’s presentation (Please note that I’ve had to remove the slide themes in order to shrink the file size to post on the blog):

Here’s what we did:

  • Considered the qualities of ineffective & effective teachers
  • Categorized student behaviours based on how you think and feel about them.  Here’s a photo of the categories you came up with courtesy of Jerin, the photographer, and Liz, the scribe:

  • Considered Dreikur’s 4 Goals of Misbehaviour – attention seeking, power, revenge, assumed disability
  • Thought of how best to match a response to a behaviour with the Law of Least Intervention in Mind
  • Read info about and prepared a short NO/YES role play on how to use responding and preventive low key management techniques

We ran out of time to present the role plays so we’ll do that next session.

If you’re interested – and I suspect that you are – here is the section from Bennett and Smilanich’s book that identifies all of the low-key management we’re playing with in class:

You’ll need to muster one or more of these strategies if Russell’s in your class 🙂

See you Wednesday.

– LH

If It’s Free, I’ll Take Three: The Writing Triangle & Girl Talk Freebies

Any teacher worth his or her salt loves a freebie.  Here’s two for you, one school related and the other sure to get you groovin’ on the long bus ride home:

The Writing Triangle: Planning, Revision, and Assessment by Graham Foster

This full text of this book is available for preview at the Pembroke Publishers site.  It should be of interest to anyone teaching Language Arts on practicum.  Here’s the blurb:

“Writing improves when students learn good planning, revision, and assessment strategies that specifically apply to different writing forms — Description, Narration, Lyric Poetry, Exposition, Persuasion/Deliberative Inquiry Research, Business Letters, and Exploratory Writing. Each of these forms is thoroughly discussed in this book, with suggestions for exploring key features, planning strategies, specific revision criteria, and assessment techniques. This bold book represents a complete makeover for tired textbooks about the writing process. It illustrates effective ways teachers can guide their students to become inspired, and turn ordinary writing into something extraordinary.”

On a related note, the text you’ll be using in the LLED 320 course I’ll be teaching to you is Student Diversity and it’s also from Pembroke.

Girl Talk – All Day

According to everyone’s good friends at Wikipedia, Gregg Michael Gillis (born October 26, 1981 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania), better known by his stage name Girl Talk, is an American musician and DJ specializing in mashups and digital sampling.

He has recently released a new album and it’s available for a free download.  That’s right.  No grey areas here just go to his record label’s site and download it.  Watch and listen to this review to get an idea if the album might be of interest:

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMKfsj1fg5g[/youtube]

I’ve been listening to All Day a lot lately and it’s fun to play “name that tune” with all the samples.  To help you out if you decide to play that game, too, here’s a (lengthy) list of all the sampled songs on All Day.

Well, there you go.  Two freebies for the holidays.  Enjoy.

– Lawrence