Mr. K, Dialog #1 Cont'd: Planning Curriculum

How did you build your curriculum? We began to discuss this earlier today. As a teacher with no developed curriculum, I am a little worried about getting thrown into the fire and being expected to have a detailed lesson plan every day. I understand that trial and error is involved, but how did you overcome this? What was your experience like when you first began teaching? In Japan, my curriculum was standardized so students could transfer schools without worrying about how their new teacher was going to teach. This made it a good starting point, but I definitely broke that rule more and more as I became more experienced. You told me that a lot of the readings came from something you read on your own time. I never really thought about that, so I will start asking myself, “Is this something I could use for class?”  By December, I want to figure out an effective way to plan for lessons. 

This is the big one.  I had a conversation with my wife about this to sort out my own thoughts.  To be honest, this was MY biggest bugaboo as a teacher.  Like you, I came to teaching with a wealth of classroom teaching experience for a company, but virtually NO experience creating curriculum.  In fact, I’m not sure I believe they should be the same job – both are INCREDIBLY complex, nuanced, and time-consuming skills to learn and refine, and mastering both is nearly impossible.  I think either could easily be the subject of four years of study in school to prepare for the job, for 8 years total.

Mr. K, Dialog #1 Cont'd: "Teaching in Action"

Over these next few months, I want to discover more of your strengths and skills as a teacher and take some of these skills with me when I have a classroom someday.  One I can think of right off the bat is your ability to “teach in action.” This is a term heavily used in my program about learning how to observe objectively, seeing student learning, and being perceptive enough to know that your lesson is effective or not. You are a pro at this. I realize that textbooks can only take you so far when training to be a teacher and that this skill gets better with experience. I guess I want to figure out how to become more perceptive. What should I be asking myself or to the students to figure out what’s working? How do I ensure all the students are learning during class?

Those are excellent questions to ask, and I think the first step to answering your questions is to KEEP asking those questions – both of yourself, and directly of the students.  Try to cultivate what I like to think of as “classroom vision.”  

Mr. K, Dialog #1: Teaching Academic Independence

Where do I begin? My experience so far in my teacher preparation program has been at the middle school level, so high school is quite new for me. For my first post, I think it would be a good idea to talk about my observations about you, my master teacher.  Then, I think it would be beneficial discuss some goals for our time together. 
I’ve been a little shocked by your teaching style, but in a very positive way. You have a very unique approach that I can tell is highly effective. I would have loved to be one of your students when I was in high school. I’m really curious to see how the students will evolve into scholars from now to December.

2013 - Welcome, Mr. Kandah!

This fall begins a new school year, and I have the pleasure of working alongside my previous mentee, Ms. Do, who is now a colleague at my school.  I hope to persuade her to share some of her experiences as a first-year teacher when she has time.

I also have the privilege of working with another student teacher from USC Rossier, Mr. Kandah, who has kindly agreed to take up the ongoing conversation about the art and craft of teaching with me.

I'll leave Mr. Kandah's first post the space it deserves in the next post!

Dialog #5: Principles for Classroom Management Conversations

Is there a set of strategies that you utilize while coming up with the rationale? If you had to break down the way you manage students’ behavior in the classroom into concrete steps, what would those steps look like? Obviously there are outside factors that contribute to how you approach different students, but how do you incorporate that outside knowledge? And what do you do at the beginning of the school year when you have yet to develop that knowledge?

I think, ultimately, my basics of classroom management come down to the following:

Dialog #5: And ONE more!

• A group of students constantly act out in class. You cannot send them all outside, but they cannot work together. You’ve tried to separate their seats, but they are still disruptive, yelling at each other from across the room.

This is one of those moments when you might need to invoke the power of the masses.  Even if the group is seven or eight kids, they're still going to be out-numbered by the non-goofs in the class.  It takes some building, but establishing a culture in which kids actively monitor each other will take a LOT of the work out of what you do.  I'd give a little bit of preface lecture on "sink or swim" - that all of them affect the success of every ONE of them, and that EVERY student is responsible for every other student in the room.

Dialog #5: And MORE ...

• A student is not doing his/her work and refuses to talk to you about it because he/she hates you.

This one's mostly about time.  Remember: be in it to win the WAR, not the individual battles.  First off, a relationship should never have the opportunity to get THIS far off-track.  If a kid is starting to "hate" you (the word does not mean, for a student, what it does to you and I - take all extreme statements with a bit of salt, and remember the goldfish rule: kids have a 15 second memory!), you should spot the resentment and the tone issues as soon as they crop up.