Teaching Outside the Box: How to Grab Your Students By Their Brains Review

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Teaching Outside the Box: How to Grab Your Students By Their Brains ReviewI've already used some of the methods I found in Ms. Johnson's book, and share much of her general philosophy of working with kids from difficult backgrounds. Even after 10 years of being fairly successful at teaching "at-risk" kids, I found that seeing the logic and reasoning of her approach on the page clued me in to many of the principles behind a successful classroom which I already used, but never saw fully articulated on the page. It sounds a bit bizarre, but I now have a better understanding of the "hows and whys" of what I do from reading her work. These are the tips that you didn't get in college regarding working with challenging older kids; it's both an intellectual and visceral approach to teaching that will help you avoid many confrontations with kids before they ever happen, and give you the understanding of how to handle the battles you can't avoid. Holding kids to high standards of behavior sends the message to your students that you believe that they are capable great things, but it can take years to build the skills a teacher needs to get to that point. This book is the blueprint for building a successful classroom.
There is also a lot here about understanding kids that have to return everyday to very difficult lives at home. Many teachers of kids with tough home lives fail because they never really understood the lives of the young people they were dealing with. Understanding the reasoning and emotions behind unreasonable classroom behavior is the key to minimizing it and surviving as a teacher, and this book reminds us that these behaviors have roots in what these kids have to go through everyday. There is much here to remind you of the positive and long-lasting effects a caring teacher can have, and that the balance of positive reinforcement with a tough determination for high standards is key to getting the best out of our kids.
I've always been struck by the fact that a greater community hasn't been built by the teachers that work with challenging students, but maybe that comes from the fact that we're cut from a different cloth. The unfortunate aspect of this lack of community is that many of us build our approaches from scrap, taking the best of what we see in our coworkers, and trying methods that we come up with on the fly. There's just so little accumulated knowledge on our curious line of work passed down from one generation of experienced teacher to the next.Also, there are many aspects of working with tough kids that will never make it into the education school textbooks, a manifestation of the great and ridiculous divide between educational research and classroom practice (don't even let me get started on that topic). The helpfulness of educational academia's theories can be said to be directly correlated to the years they've spent teaching in difficult circumstances. You may be able to quantify the number of kids that respond to a reading program that your district will never have the money to buy (and you will never have time to teach), but they will never fully comprehend the necessity of learning to deliver a warm and sincere compliment, or chillingly-cold stare, at just the right moment. This book delivers the goods to those that wish to help the kids that most people have given up on, to work for little more than the knowledge that they did something that needed and deserved to be done.
Teaching Outside the Box: How to Grab Your Students By Their Brains OverviewThe handbook for improving morale by managing, disciplining and motivating your students
This second edition of the bestselling book includes practical suggestions for arranging your classroom, talking to students, avoiding the misbehavior cycle, and making your school a place where students learn and teachers teach. The book also contains enlivening Q&A from teachers, letters from students, and tips for grading. This new edition has been expanded to include coverage of the following topics: discipline, portfolio assessments, and technology in the classroom. Includes engaging questions for reflection at the end of each chapter Johnson is the author of The New York Times bestseller Dangerous Minds (originally My Posse Don't Do Homework) Contains a wealth of practical tools that support stellar classroom instruction
This thoroughly revised and updated edition contains comprehensive advice for both new and experienced teachers on classroom management, discipline, motivation, and morale. From the Author: Top 10 Techniques for Effective Teaching These ten techniques are the focus of the Effective Teaching courses I teach. The feedback from new and veteran teachers is consistent: they work!Ready, Set, Go. The #1 tool of effective teachers is the Do Now or Get Started (master teacher/author Fred Jones refers to this routine as Bellwork). Whatever you choose to call it, use this strategy consistently and you will see student engagement skyrocket and misbehavior plummet. From the first day of class and every day thereafter, make sure students have something useful (not busy work) to do the moment they enter your classroom. Post your instructions in the same place every day so that students can find them quickly. The options are limitless, but here are a few examples: post a few problems based on the previous day's lesson for students to solve individually or with partners; post a photo or quotation and have students respond to it in writing; distribute a letter that contains spelling and grammatical mistakes for students to correct; write a vocabulary word on the board for students to look up in the dictionary and use in a sentence; post a picture of an animal on the board and have young students find other pictures of the same animal throughout the room. The keys to success here are consistency, interesting and appropriately challenging tasks, and acknowledging the cooperation of students with sincere verbal praise.Teach (and re-teach) Routines. Effective teachers establish routines -- either intentionally or instinctively. They consider every activity that is likely to occur with frequency and they teach students how to transition to and from that activity. Teaching students to respond, 'Eyes on You" when the teacher says 'One Two" is a much faster and more effective method of gaining student attention than hollering, 'Quiet!" or 'Please stop talking." Consider creating standard routines for entering the classroom, responding to teacher questions (raise your hand first or just speak out?), turning in homework/assignments, distributing or collecting materials and books, hushing when the PA system comes on, standing behind chairs quietly to wait for dismissal at the end of class, etc. It takes a bit of time to teach students routines but once they are learned, you will make up the time ten-fold because students will operate the way well-trained employees do. This isn't to say that we want them to be mindless robots. Just the opposite. We want them to be thinking humans.Control Your Classroom, Not Your Students. Banish the thought that you can control students. It's a waste of everybody's time and is bound to frustrate you. But do hold firmly to the thought that you can control your classroom. Decide what kind of atmosphere you want to create, and then consider what behaviors will be required from students to make your dream classroom possible. This approach will lead you towards creating a behavior code [Respect yourself and everybody in this room] or a short list of Be's & Do's [be respectful, be safe, do your best], instead of a list of specific rules such as 'No name-calling," or 'No running." Those broad categories cover dozens of behaviors and you can quickly remind students of the required standards of behavior for your classroom when they stray by asking them questions: Is that respectful? Are you truly doing your best? This method doesn't lock you into specific rules, and doesn't require that you waste time issuing consequences and punishments, but gives you a broad base from which to guide and correct students.Make Students Responsible for Their Behavior. If you have students who are determined to disrupt your dream classroom, remember: most misbehavior is not about you. Unless you have said or done something to offend or anger a student, don't take the student's behavior personally. There is always a reason for a student's behavior (she could be hungry, neglected or abused at home, upset over a broken friendship or romance, reacting to bullies, terrified of failing your class, and so on). And don't take responsibility for students' behavior by immediately assigning punishments and consequences. Put your disruptive students in control of their own behavior. Take them aside, one at a time, where you can have a private conversation. Give them a moment to reflect. Then, ask them to think about their behavior and offer them three choices:You can decide to cooperate and be respectful right now and rejoin the classYou can step outside and take as long as you need to calm down before rejoining usYou can continue your current behavior which will result in disciplinary action.The choice - and the behavior - are up to the student. This puts the responsibility where it belongs and allows students to choose to behave well, instead of having good behavior imposed upon them (which is usually short-term). And whatever students choose, the consequences will be their own fault. They can't blame the teacher for 'being mean" and use that as an excuse for future bad behavior. And if a student decides to cooperate, thank him/her for making a good choice and wipe the slate clean. Don't carry a grudge. Let it go. You have far, far bigger fish to fry.See the rest of author LouAnne Johnson's top 10 techniques for effective teaching.

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