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Inspired
Teacher
Homwork!
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How do you bring "trust" to your classroom? Please send Jenna
a short description of your strategies. If your idea is selected for
inclusion in the next newsletter, we'll send you some great Inspired
Teaching gear!
Last Week we asked readers to share a strategy for teaching vocab. From Alex Power:My
strategies include LOTS OF GAMES!! And then creating a story, poem,
sentence and/or illustration to show what has been learned. These are a
few examples: Brainstorming: "Let's think up some good fairytale (or whatever) words." - witch, wizard, dungeon, dragon, prince, toad, magic wand. 4-minute mixer - verbs, nouns and adjectives: (using homophones, students create sentences that use the words both ways)
He had five different sorts of candy and he sorted them all out. I
will give five different kinds of candy to the girl who was kind to me. From Dianne Bradley:The
children respond to creative ways to learn their vocabulary words. One
method that I introduced this year is creating crossword puzzles. I
also let the children write fill-in-the blank sentences for spelling
words and then they exchange them with their classmates. This went
over well. It "feels" like a game and my kids love games.
Thanks to all of you for submitting!
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Is there trust in your classroom?
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Trust - n. reliance on the integrity, strength, ability, surety, etc., of a person or thing; confidence.
Do you have confidence in your students? Can you rely on their integrity? Do they have confidence in you?
These questions may seem irrelevant in the context of teaching, say, math. But consider this fact: in a recent national study two thirds of high school students admitted to cheating on tests and ninety percent said they cheated on homework.
You may never be able to prevent the ease with which entire research papers can be downloaded for free from the internet. But you can create an environment in your classroom that encourages honesty, integrity, confidence, and trust.
One of the keys to building trust is learning to listen. In the classroom this means creating safe spaces for students to speak and be listened to. It also means giving them opportunities to talk about things that matter to them. You can have a perfectly civilized conversation about how to find the area of a rectangle, but what happens when you ask students to talk about whether or not knowing how to do this is relevant to their lives?
Opening the door to discussions about "the real world" can be frightening. But giving students a forum for voicing opinions and being heard is essential to establishing the conditions for trust. And it's worth it!
When you've established trust, conflicts dramatically decrease, students become more engaged in the learning process, collaboration increases, and your job simply becomes more enjoyable.
Your kids don't want to be deceitful any more than you do. It's important to look at the issues surrounding breaches of trust to understand why they happened in the first place. But at the end of the day building a strong and trusting classroom community is excellent insurance against problems both social and academic.
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Non Judgmental Listening Activities
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These activities can be used for any discussion topic but are quite effective for conflict resolution.
Click here for a full description of the activities.
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Discussion Facilitation Activities |
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Do your students tend to talk over one another in classroom discussions? Are there quiet voices that never get heard? Do you have problems with inflammatory comments or the potential for interpersonal disputes? These discussion strategies may help!
Click here for a full description of the activities.
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Teacher Resources
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Building Trust with Schools and Diverse Families
This 37 page booklet discusses ways to build trust between schools and families. It is filled with detailed summaries of various research studies on the topic as well as several specific action steps that can be taken to foster stronger school/community relationships.
Fuel for Reform: The Importance of Trust in Changing Schools
Read a short summary of the findings in a book called "Trust in Schools" by Anthony S. Bryk and Barbara Schneider which argues that the level of "relational trust" in a school is a strong indicator of the level of change possible in that school.
Corcoran Teacher Support Workshops - Fall 2008
Education faculty and staff of the Corcoran offer a range of "to-the-point" workshops each year to help teachers meet specific needs in their classrooms using methods and examples from visual art.
Saturday, Nov. 22, 2008 9:00 am-12:30 pm
"Mod, Modern, Moderne, Modernism, Post-Modern, Contemporary" (Grades 4-12)
CORCORAN Members: $5.00 Public: $8.00
Space is limited; pre-registration is recommended.
Please call 202-639-1807 or email tours@corcoran.org to learn more.
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Center for Inspired Teaching is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization that exists to ensure schools make the most of children's innate desire to learn. We do this by investing in teachers. Please visit our website to learn more about our philosophy, programs, and results.
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