Facilitating Chaos

So much of the art of helping students to be successful with educational content requires that we also help them develop the skills that will help them be successful in their personal lives .  Though I will not go into detail about the importance of effective questioning techniques during this post, please visit my first post on questioning ( which can be found here ) to see why it is one of the most effective tools that can be used to extend students understanding of content and improve their personal lives.  Providing students with the opportunity to use questioning to analyze experiences and situations allows them to break down information into pieces, make connections to different areas, and look for themes and solutions. Here are some questions that I have found that force students to move beyond lower level understandings of materials and form connections that drastically increase their knowledge of content. How is this similar to? How could you categorize...

This graffiti wall has been an excellent review tool this year! I got this idea from a conference that I went to last year and decided to implement it in my classroom.  It has been a great strategy to get students to engage with recently taught concepts and as a way to keep previously taught concepts at the forefront of students minds. Some things I printed from the internet (I love the internet), but most things were added to "the wall" by my students (and my 4 year-old).  In order to add a mathematical concept to the wall on a concept that we are learning/have learned, students have to come up with a design including the most important information pertaining to a concept, how it will look, and where they will put it.  This wall is at the front of my room, by my Promethean Board, so when students start to lose focus (an let's be real, they will), they will have something educational to focus on. I plan to add each concept that we cover to the wall as we cover it...

  Posing the right questions to students is one of the most important techniques that can be used when teaching and assessing students.  Your questioning techniques can expose misconceptions, uncover gaps in learning, cause students to look deeper at a topic, encourage a higher depth of knowledge, and provide students with opportunities to make connections between many different topics.     Because questioning is a topic that has many different levels , I am going to HAVE to spread the techniques that I use over several different posts...Hopefully these posts will come quick and in successive order, however, due to my tremendously busy schedule and A.D.D. (undiagnosed and I which that I had even a slight case of hyperactivity as an adult) I am not sure if this will be the case... This first questioning techniques post will be about questions that require students to extend their responses .  As a math teacher, it is easy to fall into the habit of ...

Teaching students to use their time wisely can be a difficult skills to teach.  Below are some strategies that I use in my classroom to help students develop their time management skills. -Teach students how to use time management tools , this includes calendars/agendas (my school is one-to-one so teaching students how set-up and use their Google calendar is helpful when thinking about the due dates of assignments), timers, check-off lists, and timelines -Displaying a class calendar (weekly and/or monthly) that all students will be able to see, that contain upcoming tests and assignment due dates -Post a class time schedule and an Agenda for the day (referring to this throughout the class period or the day) -Develop and maintain a Things-to-Do list ( model how to cross things off of the list and allow students to mark items off of the list) -For large assignments, break the assignments into smaller pieces and have students check-in (informally...