Classroom management
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Body Language
Have an open posture. Be relaxed, but don't slouch! Sit or stand upright and place your hands by your sides. Avoid standing with your hands on your hips, as this will make you appear larger, which can communicate aggression or a desire to dominate.
Use a firm handshake. But don't get carried away! You don't want it to become awkward or, worse, painful for the other person. If it does, you'll likely come across as rude or aggressive.
Maintain good eye contact. Try to hold the other person's gaze for a few seconds at a time. This will show her that you're sincere and engaged. But, avoid turning it into a staring match!.
Avoid touching your face. There's a common perception that people who touch their faces while answering questions are being dishonest. While this isn't always true, it's best to avoid fiddling with your hair or touching your mouth or nose, particularly if your aim is to come across as trustworthy.
Instruction strategies
- Create Learning Stations
- Use Task Cards
- Interview Students
- Target Different Senses Within Lessons
- Share Your Own Strengths and Weaknesses
- Use the Think-Pair-Share Strategy
- Make Time for Journaling
- Implement Reflection and Goal-Setting Exercises
- Run Literature Circles
- Offer Different Types of Free Study Time
- Group Students with Similar Learning Styles
- Give Different Sets of Reading Comprehension Activities
- Assign Open-Ended Projects
- Encourage Students to Propose Ideas for Their Projects
- “Teach Up”
- Create Learning Stations, without Mandatory Rotations
Asking questions
When planning questions, keep in mind your course goals
Aim for direct, specific questions.
Ask questions throughout your class and ask only one question at a time.
Ask open-ended questions.
Use Bloom’s Taxonomy to be sure you are addressing various types of cognitive processes in your questions
Refine and reflect on questions after class.
Correcting students
Time management
This sounds obvious but it can be easily overlooked. Talk to your students about error correction and to find out from them how they like to be corrected. Often students have clear ideas about how they would like you to correct them. With large groups you may have to go with the majority, but if you have a small group you can cater for individual needs.
One way to give students a choice on how much they want to be corrected in a particular class or activity is for them to make a traffic light to put on their desk. A strip of card with three circles (one red, one orange and one green) folded into a triangle with a bit of sellotape does the trick. Students point the circle towards you to indicate whether or not they want correction:
o Red = don’t correct me at all (they may have had a rough day or be tired!)
o Orange = correct things which are really important or things I should know.
o Green = correct as much as you can, please.
Praising students
Keep Daily Score.
Monitoring strategies
Look for the anomalies and outliers. We can learn more from the unexpected than from the everyday occurrences.
Re-evaluate your strategy on a regular basis. As your company grows, and your application changes, your monitoring strategy should be re-evaluated. Are you still measuring from the geographies that matter? Have new components been introduced that need to be monitored?
Align metrics with business objectives. Why should others in the organization care about a metric? Describe how the monitoring data is relevant to objectives such as increasing customer loyalty, increasing revenue, or reducing costs.
Measure performance across multiple connection types. Performance and availability can vary widely across connection types include a representative sample of your users.
Monitor from the viewpoint of your users. Capture metrics from real users to get the broadest coverage and use those locations to influence where to capture synthetic measurements from.
Compare your performance to competitors or industry leaders. Performance is relative, you are being compared to other sites on a daily basis, do you know how you stack up?
Configure alerts to be notified when performance varies from a baseline. Early identification of issues can help resolve problems before customers are impacted.
Measure individual pages and multi-step transactions. Users are visiting more than a single page, you should be monitoring more than the home page.
Analyze first and third party performance. Problems with a third party affect the overall digital experience just as much as problems with first party content.
Monitor the components and the whole. System level, component level, and overall application metrics need to be included to get the full picture.
- Start your day with a clear focus.
- Have a dynamic task list.
- Focus on high-value activities.
- Minimize interruptions.
- Stop procrastinating.
- Limit multi-tasking.
- Review your day.
Describe Noteworthy Student Behavior.
Praise Effort and Accomplishment, Not Ability.
Match the Method of Praise Delivery to Student Preferences.
Select Students for Praise: Goal-Setting and Checkup.
Make It Habit-Forming: Tie Praise to Classroom Routines