Effective Teacher Commands

As classroom managers, teachers regularly use commands to direct students to start and stop activities.

Jim's Hints

Monitor Your Use of Commands. By tracking your use of teacher commands in the classroom, you can gain a better understanding of how frequently you give then and how effective those commands are. Check out the Teacher Command Monitoring Chart (see attachment at the bottom of this page) as an example of one instructor self-rating form.

Critters!: Rewarding Positive Behaviors

This intervention rewards students for positive behaviors. It can be used with small groups or your entire class.

Jim's Hints

Give Critter Slips Out to Other Staff to Distribute to Your Students. Here is a strategy to use if you want your students to show the daily positive behavior in settings other than your classroom (e.g., in art, gym, music, lunch). Give the staff responsible for supervising students in these settings a handful of Critter Slips. Tell them the target positive behavior and, throughout the class or activity period, encourage these staff members to hand out slips randomly to students engaging in that behavior.

Have a 'Mystery Behavior Day'. Tell students at the start of the day that you will be handing out Critter Slips as usual, but that you are keeping secret the positive behavior that you are rewarding. When handing out slips, say to the receiving students something like: "Nice job. Here is a Critter Slip. Think about why you received it!". At the end of the day, ask students who had received Critter Slips to guess the positive behavior that you had selected as the theme for that day.

Customize Reward Slips to Support Curriculum. You may want to create your own customized reward slips to link them thematically to the curriculum that you are teaching. If you are presenting a unit on African wildlife, for example, you might make up slips that depict representative animals from the savannah ecosystem. For a unit on American presidents, you could hand out reward slips featuring the faces and names of lesser-known Chief Executives to help children better to remember them.

Alter the Reward Slips for Older Students. The Critter Slips program is suitable for older students as well as for younger children. Since 'cute' Critter Slips may put off middle and high school students, though, you can replace them with reward slips that resemble currency. Some inventive teachers even go so far as to create 'classroom bucks', fake dollar bills that display their face and name. Older students collect these 'dollars' as avidly as smaller children seek Critter Slips!

Victims: Preventing Students From Becoming 'Bully-Targets'

Children who are chronically bullied are often deeply unhappy in school, suffer from low self-esteem, and often find themselves socially rejected by their classmates as a result of the bullying.

Locations: Transforming Schools from Bully-Havens to Safe Havens

Bullies are opportunistic, preying upon students whom they perceive as weak.

Bystanders: Turning Onlookers into Bully-Prevention Agents

Most students in a classroom or school do not bully others regularly and are not victimized by bullies.

Text Lookback

Reserve several instructional sessions to introduce the steps in this comprehension strategy.

Jim's Hints

Have Students Write Text-Lookback Questions for Assigned Reading. For homework, encourage students to compose several challenging text-lookback questions based on their assigned reading. Use these questions later for class review.

Reciprocal Teaching: A Reading Comprehension Package

The intervention package teaches students to use reading comprehension strategies independently, including text prediction, summarization,question generation, and clarification of unknown or unc

Jim's Hints

Let students select Reciprocal Teaching passages. Allow the group to vote for a preferred passage from among several possible choices. Choice often increases student motivation and investment.

Start a 'Reciprocal Teaching' Tutoring Program. Once students become proficient in using the Reciprocal Teaching package, consider assigning them as peer tutors to train other students to use Reciprocal Teaching strategies.

Reading Comprehension Fix-Up Skills: A Classroom Toolkit

Good readers continuously monitor their understanding of informational text.

Question-Generation

Students are taught to boost their comprehension of expository passages by (1) locating the main idea or key ideas in the passage and (2) generating questions based on that information.

Jim's Hints

Use "Gist" Sentences to Organize Student Research Notes. When students are writing research papers, they often find it challenging to synthesize their scattered research notes into an orderly outline with sequentially presented main ideas.

Students who have mastered the skill of assembling key ideas into "gist" sentences can identify their most important research notes, copy these notes individually onto index cards, and group cards with related notes. The student can then write a single "gist" sentence for each pile of note cards and use these sentences as the starting point for a paper outline.

Collect Exemplary Examples of Student-Generated Questions as Study Aids. If your class is using an assigned textbook, you may want to collect well-written student-generated questions and share them with other students. Or assign students different sections of an article or book chapter and require that they 'teach' the content by presenting their text-generated questions and sharing the correct answers.

Select Student Questions As Quiz or Test Items. You can build classroom interest (and competition!) in using this question-generation strategy by occasionally using one or more student text-questions as quiz or test items.

Prior Knowledge: Activating the 'Known'

Through a series of guided questions, the instructor helps students activate their prior knowledge of a specific topic to help them comprehend the content of a story or article on the same topic.

Jim's Hints

Use Text Prediction to Prepare Students for Homework Reading. You can apply the Text Prediction strategy to boost student comprehension of homework reading assignments. When assigning the homework passages, take students through the steps in the strategy. Then require that students take their own written predictions home to compare to their actual reading.

Transition from Group to Individual Application of the Strategy. As your students become proficient in applying the strategy, you can gradually train them to use the strategy independently.

As the instructor, you might hand out the three main ideas for a story and then direct students to take each idea and write out (1) a short account of their own experiences with the topic, and (2) a prediction of what the article or story will say about the main idea. You can collect these written assignments to monitor student understanding and follow-through in using the technique.

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