Mary Poppins once said "Well begun is half done", and I couldn't agree more. In this scenerio too, if you want to have a great management/control your classroom, you'd better get started right. Today, I tell you about the classroom, which I had observed how they set their agreement and how I think about it.
After Part I - Introduction : Come to Work with Me as a Classroom Observer, I got to introduce about what I was supposed to do and now we gonna continue with part II.
The new team of teachers want to get to know more about their students so they had a second activity.
This activity is to
- Pair up with your buddy
- Each students introduce themselves with their nickname, dream job, hobby and a thing that they like.
- Each students will roleplay the dream job that they choose.
Given a little bit of time, the students were done with their pair and the teacher asked them to come out and do it in front of the whole class.
They were introducing themselves and the teachers asked the students what the things they just said were, to check if they were listening to the presenting classmate or not.
They, then, were asking around about the dream occupations that the students want to be in the future and jotted down on the board.
Notes from me : great idea to write down their answers. This makes all the thoughts more tangible and easy to grasp and work on. It would be better, though, if they could help by grouping the words for the students to see it more easily.
I talked about this in the post of How I Taught Vocab on a Sleepy Afternoon-- Part II of Learning about Hobbies. Feel free to check it out if you're interested.
This activity is quite simple and again easy to follow the instructions. The seated students would get a chance to know about their friends a little bit more. I like that the teachers got to ask and check for understanding to make sure that the other students are still engaged in the classroom. The opportunity that they let the students come forward is also a great way to boost their confidence and practice their public speaking, which is great.
Though it's simple, to me it's too simple for grade 8 students. I wish that there would be more things for the students to do, not just exchanging their names and hobbies. Maybe the teachers could've engaged more with their answers or get in groups, since there were many teachers. If the teacher team were assigned a group and get to (at least) know about their individual students more than just wait for pairs of students to come up.
Then it's the time for the most important part of setting the classroom, which is settling the classroom agreement. As I mentioned in the beginning, this (at least to me) is one of the most important foundations to start a classroom.
<<<<<<<<<< A classroom agreement can look something like this.
Interestingly, these teachers had an creative way to put it too.
First, they asked the students to write down "What should be an agreement that everyone in the class should do together, in order to have a classroom that everyone get to learn effectively"
***a little note from me : Good question to start brainstorming. It shows both what to do and the purpose clearly.
The students were writing their ideas down and submitted it to the teachers.
Now, the teachers seperated into 2 teams, one team were trying to grouping the similar idea and another team were keeping the students busy. So, it did look a little chaotic there in front of the class.
Wave, students! Woohoo!
Finally, we summarized and got the final 5 agreements.
Here are the english version for you guys.
- Participate in every activities in the class.
- Respect one another
- Only use the mobile phones with teacher's permission.
- Keep our classroom clean
- Maximum late entry time is 10 minutes.
Now the teachers announced that every teachers are eligible of giving stars : Gold stars for good behaviors and Black stars for bad behaviour. At the end of the week, there'll be presents for students who gained most golden stars and/or for the whole classroom, if they behaved well.
Again, shoutout to the giving instruction at the beginning. This is the great example of engaging students to put in work for the whole class agreement. The grouping ideas and the seperated jobs for teachers are nice too. It didn't leave the students unattended while getting the work done. Here's my compliment on their teamwork. I also liked that after writing them down, the teachers recheck with the students to make sure they're on the same ground, which is the principle of doing this
I wish the grouping team would do it somewhere else that's not right on the board in front of the students, not because it's a secret or anything, but it draws the attention of the students away. And the wave thing to draw students attention? Hmm i just wish it's something more useful to the students like asking them how their dream class looks like or something like that. I think it'd be more of a wisely spent time there.
The last activity before the dismissal of the class is every student needed to win a Rock-Paper-Scissors against any of the teachers. Cute and engaging good bye activity, I think.
Phew~~ These were such a long post for me to write. I'm not sure that because I'm so into writing about the job that I so strongly believe in or anything. But it felt nice to write it down and get my thoughts out. I hope if you get to read it, you'll find it useful for you to adapt to your class and let me know if anything in the comments down below.
Lastly,
Stay strong and keep learning, guys
Khob khun kaa,
Nomnomnoodle 🍜