Our guest speaker for this week was Ben Nakamura, principal at a Juvenile Court and Community Day School in San Diego. I could tell immediately that he knew what he was doing because he had me engaged the entire two hours he was here. He made each of us in class feel like we had a part, and he barely knew us. Ben taught us countless things in his time with us, but I will just focus on my favorite two.
The first tip that Ben gave us had to do with giving kids the power in any difficult situation (or at least let them think they have the power). He gave the example of struggling with a student in class who refuses to put their phone away. Ben said that if you try to give the student power, or autonomy, they will make the right decision every time. If you give the student three options: give the phone to me, put it away and I wont see it again, walk up to my desk and leave it there, and have them pick one of them, the student will make a good choice every time. I personally struggled with thinking that the students will make a good choice each time, but he insisted that 9 out of 10 times this works. I almost can't wait to have this problem in my class to try it out.
The second tip that I found to be extremely helpful is something he calls PTA. This isn't the regular parent volunteer board that I first thought of. It stands for Post, Teach, Assess. PTA is used for setting up classroom norms or expectations. You need to first post your expectations in the class for all the students to see. This could be after a class discussion about what the students think the expectations should be of them as well as of their teacher. After you post the expectations, it is important to teach your students how you want them to do the things you expect of them. Model the behavior and techniques you want your students to do. There is a difference between teaching and telling. If we want our students to meet our expectations, we have to teach them how to do so. Lastly, we as teachers need to assess our students on how they are meeting the expectations. As teachers, our job is to "teach" our students, and then see what they learned by assessment. This is how we keep students accountable for their learning in their educational career. If we really want our students to learn and execute our expectations, we need to assess their knowledge of them as well.
Overall I thoroughly enjoyed having Mr. Nakamura as a guest speaker. I think that all of us learned a lot from him and will have him to thank one day when we are expert teachers with superb classroom management!