Teaching Beliefs and Strategies
I believe that a good teacher must be able to develop relationships with their
students that invite openness and respect from their students. Any teacher
can read content and develop a lesson plan. But without the ability to gain
the trust and confidence of the students a teacher will fail at truly leading
them to higher achievement. I have also always believed that classroom
management is where teachers either succeed or fail. I use a system that
might seem complex to some people but has always been very successful for me.
I begin each class during each semester with my list of rules and
regulations. Most of these are what the school expects from the students, the
rest are what I expect out of them. The key, in my eyes, is to create rules
and expectations that are not only appropriate, but acceptable by the
students standards. The next and most important strategy is to be consistent
with regulation of the expectations. Throughout the course of the semester
students that fail to follow the rules are subject to penalties for their
actions. The majority of these issues are simply handled with warnings or
small penalties. I believe that we all make mistakes, and if a student is
willing to pay the consequences for their actions then that is where the issue
should end. This strategy has worked very well for me in the past as students
realize that once they do what I ask them to do we are both able to move on
without further problems.
Artifact Logs
Standard 1
Standard 2
Standard 3
Standard 4
Standard 5
Standard 6
Standard 7
Standard 8
Other Resources