Management
Rules:
Right now my rules are the same they've been all year: Listen Carefully, Speak Respectfully, Act Reasonably, Take Responsibility for the Classroom Community. Practically speaking, my rules are basically: Come Prepared, Listen Silently While Mr. Weimer Is Speaking, Do Your Work, Act Reasonably. Before I just wrote those I expected those "new" rules to be farther away from my originals, so maybe that means I should simply rephrase the rules in my room and make a new poster. I guess that will be change number one.
Consequences:
I have changed my consequences to some degree. At the beginning, I decided to split apart major and minor consequences. Minor consequences could rack up as many checks (earning a writing assignment each); major consequences can earn detention and a referral. As it turns out, I have only assigned two detentions in class. Detentions have become a purgatory of sorts for the majority of students who never hand in writing assignments before I write them up for skipping detention. A minor consequence behind the most common consequence (writing assignments). In other words, I already have 20ish people for detention on Tuesday, 10ish people for the Tuesday after that, and some people in detention until after Christmas. There have been periods in which students have done my writing assignments, but recently I've almost completely stopped getting lines from any of my ninth graders.
In short, I've changed my plan by writing more students up and sending them out of my room; I've never really given detentions in class; I've been trying to tighten up on disrespect. Verbal abuse directed at me from my students is a management problem I hadn't fully anticipated and am still struggling to find effective ways to manage.
Rewards:
I've added a ticket system. I pull tickets and give candy every other Friday. They can also trade two tickets for a bathroom pass and five for a participation/hw pass.
posted by Dave @ 9:57 AM
1 comments
1 Comments:
This appears to be in response to something and I dont know what that is.
Seems that your rules could be generic to most classrooms and, often, are ignored to one degree or another. In your room/school apparently to many degrees.
Wait, gotta back up. Someone gave you the message to make changes in order to creat change or whatever. What if the rules are sensible? What if it is the behavior(s) that is unreasonable. Changing, modifying rules isn't going to impact upon that. Unless, of course, you make anarchy the goal.
(There's an interesting idea: what if you made the norm chaos? Encouraged talking, you interupted their conversations repeatedly, came in unprepared, etc.) Apart from losing your job, might be interesting as an experiment.
I think that you might adopt a zero tolerance policy on disrespect, especially toward you. Send them out immediately. No warnings, no check marks, no nothing other than the clear understanding that it won't be tolerated and violation of that means out of the room. There isn't any middle ground with this one. And, I am pretty sure that dissing them is received very poorly so, make examples. Or, even harsher, two disprespectful comments toward you = a zero on some major assignment.
I worry about writing as a consequence as it's kind of like using food as a consequence. Could turn them off to any writing, but, what's the option?
Do you need to shorten the time of positive reward? The consequence for unacceptable behaviors is immediate, why not the reward for acceptable behavior? Give something immediately or at the end of class then earn tickets, poins, whatever, for larger rewards later. Every other week is an eternity!
There's nothing here about learning to communicate, however. How is that going?
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