Newsletter

Rip’s Teaching Tips​

Monthly Newsletter

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Ideas, resources, and inspiration for teachers

 

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Establish a Seating Plan That Allows Maximum Proximity to Your Students

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One of the first things you will need to do in your classroom is to decide how to arrange the furniture. This decision will be determined partially based on what kind of furniture is in the room. Do the students sit in desks? At small individual tables? At larger tables? All of these will present both possibilities and limitations as to how you can arrange your classroom. Having said that, there are two very important factors to consider is determining how best to arrange where and how your students will be sitting.

 

First, you will want to maximize proximity to your students. There is a great deal of research (see for example, Wehby, J. and Lane, K., 2009) as well as decades of teaching experience that tells us of this wonderful relationship between student misbehavior and where the teacher is physically in the classroom. It’s called the proximity rule, and it goes like this: The closer you are to any student or group of students – the less likely they are to be off- task or misbehaving.

 

This is a great truth that all good teachers know and use in their teaching practices and in the ways in which they configure the student desks in their classrooms.

 

Secondly, you will want to configure the students’ desks in ways that support the specific kinds of learning activities that you will have them engaged in. Sometimes you will want them in groups of two; other times in groups of four. Still at other times, you may want them working individually.

 

Personally, unless I had the students doing group work, I found the horseshoe configuration worked very well. I would place the student desks or tables around the perimeter of the room, and I would direct activities from the center of the horseshoe. This way, I was never more than three steps away from any student.

 

And lastly, as you teach, you will want to move around the classroom constantly. Teach from the front, the back, the sides and the centre. Remember, the closer you are to your students, the more on task they are likely to be.

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​​​​Research Spotlight: ​

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You are all familiar with the saying, “a picture is worth a thousand words.” However, a picture is also an effective technique that you can use to teach students and to help them remember content.​

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In their article The Surprisingly Powerful Influence of Drawing on Memory (2018), authors Myra Fernandes Jeffrey Wammes, and Melissa Meade explore the idea of using drawing as a device to help student remember content. In their research, they explored whether drawing to-be-learned information enhanced memory and they found this strategy to be a reliable, replicable means of boosting performance. Specifically, they demonstrated how this technique can be applied to enhance learning of individual words and pictures as well as textbook definitions. Their study showed that gains are greater from drawing than other known mnemonic techniques, such as visualization, writing, and even tracing to-be- remembered information.

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The next time you are teaching content that you want your students to remember, think about having them draw pictures that symbolize the content in a way that is meaningful to them. It is highly likely that you will see retention increase.

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Book of the Month: Summary of a Book That Will Help You Be a Better Teacher

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TRUE Teacher Story of the Month​​​​​​

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At roll call every day, Mr. Schlatter would recite the first part of a quote, and his students would have to recite the second part. He had one boy, Alan, who complained bitterly about having to do this right up until the day he was expelled.

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Years later, Mr. Schlatter got a phone call from Alan, who told his former teacher that his life had not gone well, and that he had tried to kill himself by slitting his wrists. “You know what, Mr. Schlatter, as I lay there with my life running out of my body, I suddenly remembered that dumb quote you made me write twenty times one day. ‘There is no failure except in no longer trying.’ Then it suddenly made sense to me. As long as I was alive, I wasn’t a failure, but if I allowed myself to die, I would most certainly die a failure. So with my remaining strength, I called for help and started a new life.’”

 

Because it is the nature of teaching that we often don’t immediately know the impact that our work will have on our students’ lives, it’s important that we recognize our more immediate wins.

 

I kept a small sign taped to my computer monitor that said, “Win small. Win early, Win often.” It helped me to figure out how I could “win” on a daily basis. While I hoped that some of what I was teaching my students might impact them for a long time, I also needed some quick wins to keep me going on a day-to-day basis.

 

How about you? What do you do to keep score in your classroom? How do you know if you are winning?

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Teacher Well-Being Corner

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QUOTE OF THE MONTH

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"Learning happens when students have to think hard."​

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TEACHING Q&A

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On the Rip’s Teaching Tips website there is a section where teachers like yourself can submit questions and I will answer one or two of these each month in this newsletter and explore some possible answers that I hope will prove useful. This months question is:​

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This month’s question is from an experienced educator who wants some ideas on how to deal with students
constantly yelling out: “6-7” and doing the juggling motion that goes with this.

Every year there seems to be something that kids get into, some new fad. A while back it was skibidi, the talking
head in the toilet. Now it’s kids yelling out, “6-7” and doing a juggling motion. Some teachers get very frustrated

with this, as students who do this constantly throughout a lesson are disruptive to learning and disrespectful to the
teaching.

One strategy that I have found really useful in circumstances like this is to give my students what they want . . . but
in very large doses. Let me explain. Most kids like ice cream, but if you forced a child to eat two gallons of ice
cream, they would get sick. Let’s apply this to “6-7.” Instead of arguing and punishing students for these kinds of
behaviors, I would encourage them to do this. In the “6-7” instance, I would start each class by telling my
students, “OK, it’s 6-7 time. Stand up and yell out 6-7 for as long as you want, but when you are done, sit down.
And if you sit down, you are promising me that you will NOT yell out 6-7 for the remainder of the class. Get it out
of your system now. OK, everyone up, let’s go!”

What happens here is that I have taken away the spontaneity of just blurting out “6-7” and having your classmates
laugh at you. Trust me, having to stand up and say “6-7” repeatedly – while everyone else in the class is doing the
same thing – is no fun at all.

Try this, but hold your students accountable. When they sit down, they are making a commitment to not yell out
“6-7” for the rest of the class. If they do not honor this commitment, then there must be a consequence, such as
coming after school and yelling “6-7” 670 times before going home. Whatever works for you.

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Fun Extra​

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​Learning to write realistic learning objectives:

My lesson plan said: “Students will understand the concept.”

By 10:00 a.m. I’d changed it to: “Students will be exposed to
the concept.”

By 11:00 a.m. I changed it to : “The concept will be in the
same room as the students.”

Mission accomplished. 😄

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If you find this newsletter of value, please feel free to SHARE it with your colleagues.

 

And please remember:

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If you’re not having fun... you’re doing it wrong! ​​​​​​​​​

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Thank you for all that you do to help kids! Teaching is hard, but there’s no doubt that you’re making a difference.  The very fact that you have taken the time to read this newsletter tells me that you want to grow and continue to get better as an educator. My compliments and my thanks!

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