Right before the break, I feel like the students got a little out of hand - with call-outs, misuse of time, interruptions, and more. Coming back from the break, I wasn't about to let those behaviors continue. Something had to be done.
Sooooo, at our Community Circle meeting last Friday, we had the students brainstorm ideas of how to "fix" this problem, and they talked it out.
And it turned out like this -->
Today in our classroom, we introduced an updated version of our "Take 2" reflection time...and no one had to follow it yet!
We still have a long way to go until the end of the year, so this was an important part of our behavior management that we had to reevaluate. Yes, it took a few minutes out of our "teaching time," but I like to think of it as more of a time saver in the end.
Often, dealing with and managing kids' behaviors is the hardest part of teaching - give me lesson planning and, yes, even grading (gasp!) any day over interruptions and incessant chatter.
But as having a perfectly quiet classroom is not in my foreseeable future, I will have to settle for trying various management techniques (like the one we started today) instead. Reflection time (with a written component) should not be overlooked for use in the classroom. Just sayin'...
a chatty classroom isn't all bad... especially when they're talking and sharing what they're learning with the people around them. ;)
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