Osugi Sakae

Here are some details from the book “Teach like a champion: 49 Techniques that put students on the path to college”. I have found the book very helpful because so much of the advice is so specific. The author includes examples of specific phrases that are (supposedly) effective and also tells the reader why they work and why they are better than some other commonly used phrases.

Also: There is a DVD included with the book. I have not watched it yet. The videos are of the techniques in the book actually being used with students. So I think the DVD (not having seen it yet, mind you) complements the book content well.

Chapter 6: setting and maintaining high behavior expectations explains techniques 36 to 42. They are:

36. 100 Percent
37. What to Do
38. Strong Voice
39. Do It Again
40. Sweat the Details
41. Threshold
42. No Warnings

Each of these is explained in as many pages as required. Strong Voice includes five principles and takes about nine pages. Sweat the Details and Threshold only need about 2 pages each.

Technique 38: Strong Voice

Five Principles of Strong Voice:

• Economy of Language
• Do Not Talk Over
• Do Not Engage
• Square Up / Stand Still
• Quiet Power

I am finding “Do Not Engage” especially useful. Basically, when the class is on a topic – whatever it is – the teacher should not allow the topic to be changed. Classic case is the teacher tells a student to do something and instead of doing it, the student replies with something like “I wasn’t doing it” or “She kicked my desk first”. The teacher should not reply with anything off topic, but should stay on target by, for example, repeating the request and adding a comment to the effect that the student does not need to talk now.

Do Not Engage applies to general classroom interactions as well. Students shouting out answers? Do not engage. Not even to say something like “Good but next time please raise your hand”. That is engaging. Better to say something like “Raise your hands if you want to answer” – corrects without engaging.

All of the techniques are handled in this way and there is a lot of good advice that new teachers will find very helpful. Experienced teachers may already know a lot of what is in the book. Or they may find several great ideas that they hadn’t thought of before.

I just learned about Translation Party from this article on BBspot, so I went over to try it out.

Translation Party is an interesting idea and pretty cool to play with. The idea is to translate an English sentence into Japanese, take the resulting Japanese sentence and translate it back into English, and repeat this until the results “reach equilibrium”. Equilibrium is when the English in and English out match. It doesn’t have to be the original English, just any E1 -> J -> E2 where E1 and E2 are the same.

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Who, outside of your immediate family, has had the biggest influence on your success in life? It is probably your teachers and coaches.

Peers, of course, also have a huge influence on young people, but not in an organized or necessarily positive way. Good teachers work hard to positively influence their students while equipping them with the knowledge and skills they will need to succeed in life.

Teaching and education are long-term investments; yet teacher incentives, when they exist at all, are usually short-term and often actually just the lack of a punishment — like loss of funding or cancelled programs. All stick, no carrot.

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