Wednesday, March 31, 2010
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:
- 100 Percent
- What to Do
- Strong Voice
- Do It Again
- Sweat the Details
- Threshold
- 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.
During our flight home from Japan, my wife noticed something odd from the window. Some of the pictures she took show what looks to be a large ship. We were very surprised that we were able to see it so well.
More pictures and info below …
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Oops
I just found this post in the drafts section and realized that even though I wrote it well over a year ago, I never posted it. Rather than leave it again, I am going to post it now and complete it with screenshots in the near future.
This post is a bit out of date because I am talking about MS WinXP and KDE 3.5.x even though MS Windows Vista has been out for a couple of years (and MS Windows 7 is currently RTM) and KDE is up to 4.3. However, I am still using KDE 3.5 and much of the MS Windows-using world decided to stay with MS WinXP, so this article is not as out of date as it may seem.
Also, I believe (but could be wrong, I admit) that the situation has not changed much with current MS Windows releases — they still don’t come with much useful software; the end user still has to purchase or otherwise acquire and install their day-to-day software on their own.
Further, most of the KDE software mentioned in this article is still in use in KDE 4.3, although possibly in slightly modified form.
More Observations on KDE & WinXP
This is the third in a series of articles chronicling my switch from KDE to WinXP at work. If you haven’t already, please read the first and second articles.
There was not a whole lot of good software included with WinXP. Almost none. There is no good text editor – just Wordpad and Notepad. No good image manipulation program. MS Paint is the graphics equivalent of Notepad. For someone used to Linux, such skimpy software offerings are strange. KDE comes with an impressive amount of software. MS WinXP doesn’t.
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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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