Читать книгу Awesome Sauce - Josh Stock - Страница 19

POSSIBLE APPLICATIONS: Teacher to Student

The beginning of class is always hectic. I like to check in with students early on, but first I need to take attendance, and Kiera has a question about the writing assignment from last Thursday, and Oliver is crying because Brooklyn said something mean to him in the hall, and then I’m supposed to ask every student to attend the mixer after school today (at least, I think that’s what the e-mail said—or was the mixer tomorrow?), and on top of that, I want to build a relationship with the quiet student who hasn’t spoken the last few days. It’s a lot to accomplish.

I used to start every class period by reading off class announcements—things like birthdays, assignment reminders, reading goals, and quotes of the day. As a middle school teacher, I was doing this for five classes a day. Every day. All that repetition was exhausting and felt like a waste of time, but I also knew that consistency was important for many of my students. I love to mix up seating arrangements and experiment with the structure of class activities, so announcements give us an anchor to start from, a calm, predictable moment before we launch into something amazing. (Offering routines like this is especially helpful for students who have executive functioning challenges.)

To make these announcements less exhausting, I decided to start recording them. I wanted a one-stop shop for all the most important events coming up, something I could show students at the start of class while I completed the usual beginning-of-the-hour tasks. The purpose of the video was to walk through this information once and then be able to reuse it for the rest of the day. And it worked great.

The first few times I did it, it took me about fifteen to twenty minutes to record the video because I kept restarting if I made a mistake. I wanted the video to be absolutely perfect. I noticed every “um” or “uh” or awkward pause. It was so time-consuming that I nearly gave up. But once I stopped worrying about perfection, I was able to get the time frame down to five to seven minutes for most of my announcement videos. I made a rule to limit myself to no more than three takes. Most days, I only needed one.

These videos freed me up to meet with individual students and complete administrative tasks, and they engaged the students a lot more than I would’ve just reading off upcoming due dates. Students pay more attention to a video than they would to me, because the videos are unique.

STUDENT-CREATED VIDEO

Students earn celebrity status when they pop up in my announcement videos. Sometimes a random student will stop by in the morning when I’m recording; other times I’ll find random students in the hall to record. One of my favorite approaches

is to find students who need an extra emotional boost. I’ll record them, hype them up, and make them the star of the show. It’s a great motivator.

I also started to vary the way I presented information in the videos. Sometimes I would say a date for an assignment and have it written on the board behind me in the video; other times I would also point to the due date on the calendar. These variations were meant to engage different parts of students’ brains.

My daily announcement videos usually follow the same general format:

1. First, I go through the daily announcements. These usually include upcoming assignments, reading checks, challenges, and anything else students may need to know in the near future. I always try to hold up a physical version of the actual assignment so they can visualize what I’m talking about.

2. Next, I do birthday announcements. I want to make sure every student who celebrates a birthday gets a shout out. I wasn’t sure how important this was until I missed my first student, who was super bummed. Most students value this kind of positive affirmation, so anybody I miss always gets a special birthday shout-out the next day … usually with a guest like Batman. (To see what I mean by this, look at the Characters section in chapter 7.)

3. Finally, I wrap up the announcements video with the quote of the day. I have a chalkboard in my room where I always write a positive daily quote. Sometimes I just read the quote, and that’s the end of the video. Other times I ask the students to talk about the quote when the video is over.

The last thing I include in my announcement videos is my catchphrase. Somehow it caught on and now the kids think it’s weird if I don’t end by saying “Until next time, book it forward and be awesome!”