Ch. 14 “How do C.M. Charles and Others Energize Their Classes?

Charles places a lot of emphasis on synergy (when two or more entities are brought together and begin feeding physical or psychic energy to each other, p.249).  He believes that when teachers take advantage of the natural synergy in the room and enhance it with exciting exercises and lessons, the students have less opportunity or desire to misbehave.  It is important to develop a classroom ethics and trust as a whole, and the teacher should spend time early on in the year to create a feeling of togetherness.  Charles also suggests making use of your natural charisma, or developing some if you’re a bit short on it.  Things like charm, friendliness and enthusiasm are contagious.  A synergetic teacher should also keep open lines of communication flowing between himself and the rest of the students as well as between the students individually.  Charles also uses the word “coopetition”.  As in, cooperating in competition.  I like this phrase a lot, and it always gets everyone in the class engaged and excited.  Another important aspect of synergetic teaching is solving problems that arise between teachers and students immediately through discussion and encouragement.  In the chapter, Charles even provides a 5 session process for developing a discipline plan with the students.  He goes on to say that working together to find a solution is most often better than using punishment in order correct misbehavior.

Marilyn Page suggests changing the language we use while teaching in order to promote more interesting teaching.  By changing the word teaching to learning the teacher can think in terms of “how can I best help Doug learn this” instead of “how can I teach this to Doug the best?”.  She also suggests changing lesson to learning plan, unit to investigation, cover to discover, and presentations to interactive learning experiences.  All of these changes are turning the attention to the student and away from the teacher, as well as making everything sound a little more exciting. 

Benna Golubtchik suggests creating a multisensory classroom, using colors and three dimensional models and problem solving questions to steer learning.  She suggests using kinesthetic activities in order to tap into all sensory modalities. 

Rosemary Shaw Is an advocate for multi-media technology, and uses the internet as a teaching tool in her classroom.  She suggests a six step process to help students conduct online research.  1. Questioning-students must understand the project.  2. Planning-students choose a topic and decide on resources needed.  3. Gathering-students get online and begin to siphon through primary and secondary resources.  4.  Sorting and sifting-students now start to assemble all the information they’ve gathered.  5. Synthesizing-students put everything together into a coherent report.  6. Evaluation-students review everything and make sure all requirements are met.

Nancy Powell suggests using marker boards to keep students engaged.  I read this section and the only thing I could see was using something like iPads instead of marker boards.  Sounds a little ‘80’s for a 2008 report.  The concept is still the same.  Each student is responsible for responding to a question or prompt and must answer individually.