Inspiring Students Today

Unfortunately what works well one day can easily become a disaster the next with emotionally disturbed students. Staying calm, building a good rapport with the students, listening, collaborating and always being willing to change with the moment is a strong point of mine, and something that thankfully is going well. If you lock yourself into expecting a specific outcome from the same procedures each day, your classroom will be chaos in no time at all. Each day requires a self reflection of how to best deal with a behavior of a student. What I have always been good at is to not categorize every student's behavior under specific labels. Each of us wakes up each day with different issues to face. If a student wakes up to find out their mother has stage 4 cancer, it is my job as a teacher to listen, and finally to treat that student in the same way I would hope someone would treat me. Every human being wakes up to different days each day. As a teacher it is my job to be open to what ea...

I think one thing that is going well in my class is exposing my students to new experiences. I work with students who are emotionally disturbed, often times from foster care or group homes. A common thread that runs through most of my students is poverty. For the most part, they lack what most people consider basic needs - being able to order pizza, nice clothes, getting out to a park, etc. To partially remedy this, I have worked hard on, for example, making pizzas. Students learn to fold pizza boxes; they make the dough from scratch; they weigh ingredients out on scales so they learn ounces, grams, etc; they learn radius and area of a circle; they learn the cost of pizzas, they learn about the quality of ingredients and multiple other skills. The most important part of this is teaching them to be the 'best' at something. You see, we don't just make a basic pizza, but my students understand how to make the best pizza. I have confidence in them to be the best at this and the...