Kennedy

Thoughts from reading pgs 1-28

1. One of the strategies for building positive relations is to, "Give the students a survey the first day of school that asks them to list hobbies, interests, pets, trips they've been on and other personal information." I have always done a beginning of the year activity with a poster including pictures of their personal lives, things we wouldn't see about them in the classroom....I will continue to do this and it was good to see this is a positive activity.

2. An important idea the presenter stressed was that effective classroom and building-wide discipline approaches emphasize prevention strategies that are backed with "timely and meaningful consequences." Prevention is the key word, consequences are the least important component of effective classroom discipline.

3. These pages included great monitoring skills which are necessary to recognize when to move to the "prevention" stage...silence being a very effective tool. Another monitoring skill that I especially liked is when we are having a teacher led discussion, in order to maintain on task student behavior, choral responses are positive as are asking students to write discussion answers on a piece of scratch paper. It is safe and keeps students thinking about the discussion concepts.