8 Ways Blogging Makes Me A Better Teacher General by Joel Wagner - January 14, 2008July 2, 20109 I have found this year that I have been making a lot of progress on my own personal teaching style. It's my 6th year to teach, and I begin what could be seen as the downhill slope of teaching. Now that I am pretty adequate at getting children to be and stay quiet throughout class so that I can teach them, I run the risk of slacking off and stagnating in my teaching technique. The whole if it's not broke, don't fix it mentality could very easily take over. But that's not the case with me. Why not? I believe that a lot of it has to do with my own personality of one who pursues excellence. But I think
Self-Sufficient Students General by Joel Wagner - January 11, 2008July 2, 20107 Recently, one of the other teachers sent the following email out to everyone at my campus: Self-sufficient – able to take care of your own needs without help from others Colleagues, over the next several weeks I will be using some of my sponge time to explore the idea of self-sufficiency in school and at home. We have already learned the definition and brainstormed some examples. Now I am soliciting ideas from you. If you had to name one or two ways in which you wish your students were more self-suffcient, what would it be? If you have been successful in teaching your students to be more self-sufficient in school, what method did you use? My personal
Highlighting Some Recent Comments General by Joel Wagner - January 7, 2008July 2, 20101 I have fallen behind on the blog lately, but that is because I am actually trying to move forward some more in my personal life. Sometimes sacrifices are necessary parts of progress. I wanted to take this opportunity to highlight a few of the great comments that I have received lately. I am interested in hearing more about how some of you run your classrooms effectively. This can include specific teaching techniques, classroom management (which we have gone over quite a bit in recent months), and socially. I also am interested in hearing how you handle administrative issues that seem to pop up from time to time. Out of the middle of nowhere, Jane wrote a lengthy and thoughtful comment
152nd Carnival of Education Blogging & Technology by Joel Wagner - January 2, 2008July 2, 201012 Welcome to the January 2, 2008 edition of The Carnival of Education. I have been asked to host this party, so fasten your seat belts, tighten your shoelaces, batten down the hatches, and let the good times roll. How's that for a cliché riddled sentence? Last time I hosted, I got quite a few positive comments. So hopefully you will enjoy this time around as well. If this is your first time visiting my blog, welcome! I'd love it if you stick around, subscribe, and contribute to the conversations! Looking for somewhere to start, check out The Busiest Articles of 2007, then if you're in a real commenting mood, go visit the poor Overlooked Articles of 2007 and The Loneliest
The Busiest Articles of 2007 Blogging & Technology by Joel Wagner - December 26, 2007July 2, 20101 On Sunday, we looked back at some of The Loneliest Articles of 2007, today, we'll go to the other extreme and look at the busiest articles of 2007. These are the articles that generated the most comments. I've gone through the articles and found those that received the most comments. After boiling down that list, I have come up with the 15 most commented articles. 148th Carnival of Education December 5th, 2007 (9 comments by 9 authors, 4 trackbacks) (13) The State of the Blog: 08/01/07 August 1st, 2007 (11 comments by 11 authors) (11) 5 Surefire Tips For Handling Misbehavior September 12th, 2007 (8 comments by 7 authors) (7) The Purpose Of A Personal Mission Statement July 26th,
Organizing Your To-Do List for Maximum Productivity: Part 2 Stress Reduction by Pamela - December 24, 2007June 30, 20101 This is a guest post by Pamela, who doesn’t currently have her own blog. Pamela teaches elementary in Michigan. Ideas for organizing your subcategories In part 1 of this series, I talked about the shortcomings of traditional to-do lists and the increased productivity that results from using a to-do schedule. With a to-do schedule, your list is organized by day, and each day is broken down into subcategories. The schedule makes it easy to plan ahead, since you have a list for each of the next 7-10 days. Today we’ll talk about some of the subcategories you might use for your daily lists. One way to organize your day is by using time of day categories Before
The Loneliest Articles of 2007 Blogging & Technology by Joel Wagner - December 23, 2007July 2, 20100 In the Christmas break, I am looking back at this blog's growth and development. I began writing a little bit for the blog in February, but didn't officially launch it for real until June. Since that time, growth has been pretty consistent. I now seem to regularly get a small number of comments for every article I write, with some eliciting more than others. As I look through the blog's archive, it strikes me that there are some articles that have either been buried deep in the archives, or for whatever reason, have gone unnoticed by my readers. So I am giving all of those articles a chance to redeem themselves, come up to the light of day. Here is
7 Things About Me Personal by Joel Wagner - December 15, 2007May 30, 20162 I don't normally do these kinds of things, but this week has been far from normal! I was tagged by Carol to share 7 random things. It goes something like this: The rules are: - Link to the person that tagged you and post the rules on your blog. - Share 7 random and or weird things about yourself. - Tag 7 random people at the end of your post and include links to their blogs. - Let each person know that they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog. 7 random things about me I love the Bible. The Word of God used to not make any sense to me, but I asked God to help me understand it, and He did.
50 Reasons To Love Your Job As A Teacher Reader Appreciation by Joel Wagner - November 30, 2007August 5, 201612 In November of 2007, I had Reader Appreciation Month. During the course of that month, I interviewed a number of my readers and gained some powerful insight into what makes teachers tick. This article summarizes 50 reasons to love your job as a teacher. As we come to the conclusion of Reader Appreciation Month, I want to summarize some of the things that we have learned. Today, I'll focus on some of the reasons my readers have shared with me about why they love their jobs. Edutopia put together a slide show of 20 Inspiring Reasons Why You Love To Teach. But here are my 50 reasons to love your teaching job. 50 reasons to love teaching Sharing my experiences Helping inexperienced teachers solve problems The
Top 5 (Plus 14) Character Traits Of Superior Teachers Reader Appreciation by Joel Wagner - November 29, 2007July 28, 201610 In November of 2007, I had Reader Apprection Month where I interviewed some of my readers, most of whom were fellow bloggers. Through the course of that month, I picked up a number of responses to the question "What Makes A Superior Teacher?" This article aggregates them and looks at the top answers. I'd guess if you're doing the top 5, you are well on your way to being great. As we come to the conclusion of Reader Appreciation Month, I want to summarize some of the things that we have learned. Today, I'll focus on some of the character traits of people who were indicated by my readers as their favorite teachers. Some of the character traits were mentioned by multiple
50 Awesome Classroom Management Tips You Can Use Tomorrow Reader Appreciation by Joel Wagner - November 27, 2007August 4, 20169 As we come to the conclusion of Reader Appreciation Month, I want to summarize some of the things that we have learned. Today, I'll focus on the incredible wealth of knowledge that we have learned about classroom management with these 50 awesome classroom management tips. I found that when I put all of the tips together, I had over 70 suggestions. I combined a few of them and broke them down into categories. The tips all fell into four categories: Personal, Student and Parent Relationships, Organization and Teaching, and Behavior and Rules. After consolidating, I came up with 50 classroom management tips I have learned this month. Personal classroom management tips Find out who you are as a person; find your strengths,
Reader Appreciation: Joel Reader Appreciation by Joel Wagner - November 26, 2007May 29, 20161 With all of the great responses I have read with the Reader Appreciation Month, I decided to go ahead and fill out the survey as well. Name: Joel Location: The border of Texas and Mexico Occupation: Middle School Band Director Blog: So You Want To Teach? Tell me some of your favorite things about your job Inspiring children. Spreading my passion for music, life, and learning. Watching the students grow year after year. Recruiting kids into my program. Being creative with the music. Transforming students from knowing nothing about how to play an instrument to being able to perform complicated (for them) music by the end of the year. Demonstrating the value of long-range planning to achieve crazy cool results. Guiding students to success, both individually
65 Things You Should Do Right Now To Avoid Teacher Burnout Stress Reduction by Joel Wagner - November 10, 2007September 3, 20123 This past Tuesday, I took a day off of school. This is not normal for me, and I even had to fight my urge to go up to school and make sure things were running smoothly. I even drove up to the school and chose not to get out of the car. Why? Because I had a chance where I knew I could relax for a day and things wouldn't fall apart. I suppose it's sort of a building process for me of letting go of my band. I don't like to miss school. I remember my parents encouraging me when I was in high school to miss a day when I didn't fell well. I have been debating missing a day
Less Stress: Don’t Take Work Home Stress Reduction by Joel Wagner - November 1, 2007July 5, 20104 I wrote a couple of days ago about a plan to reduce the amount of papers that you take home. Preferably, that number will approach zero as your systems get refined. That is NOT the focus of this entry. The goal here is to truly liberate you from your job. The story goes: A senior monk and a junior monk were traveling together. At one point, they came to a river with a strong current. As the monks were preparing to cross the river, they saw a very young and beautiful woman also attempting to cross. The young woman asked if they could help her. The senior monk carried this woman on his shoulder, forded the river and let her
Less Stress: Work Only At Work Stress Reduction by Joel Wagner - October 30, 2007July 5, 20102 I rarely take work home any more. I used to do it all the time. Then I noticed something. I rarely got any work done at home, and I felt guilty about not getting it done at home. I also realized that when I didn't take work home, I didn't fall too far behind when I got back to school. I am able to find ways to catch up, or find corners to cut. What if the only work we had to grade were quizzes and exams? How would that transform our classrooms and our lives? What if we set up our grading scale something like this: Daily Work - 10% Quizzes - 40% Tests - 50% I understand that