The Impact of Great Teachers [Infographic] General by Joel Wagner - July 1, 2016June 29, 20160 Great teachers Many people live their lives without impacting more than a few hundred people. Teachers often make that kind of impact over the course of one year. This kind of responsibility can be intimidating, and is one of the main reasons that I continually encourage my readers to strive toward being great teachers. This infographic below looks at some of the qualities of great teachers. Keep aiming higher, my friends. The world needs great teachers like you! Image courtesy of Teacher Certification Degrees
The Art of Encouragement Inspiration by Joel Wagner - June 30, 2016July 10, 20160 By far one of the most successful early posts on this blog was 6 Motivation Techniques. I wrote it in March of 2007, as I was approaching the end of my fifth year of teaching. Now more than nine years later, I realize I was onto some good ideas, but I was off base. In this article, we'll look at the missing piece that would have helped me so much in those early years of teaching: The Art of Encouragement Without motivation, your class is just another block of time that the students have to suffer through. With motivation, you hear things like “hi, favorite teacher!â€Â and “I love this class!†As a teacher, those are the kinds of things that we
Failing Forward: Turning Setbacks Into Triumphs Inspiration by Joel Wagner - June 25, 2016July 10, 20160 Another school year has come and gone. For many of us, it was a year of a few huge successes, a few colossal failures, and a whole lot of in-betweens. This article discusses how those colossal failures can propel you toward being a much better version of yourself. Every failure is an opportunity I love failure...at least after it's all over. I don't love failing. In fact, failing at stuff is one of my least favorite things. But I love what failure does to a person. It means I did something. It means I tried. It also means, I have a new opportunity to learn a great lesson. Often, the bigger the failure, the more valuable the potential lesson. The tough part about being
10 Steps For Interview Success [INFOGRAPHIC] New Teachers by Joel Wagner - June 24, 2016July 5, 20160 Summertime is in full swing. That means that many new teachers search for their first job, and many more experienced teachers look for a new job. The interview is an inevitable part of the job hunt. For many pre-service teachers, a teaching job interview is the first real job interview they have ever had. But interviews often lead to rejection. The good news is you only need one interview success. Nowadays, numerous resources are available to help make sure the interview goes well. Unfortunately, few of them seem to be geared specifically toward teachers. Tradewind Recruitment is one company whose focus is helping teachers find jobs. They have put together a nice infographic to help guide you through the process. If you happen to be in the United Kingdom, you may want to check out
How To Actually Enjoy Teaching A Class You Don’t Want To Teach General by Joel Wagner - June 23, 2016June 23, 20160 You want me to teach what? Imagine my surprise the first day of my job one year when I found out that I was teaching Music History and that there was no curriculum for the class, no budget for it, and no textbook. The class was used to fulfill the fine arts credit that student needed to graduate, so I could reasonably expect that less than 25% of the students had any kind of working knowledge of music. In fact, most of them would inevitably want to listen to exclusively hip hop music and complain about anything that was produced more than 5 years earlier. Other teachers who had taught the class explained to me that they just show movies, or spend a semester teaching music theory and then a
How I Fell In Love With Lesson Planning Music Education by Joel Wagner - June 20, 2016June 20, 20160 "I got your lesson plans right here, buddy!" You know the drill, spend hours creating a lesson plan weeks ahead of the class that you don't even stick to because the students fell behind last week  and now you're playing catch up trying to make magic happen. I know. Or an administrator drops by expecting to see your lesson plan binder at the front of the classroom or the state-mandated objectives listen on the board, or whatever new wild scheme the wind has blown in this year. Or maybe I'm the only one who has spent one industrious teacher work day in April writing lesson plans for the entire year because I didn't do them. Or simply turned in an empty lesson plan binder at the end of another school year.
Weekend Reading 6/18/16 General by Joel Wagner - June 18, 2016June 19, 20161 I found some great stuff going on out there in the world of education blogging this week. Here is a summary of what I found and shared on Twitter (follow @sywtt). this week. Growth Mindset: Clearing Up Some Common Confusions Digital transformation in eduction: from challenge to opportunity What's so sexy about math? How I teach kids to love science 10 Open-Ended Questions for Teachers' Reflection and Summative Evaluation 5 Common Teaching Practices I'm Kicking to the Curb When Everyone Owns the Place of the Arts I'm A Teacher Who Loves Quizzing; But Does Quiz Format Matter? Are We Too Preoccupied with Teaching Techniques? 7 Shifts To Create A Classroom of the Future 6 Apps That Can Help with Student Assessment
[INFOGRAPHIC] What Makes A Good Teacher In 2016? Inspiration by Joel Wagner - June 17, 2016July 5, 20160 According to ITN Mark Education, there are 7 key components of a good teacher. Love of the subject Stress Management Complete control Organization Professional behavior Expert instructional methods Praise It's interesting that through the years, I have written about each of these concepts on this blog. Below are links to a few articles with a brief quote from that article. From Burnout To Ignited Passion: How Blogging, Information Overload, and Running Made Me A Better Teacher So I have to get back to me being me. I inspire people simply by being me. You do too. But do yourself and me and everyone else a favor and go out there to be the most awesome, amazing, passionate version of you that you
Should Teachers Provide Great Customer Service? Classroom Management by Joel Wagner - June 16, 2016June 19, 20160 This is an updated version of one of the first articles written on this blog about treating education as a part of the customer service industry. The article was originally posted on February 24, 2007. It was edited and updated on June 15, 2016 to reflect a maturation in my approach to teaching as well as writing. You can read the original along with a handful of comments here. In the beginning When I was in college, I was assigned for one of my classes to write out own philosophy of education. It was somewhat noble (“I teach children to be better people through music†or something like that). It was substantially trite. Most importantly, it lacked any passion and it lacked depth. After all, I had not
A Step-By-Step Framework for Incremental Growth Inspiration by Joel Wagner - June 14, 2016June 14, 20162 I want you to watch the first 3:40 of this TED Talk by Benjamin Zander Notice the Dramatic change in the piano player from 7 years old to 11 years. Huge difference. But from 8 to 10, there is seemingly no change. What's happening is incremental change. Each year, the child improves dramatically, but it is not always evident, until BAM, it all seems to fall into place. Michael Hyatt writes about The Power of Incremental Change Over Time on his blog: I am not opposed to massive action. I have used it myself to achieve certain results. But it causes most people give up before they ever start. They just don’t think they can make the investment...What these people don’t realize is that they could
Weekend Reading 6/11/16 General by Joel Wagner - June 11, 2016June 11, 20160 Over the past two weeks, I have jumped back into blogging. This week, I jumped back into Twitter (follow @sywtt). There's some great stuff going on out there in the world of education blogging. Here is a summary of what I found and shared this week. Response: Blended Learning Is 'the Next Generation of Education' 41 Books Worth Reading What Makes a Good Teacher? 36 Edtech Tools I'm Using Right Now in My Classroom and Life Blooming teachers 'Being a "sergeant major" teacher has been my most effective behaviour-management strategy 10 Ways to Flip a Kid and Turn Their Day Around “What Is My Job, Anyway?†Teacher Hindsight From a Multi-Classroom Leader Is your school’s “digital citizenship†practice
Teacher Turnover [Infographic] Why Teachers Quit by Joel Wagner - June 10, 2016June 16, 20160 According to recent studies, 30% of teachers quit teaching by the end of their second year of teaching. I am convinced that many of those cases would be avoided with proper support networks in place. I recently came across an infographic from 2013 by USC Rossier that addresses this issue in their blog post entitled How To Save Our Educators. What interests me about this is that it goes a bit further than simply acknowledging that teacher turnover is a problem from the standpoint of it being bad to lose educators, but also at the average cost to replace teachers ($12,500), the impacts on student achievement, and looking at some of the possible solutions. USC RossierOnline
5 Keys To Educating People – Revisited Inspiration by Joel Wagner - June 9, 2016June 15, 20160 This is an updated version of the first article written on this blog, which was originally posted on February 11, 2007. It was edited and updated on June 9, 2016 to reflect a maturation in my approach to teaching as well as writing. You can read the original along with a handful of comments here. A Matter of Priorities During my first two years of teaching, I discovered that I had a whole lot of information, but the students just weren’t listening to me or learning from me. It was not, mind you, because I was giving them wrong information. It was, however, because I had placed my priorities in the wrong order. When we have the proper perspective, we end up teaching far more than
Six Music Classroom Management Strategies Music Education by Joel Wagner - June 8, 2016June 15, 20160 I recently came across an article by Rachel Maxwell and Jessica Corry called Six Music Classroom Management Strategies. As I read through the list, I noticed many similarities to topics that I have covered frequently. If you find yourself teaching in a music classroom of any sort in the near future, I highly recommend checking out the original article. Teach, Model, and Reteach Routines Use Nonverbal Signals Keep Rules Simple Organize Your Space Play More, Talk Less Consistent Expectations
60 Very Practical Things I Wish I’d Known Before I Started Teaching General by Joel Wagner - June 7, 2016June 15, 20162 While I've had my ups and downs over the years as a teacher, my first two years were extremely challenging. Many of these pitfalls were avoidable. If I were going into a middle school band class as a first year teacher today, knowing what I know now, I would approach things differently. Here is an unsorted list that I have brainstormed of things I would like to have known before the first day of school. Begin class on time, every time Even though attendance is computerized, come up with a simple written system of checking role and do it consistently Run through each class period in your mind and take notes of questions you have; address those before the first day The more procedures