Find A Moment (Total Teacher Transformation Day 1) Classroom Management by Joel Wagner - May 3, 2009June 30, 201010 This is an article in the Total Teacher Transformation series. Click here for a complete table of contents. Congratulations First of all, I want to congratulate you on taking the first step of this journey toward becoming a great teacher! I can't even begin to describe for you the exciting possibilities that await you as you move through these lessons and begin to come over to the other side. If your experiences are anything like mine as I went through this process five years ago, you will not believe that you used to have classes the way you currently do. If you follow the advice here, I can virtually guarantee you a completely different classroom environment before this month is out. To
February 2007 Personal by Joel Wagner - February 26, 2008July 2, 20103 On February 11th, 2007 I wrote the first blog post that is included in the archives of So You Want To Teach? I didn 't actually set up the blog on this domain until June, but I thought that since the blog was now over a year old (at least as far as some of the content), I'd go back and take a look at some of the old stuff. By the way, none of them have any comments at this point... If you have a blog, you can direct some of that traffic your way simply by writing a good, thought-provoking comment 5 Keys To Educating People February 11, 2007 Classroom Management: The Key To Your Success
The Overlooked Articles of 2007 Blogging & Technology by Joel Wagner - December 27, 2007July 2, 20100 In continuing my review of the year, I am looking today at some of the articles that I wish were more popular. They may have received a handful of comments, or they may not have received any. The most common cause for their relative obscurity is that they are older articles and have gotten lost. Even so, many of them haven't received a whole lot of traffic. So I'm dusting them off, polishing them up, and repackaging them here. A dozen overlooked articles of 2007 A Customer Service Oriented Classroom Experience February 24th, 2007 Be The Best Teacher In The World May 19th, 2007 Reading May 29th, 2007 Finding Excellent Educators To Emulate June 5th, 2007 Where Have All
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
A Recipe For Less Stress Stress Reduction by Joel Wagner - September 29, 2007July 5, 20100 In preparing for my month-long series on 25 Tips For Less Stress, I realized that I left out a few key ingredients. If you follow all 25 tips listed, and leave out the foundational ingredients, you will still be under intense stress. If you follow the tips with little success, you may actually be under more stress at trying to figure out why they don't accomplish their goal! So today, we will look at the very first and most essential elements of a stress-free classroom. I have written on each of these issues at great depth previously. Below each ingredient are links to four of my articles that address this very issue. I also went to Google's cool Blog
Weekend Wrapup 08/20/07 Blogging & Technology by Joel Wagner - August 20, 2007July 5, 20102 Happy Monday morning. I begin staff development this week. School begins in Texas next Monday. This spring, I began to make myself familiar with the Getting Things Done (GTD) approach to personal productivity. My views on effectiveness went into overdrive this summer as I read The 4-Hour Workweek. Timothy Ferriss has recently posted The Not-To-Do List, 9 things to make you more productive. Just a Substitute Teacher points us to an article in USA Today that has a great list of things that some school districts or schools do to get more subs. Check out How to Lure Substitute Teachers. Athena gives us a list called 10 Things I Learned In My First Year of Teaching. How many of us
New Teacher Survival Kit General by Joel Wagner - August 3, 2007August 5, 201620 We’ve all been there. The beginning of the first year of teaching can be daunting, to say the least. It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. First year horror stories abound. The number of teachers who quit after the first year or two of teaching matches or exceeds the number of teachers who stick with the profession. My theory is that teachers leave the biz for lack of knowledge. College only can do so much in preparation. We hear of how much better student teaching was back in the day than it is now, and how poorly prepared prospective educators are these days. There may be validity in that, but lamenting these things doesn’t solve problems.
A Customer Service Oriented Classroom Experience Classroom Management by Joel Wagner - February 24, 2007June 15, 201611 In The Beginning When I was in college, I had an assignment for one of my classes. The assignment was to write up my 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 behind it. The Interview In my very first teaching job interview, the principal interviewing me asked me what my educational philosophy was. I gave some sort of flimsy answer because I wasn't prepared for the interview. He gave me a chance later on to ask me if I had any questions. I asked him what his educational philosophy was. What he said has stuck with me ever since. He