5 Questions To Ask Before You Teach Each Class Classroom Management by Joel Wagner - May 27, 2013May 28, 20162 As I was going through some old paperwork a couple of weeks ago, I came across the binder that I used with my band three years ago. I remember that was a difficult year because the classes were terribly large. My first period brass class had somewhere around 60 students, and my second period woodwind class had just over 70 students. As you might imagine, this posed a number of classroom management issues from time to time and really had the potential to wear me out. In the very front of that binder, I found a pre-class checklist that I had come up with and was flooded with memories. I think most of these questions will, if applied on a
Laying Out A Legacy Personal by Joel Wagner - August 27, 2009June 30, 20106 A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about how my friend Junior had posted on his blog calling for people to write about what kind of a legacy we wanted to leave. I have been thinking a whole lot over the past few months about my progression as a teacher, and this seemed like the perfect opportunity to really flesh out some about what kinds of things I have been through. I've sort of broken things down by year and I would be interested to know how many other teachers could say their progress as a teacher has been similar. Clearly I have not yet arrived, but I have learned a handful of things along the way, and it's been
SYWTT Celebrates Two Years – A Brief History (2007) Blogging & Technology by Joel Wagner - February 11, 2009June 30, 20106 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 is not, mind you, because I was giving them wrong information. It was, however, because I had placed the priorities in the wrong order. When we have the proper perspective, we will end up teaching far more than we ever imagined we might teach. And so began the very first post on the blog that would turn into So You Want To Teach? That was posted two years ago today, on February 11th, 2007. Over the remainder of this month, I will be looking back at