Hi…

I hope you enjoyed the article I posted a couple of weeks ago by Rob Plevin…

In the article, Rob discusses the importance of getting students to LOOK FORWARD to your lessons. Rob believes (and I’m sure we all agree) that when students come into your classroom with a positive attitude they are much easier to manage and teach.

Well…here are some specific ideas from Rob Plevin for getting students to LOOK FORWARD to your lessons:

* Cooperative learning activities – get students working together so that their needs for attention and support are naturally met – you then become free to give assistance when it is required rather than when it is demanded.

* Attention grabbing starters – Get them interested from the start and the rest of the lesson has a fair chance of success. If you don’t manage to do this, you’re fighting a losing battle for the entire lesson.

* Learning games – when learning is fun, it is more enjoyable and memorable.

* Relevant subject content – relevant to THEIR lives

* Ability-appropriate tasks – too hard and they’ll be frustrated, too easy and they’ll be bored

* Music – great for setting the mood in a lesson but also for marking transitions and ‘types’ of activity. Use upbeat or comedy theme music to hurry students through physical tasks and relaxing music when you want them to think. Use their favorite music as an occasional class reward for good effort.

* Energizers and brain-breaks, and novel activities – Physical energizers can get the group back on task and re-focused.

* Anecdotes and analogies – students respond so well to analogies and quirky stories. It gives them an instant way of connecting to new information.

* Role plays – If you aren’t using role play I suggest you do it NOW. Your most challenging students love role play when it is presented in the right way. This one activity can have your students queuing at the door to get in every lesson. “Sir, can we do role play again please?”

* Humor breaks – It goes without saying, we need humor, we need to laugh. But are you actively planning dedicated humor time into your lessons? If you do, your students will thank you for it and your lessons will be the talk of the school.

If you want more ideas on how to get students to LOOK FORWARD to your lessons then you must check out Rob Plevin’s lesson improvement program known as Needs-Focused Lessons.

I can’t recommend Rob’s Needs-Focused Lessons highly enough and you can still get started for just $1.

Take a look at this extremely valuable resource right now at:

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As many of you know I’m a firm believer that there needs to be some degree of fun in every classroom. As my very first professor, Barry Raebeck, once stated, “If it’s not fun a fair part of the time, it’s probably no good and definitely wont last.”

However, the classroom cannot just be all fun and games either…

I’m passing along a short article today which I found very interesting.

Check it out and let me know what you think. I’d be curious to hear if it resonates with you or not…

Best Wishes,
Adam Waxler
Teaching Tips Machine, LLC

———–START of ARTICLE———-

“Why You Can’t Rely on Fun Lessons to Solve Classroom Management Problems”

© Written By Rob Plevin
Author of the new Needs-Focused Lessons

Having a fun classroom and teaching a fun lesson isn’t enough to stop behavior problems, and it isn’t going to miraculously transform your challenging students into hard-working, diligent stars.

Without a good understanding of some other key classroom management skills, a lesson that you think is fun may well turn into a free-for-all and only serve to build you a reputation as a walk-over.

Teaching is not about “entertaining” students or letting them just “mess about,” and it certainly isn’t about demoting them to the role of passive spectators.

The truth is, even the most colorful and funny presentations can become boring (and even annoying) to kids if they are repeatedly expected to merely “be entertained” or just “have a laugh.” If challenging students are to feel truly involved in a lesson, they need to be given opportunities to develop, grow, improve and feel a sense of accomplishment and achievement.

Sure, they can still have fun in the process, but it is more productive if the fun comes from interacting with each other, finding out, working out, building, trying, experimenting, practicing and doing. They don’t get these things from just sitting back and watching or messing around.

I like to use the simple analogy of your pupils each carrying an “emotion backpack” on their backs as they enter your lessons. If they arrive with the feeling that the lesson (based on their previous experience) is something they will have to ENDURE for the next hour – something that is boring, irrelevant to their lives or perhaps embarrassing or difficult – then their backpack will be filled with NEGATIVE emotions before they even set foot through the door.

Teaching kids who walk in your classroom with negative preconceptions is the HARD way to teach. It’s tough to get students to engage when they have already made up their minds that the lesson isn’t something they’re going to enjoy or benefit from.

The easy way is to have them actually LOOKING FORWARD to your lessons. You want them carrying that backpack with a little bit of INTRIGUE, perhaps recollections of a few LAUGHS they had during the last lesson or a feeling of SUCCESS and ACHIEVEMENT having UNDERSTOOD a difficult concept for the first time.

Isn’t that what education is all about?

———–END of ARTICLE———-

I hope you found the article informative. If you want more ideas on how to get students to LOOK FORWARD to your lessons then you must check out Rob Plevin’s lesson improvement program known as Needs-Focused Lessons.

I can’t recommend Rob’s Needs-Focused Lessons highly enough.

And Rob has agreed to let you try his simple but super-effective lesson plan strategies for $1.

Take a look at this extremely valuable resource right now at:

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Towards the end of each school year I always stress the importance of allowing your students to evaluate you as a teacher.

Let’s face it…who else would be better to evaluate you than the ones you’ve been teaching for the past 180 days or so?

You have nothing to lose and a whole lot to gain by having your students fill out a simple evaluation sheet.

Here’s the one I’ve been using for the past several years:
http://www.teachingtipsmachine.com/TeacherEvaluationForm.pdf

Feel free to download it, print it, and pass it along…

Best Wishes,
Adam Waxler
Teaching Tips Machine, LLC
www.TeachingTipsMachine.com

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