Classroom Management
Michael shares his insights and materials for his highly effective classroom management system.
At the beginning of the year I would pass out a description of how the class would be conducted, including class rules, social skills, homework, and grading policies. A letter explaining my method would also be sent home to parents. Then, in the first few days of the school term, I would give students a semester schedule of class activities, homework assignments, and the last year’s final exam. This allowed the students to understand what material we would cover and when they would receive it. With the previous year’s final exam in front of them, students were able to see their year-end objective. Samples of these classroom handouts can be found here:
A very important part of my geometry curriculum is the Student Notebook, a 3-ring binder with six sections: Notes/Homework, Chapter Summaries, Definitions, Investigations, Conjectures, Journal, and for my honors class, Postulates and Theorems. After a large number of geometry vocabulary terms had been developed for van Hiele Level 1 understanding, I would give a vocabulary qualifying exam (VQE).
The vocabulary qualifying exam is a 48-item exam. On one side of the exam paper, students sketch and correctly label 24 terms. On the other side, students provide the correct term for 24 geometric figures. Once a student had passed the VQE, they earned the privilege of using their notes for all tests throughout the year.
Grading notebooks is time consuming and takes valuable energy away from the students, so I created detailed rubrics for assessing the notebooks, and the students were able to do most of the notebook evaluations themselves. Whenever you can turn a task of yours into a learning experience for your students, it helps everyone! Samples of these classroom handouts can be downloaded here:
Similarly, I did not take homework home to grade. Instead, I created a homework log sheet and students were responsible for monitoring the amount of homework attempted by members of their group. A sample of the Homework Log is available here:
“
”
