Teacher’s Corner

Arrange to meet with some other teachers that you trust to talk over good classroom ules and consequences  that make sense for the ages of your students.  Have a “rule party” (instead of a “pool party”). If you don’t want to do this with teachers in your school, try inviting friends and family members who are teachers.

Each person can bring a classroom rule that is a challenge for them and everyone can give ideas for how to clearly state the expectation in a way to be good for the age of the students in mind.  Then, the group can brainstorm what type of consequences would make sense. Lastly, you could discuss ways to help teachers stick to the rule and the consequences and not look the other way. 

Remember, you are in charge of your classroom. All the ideas you hear are for you to evaluate and make the final choices about what you think will work for your students. Announce this as one of the “party” rules at the very beginning.

In the meantime, you can use the writing prompts and discussion topics below to gather student feedback for your “party.”

The following are writing prompts and discussion topics you can use to help students think about classroom rules. 

1. What  are two classroom rules you know of that you think are helpful? Why are they helpful?

2. If you don’t know of any classroom rules that are helpful, imagine that you are a teacher of students your age. What classroom rule do you think would be a good idea?

3. Rules for the sake of rules is never a good idea. Rules need to have consequences in order to be useful. What do you think would be a fair consequences for any rule you mentioned in #1 or #2 above?

Teachers, you can use this blog in classrooms. Here are two ideas about how.

1. For middle or high school parenting or child development courses:
   • Use the blog for discussion topics
   • Require students to research the topics and agree or disagree with what the blog is suggesting.
2. For all courses, especially English Language Arts:

• Use the blog for writing prompts for paragraphs, theme papers, journal entries, class starters, etc. Have students read the blog and respond to:
• Do you agree with what is being said about kids? Do kids really act, think or feel that way?
• Do you agree with what is being said about parents, grandparents, teachers and child caregivers? Do or should they act, think or feel that way?
• What would be your advice on this topic?
• What was left out of this article?
• If you were a parent, would you use any of this information? How?

Why can this blog be a useful teaching tool?

• Students that see connections between their coursework and their lives do better in school.
• Most students will either be parents one day or have children in their lives that they care about, so the topical information can help them build their knowledge about children and parenting and develop a positive image of the type of parenting they want to do.
• The new core literacy standards adopted by most states call for frequent writing in all courses.
• Newly developed end-of-course assessments to be used by many states will require that students demonstrate that they can think critically. These prompts help students practice critical thinking.
• Newly developed end-of-course assessments to be used by many states will require that students demonstrate that they can analyze what they read. These prompts help students practice analysis.