Richard D. Solomon's Blog on Mentoring Jewish Students and Teachers

Our hope is that this blog will become a forum in which people can exchange ideas on how to recruit, develop and retain exceptional Jewish educators through mentoring and e-mentoring students, teaching candidates, and teachers in our day and supplemental schools. The present focus of this blog is to empower Jewish teachers, administrators, teacher trainers, consultants, and staff developers to integrate web technology (i.e. web tools and apps) into their teaching and teacher training.

Wednesday, August 12, 2009

Classroom Management Procedures that Mentors Should Not Only Model for their Mentees, but also Rehearse with their Students

As mentioned in a previous post, there are a multitude of teaching practices an expert teacher utilizes that are not perceived or understood by the pre-service, novice, and beginning teacher.

As mentors we should not assume that our mentees can immediately put into practice what we say or do. Accordingly, our teaching practices should be clearly identified, described, demonstrated, discussed and evaluated during the professional conversations we have with our mentees.

Harry and Rosemary Wong (1998) have identified a set of classroom management procedures that should not only be modeled by the mentor, but intentionally taught and rehearsed with their students. Here is a brief listing of some of those classroom management procedures. The classroom management procedures listed below particularly relate to students in the elementary grades.

* Harry and Rosemary Wong’s List of Suggested Classroom Management Procedures to Rehearse with (Elementary) Students

How students should enter the classroom and walk to their seat

How to get students to work immediately

How to let students know when you are ready to begin the lesson

How students are dismissed at the end of class

How students are to listen and respond to their classmates

How students are to participate in classroom discussions

How students check out classroom materials

How students can indicate that they understand what you are teaching

What students are to do when the teacher is absent

How students are to work cooperatively

How students are to organize their notebook

How students are to walk in the hallway

How students are to act when visitors are in the classroom

How students are to act when a substitute or other adult takes over the class

* Wong, H. K., Wong, R.T. (1998). How to Be an Effective Teacher: The First Days of School. Mountain View, CA: Harry K. Wong Publications, Inc.

In the next post we will begin to address this question: what is the core knowledge base a mentor teacher needs to understand about how teachers learn to teach.