Teaching Tip #2

Don't Be Afraid to Stop

This goes along with my last post, on plans.  Here's an example of what I mean:

It's the end of the day, and I have a double period coming up.  I'm excited for the lesson, but I'm also excited for the class. We have fun together.

I pray and start the lesson.  The students are writing down some things but are not talking - not to each other, not to me, and they're acting very different than usual.

That morning, they had had a class meeting, and I knew from another class that things did not go well.  So I asked them questions aloud to which I got nods - yeses and nos - but no straight answer.  One had even written YES on one side of a paper and NO on the other.

I had no clue what to do.  This was very unusual for them, and I stood in front of my desk with my arms crossed just looking at them.  This was not going to happen for 90 minutes.  And me asking questions aloud made the silence that much stronger.

Since they were okay with writing things, I decided to follow suit.  I wrote out questions on the board and turned for my answers. About 3 questions in, they responded aloud "yes" or "no" and a snowball effect occurred.  They vented frustrations, explained they had acted like that all day and felt bad for the teachers but wanted to stay true to the day's mission, and brought up a few other things.

That first bell rang (not all classes in my school are double periods, but the math classes have them most of the time and the science classes have them for labs) but they had exhausted the conversation.  I was able to go through some of my planned material at a relaxed pace, and the students all partcipated.

But had I not given them that down time and tried to force the lesson, yelled, or made threats about their grade, they wouldn't have responded to me. Giving students time to just talk at times can be very beneficial.