Hi Stacie,
I have to agree with the effectiveness (or lack of) with contracts. The
time lapse between the students signing them and the daily behavior they
exhibit causes a disconnect and makes contracts pretty useless.
Here's a technique I used when I taught a tough, off-task class. This
only works if they care about their grade. It's the "daily
participation grade" with a twist.
I had an overhead projector (the old fashion kind) and a transparency
that had the class list on it and three columns. Periodically,
throughout the period, I used to scan the room and put a score of 5 or 0
in the first column, then put the transparency back up for all the
students to see. This was all done quietly, without fanfare or comment.
The kids would look up and see if they had a score or not. The
advantage to this was that they had instant feedback about whether I
thought they were off-task. This encouraged them to be on task (for a
few minutes!) to get the score when I did the next scan around the room.
They could earn a total of 15 points in a period. It was also an easy
method to justify to parents, if they questioned their student's grade.
Just a thought.
-Alix
Alix E. Peshette
Technology Training Specialist
Technology Support
Davis Joint Unified School District
Davis, CA
-----Original Message-----
From: StacieMich@aol.com [mailto:StacieMich@aol.com]
Sent: Saturday, January 28, 2006 1:40 PM
To: TeacherArtExchange Discussion Group
Subject: [teacherartexchange] Not getting any easier
The weekend once again, the time I beat my brain to figure out what to
do for
the upcoming week. My students finished the still life projects. I'd
say I
had maybe three decent final projects from my last period. Some of the
students simply chose not to complete them. They just didn't care about
their
grade. They wanted to play around while I was trying to help the
students who
actually wanted to fix their drawings and learn how to shade. Several
of the
students were still horrible, and I could not get them to clean up.
They just
throw things on the floor, leave their projects on the table or on the
floor.
They are complete slobs. I was furious. After the class, I marched
down to the
Dean's office and asked her once again for some advice. She said that
it was
time to talk to some of the students who were giving me problems. I
spent
twenty minutes gathering all of the documentation on those students, the
essays,
notes home, notes from parent calls...I was amazed at the size of the
stack
of papers from that one class after four weeks.
Now I'm trying to decide what to do on Monday. I'm thinking that I
might
only allow those students who have been good do an art project while
making the
others complete a written assignment. Perhaps I'll simply pick out the
students who are acting out (there will probably be about 10 of them)
and tell them
that they have lost their privilege to do art? I'm even thinking about
moving
the good students to two or three tables on one side of the room so that
I can
teach to them. I don't believe that the troublemakers deserve to do art
in
my classroom right now, yet I don't want to punish the whole class any
more.
The contracts that I make them write really aren't working all that
well...so
I'm thinking of giving them other written assignments that will be worth
a
grade.
I'm trying to decide on a project for next week...something easy,
something
fun...I'd like to get them playing with color now...so I'm going to look
into
the color wheel projects. I'm not sure if I'm ready to get them going
in paint
just yet...perhaps an oil pastel project first or a collage type thing.
