Kathy, I know you already have the following knowledge but thought it would be helpful to complete the journal. Thank you for your continued help!

Chapter 3

By the end of this chapter, you will be able to do the following:

Analyze some of the various learning theories Understand what learning-centered education is Be aware of the importance of lesson planning Recognize the relationship between classroom management and lesson planning

3.1 Learning Theory for Teaching

Learning Theories

Over the past two centuries, three dominant and sometimes conflicting learning theories have shaped content pedagogy—the design of lessons that support students' acquisition and application of knowledge. These three theories are behaviorism, cognitivism, and constructivism.

Behaviorism

Behaviorism asserts that learning requires an external change in a student's behavior that can be observed. Behaviorist theory dates back to the mid-19th century and draws its influences from both science and philosophy. The behaviorist educator believes that learning occurs through interactions with the environment. The classroom environment shapes a student's behavior. Taking a student's thoughts, feelings, and emotions into consideration is useless in explaining a student's learning behavior.

One of the most famous behaviorists, Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov (1849–1936), used experiments with dogs to develop his theory of classical conditioning. His experiments focused on creating very specific circumstances in a dog's environment that resulted in specific responses from the animal. With classical conditioning, the educator focuses on creating the exact environment necessary to "evoke" the desired learning from students.

Bettmann/Corbis

Like Pavlov, American psychologist John B. Watson (1878–1958) saw controlled laboratory studies as the most effective way to promote learning. According to Watson, systematic manipulation of the student's environment can and should result in new learning.

Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select—doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief, and, yes, even beggarman and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors.—Watson (1924)

B. F. Skinner (1904–1990) developed the law of conditioning and the law of extinction. Skinner believed that a response followed by a reinforcing stimulus is strengthened and therefore more likely to occur again (conditioning), and a response that is not followed by a reinforcing stimulus is weakened and therefore less likely to occur again (extinction).

Behaviorist teachers focus primarily on students' actions and reward desired behaviors. Students learn these desired behaviors in a three-step process:

1.With modeling—observational learning—students learn the desired behavior/response by watching the teacher model it.

2.With shaping—breaking down the desired behavior into achievable units—only when one desired behavior is demonstrated can a student progress to the next behavior.

3.With cueing, using verbal or nonverbal cues lets a student know if his or her behavior is appropriate (Stanridge, 2002).

Cognitivism

Cognitivism asserts that the focus needs to be on the thought process behind the behavior. Although its roots stretch back to ancient Greece, the cognitive movement grew in popularity in the second half of the 20th century, when some educators found the theory of behaviorism incapable of explaining certain social behaviors. The cognitivists' quarrel with the behaviorists was that their focus on observable behavior did not account for what was going on in the mind. Cognitivism emphasizes a system of effects, including:

•Meaningful effects—meaningful information is easier to learn and remember.

•Transfer effects—prior learning impacts the learning of new materials or tasks.

Well-known linguist Noam Chomsky (born 1928) has followed the cognitive approach while studying how children learn to talk. Chomsky maintains that each of us is born with a "universal grammar" ready to absorb the details of whatever language is presented to us at an early age. Chomsky applied his theories of language acquisition to learning as a whole, underscoring the importance of relevant, culturally based instruction (Boeree, 2000).

Constructivism

Constructivism maintains that learning requires a change in a student's thought process (linking previous learning to new learning)—an internal change that cannot be observed. Constructivism is linked to the progressive movement, founded by American educator John Dewey (1859–1952). Progressive educators believed that a "top-down" system, where some of the populace is educated and others are not, would ultimately undermine American democracy (http://www.uvm.edu/~dewey/articles/proged.html).

Jean Piaget (1896–1980) expanded the progressive movement's sociopolitical emphasis to a broader understanding of how children learn. According to Piaget, learning, whether it takes place inside or outside the classroom, involves the two-pronged process of assimilation (the ways by which a person takes material into the mind from the environment) and accommodation (the difference made to one's mind or concepts by the process of assimilation). Assimilation and accommodation exist together in every learning situation and form Piaget's theory of adaptation (Hummell & Huitt, 2003).

With the U.S. publication in 1962 of Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky's (1896–1934) Social Development Theory, constructivist theory expanded yet again to a new level of specificity around how, when, and from whom a student learns. Vygotsky maintained that learning constantly takes place in all kinds of social settings. Social Development Theory introduced educators to the idea that students naturally seek out people who know more about a situation, problem, or concept than they do. This person, whom Vygotsky dubbed the most knowledgeable other (MKO) can be a teacher, a coach, a librarian, a tutor, or another student in the classroom. Vygotsky expanded this idea to when and how a student can complete a learning task without the assistance or scaffolding of the MKO. The distance between completing that task with assistance and completing the same task alone is known as the zone of proximal development (ZPD) (Figure 3.1).

Application: Constructivist Teacher

Simply put, the constructivist teacher helps students construct knowledge instead of memorizing and/or reproducing facts. In the constructivist classroom, how something is learned is equal to—and in some cases, more important than—what is learned.

Constructivism in the classroom is all about collaboration and negotiation with your students around four major topics.

1.What are we going to learn?

2.Why are we going to learn it?

3.How and when will I assess what you have learned?

4.How will we decide what types of assessments are complete, fair, and timely?

As you learned in Chapter Two, classroom success is predicated on knowing as much as possible about your students: their interests, their learning styles, their prior knowledge. The constructivist teacher understands that when students encounter something new, they have to reconcile it with their previous ideas and experiences (Seigel, 2004). This reconciliation process is unique to each student because each student brings different content knowledge and different learning experiences to the new learning situation.

If you were to travel to London and use the subway system, the "Tube," you would hear an automated voice warning you to mind the "gap," which is the distance between the edge of the platform and the train. Similarly, the constructivist teacher envisions his or her students as learning travelers, poised and ready to acquire new knowledge and skills. The teacher is constantly aware that a student can fall off the learning platform at any time. It is the mission of the constructivist teacher, then, to find the gap, mind the gap, and fill the gap so that each student can continue his or her learning journey.

The constructivist teacher is also constantly aware that a student's prior knowledge can help or hinder the learning and application of new knowledge. Good teaching can be as much about unlearning as it is about learning—getting students to recognize and correct their misconceptions. These misconceptions can be socioeconomic, cultural, familial, or religious. They must be handled with skill and respect. Loving, respectful correction and guidance are at the core of constructivist teaching.

3.2 Learning-Centered Education

Envision yourself in the following scenario: You are a stage actor who has landed the dramatic role of a lifetime in a play that has stood the test of time. It is a role you have hoped for and prepared for since you stepped out in front of the footlights in your fifth-grade talent show. High school theater classes, an undergraduate degree in Performing Arts, years of playing minor roles and understudying major parts, and now, this!

You have spent weeks researching your character's background, days pondering your character's motivation. You have memorized dialogue, run through lines, rehearsed. You have incorporated the director's suggestions, bonded with your fellow actors, and completed the dress rehearsal. You know

the importance of this play, the responsibility of this particular character to impart the play's message and bring to life its enduring themes. You are ready.

Just before you step onto the stage, your director stops you. There is something you need to know about tonight's audience. Several of the theater goers speak a foreign language; at least half of them have never attended a live performance before. Others are experienced theater goers, who have watched the theater's greatest actors perform. Some have come to tonight's performance willingly, excitedly. Several have been dragged along by partners or parents.

And in the front row? Theater critics, who will be evaluating your performance and publishing their findings in several local and national newspapers.

Your director steps back and smiles encouragingly. "Break a leg."

Like this actor, a teacher spends years acquiring a wide range of content knowledge, classroom-management strategies, and instructional techniques. And like this actor, the classroom teacher must perform in front of an ever-changing audience, including not only students in the classroom but the critics in the front row: parents, school administrators, and local, state, and national evaluators.

Differentiated Instruction

As school populations grow more diverse, teachers must consider how they will address this diversity and how they will reach as many students as possible. They can

1.Instruct homogeneously: teach all students in the same way; this is a "one-size-fits-all" approach that relies on students adapting their learning needs and styles to the presentation style and assessment techniques of the teacher.

2.Create ability groups: separate students into ability groups and teach each group differently, which also produces varied results.

3.Differentiate: address each student's abilities, interests, and learning style; this is the learning-centered approach we will focus on in this section.

Differentiated instruction creates a classroom environment where learning goals, instruction, and assessment are consistently individualized. Students are expected to be active participants in their learning, assisting their teacher in evaluating their mastery of content and their progress toward meeting learning outcomes.

To be a teacher who consistently and effectively differentiates instruction and assessment is challenging work! As you learned earlier in this chapter, good teaching requires constantly minding the gap—determining where your students are in their individual journeys toward mastering a specific learning target. But minding the gap is not simply about diagnosing learning or performance deficits; it requires you, the teacher, to constantly modify and individualize instruction to address these deficits.

Effective teaching in the differentiated classroom involves the formation of trusting relationships between teacher and students. Teachers question and listen to their students. They customize the instruction and assessment for critical learning targets based on what they have learned about each student through these ongoing conversations. This questioning, listening, and customizing engender mutual respect among teachers and students and result in the creation of a true learning community.

Differentiated instruction, like many other instructional theories or systems, has its passionate believers and equally passionate detractors. Proponents emphasize the positive impact on student learning and the increased sense of community within the classroom. Opponents emphasize the negative impact on teachers who, they believe, cannot possibly customize learning in classrooms of 20 or more students.

Differentiated instruction can effectively serve students without sapping a teacher's focus and energy. The key? Grouping students according to ability but constantly moving and changing ability groups based on individual student's performance, interests, and background knowledge.

Traditional ability grouping often forms permanent, unchanging groups within the classroom, between grade levels, and even between content areas. Ability grouping can lead to tracking that prevents high-performing elementary students from working in groups with identified "gifted and talented" students. This same type of tracking may prohibit high school students from taking a Chemistry course until they have passed Algebra 1-2 with a grade of "B" or better.

Compare that inflexibility with the following description from the National Center on Accessible Instructional Materials:

In the differentiated classroom ... learners are expected to interact and work together as they develop knowledge of new content. Teachers may conduct whole-class introductory discussions of content-big ideas followed by small group or paired work. Student groups may be coached from within or by the teacher to complete assigned tasks. Grouping of students is not fixed. As one of the foundations of differentiated instruction, grouping and regrouping must be a dynamic process, changing with the content, project, and on-going evaluations.—Hall, Strangman, and Meyer (2009)

Application: Differentiated Instruction

Differentiation emphasizes the acquisition and application of knowledge and problem-solving skills. Relevance drives this acquisition/application process, with students in the differentiated classroom encouraged to ask:

•Why does this information matter?

•How does it relate to information I already know?

•When, where, and how can I use this information?

Once students determine the relevance of information presented to them, they should be assigned performance tasks that measure their unique and changing abilities to apply that knowledge. There are three key elements in planning differentiated instruction: content, process, and product (Tomlinson, 2001), as seen in Table 3.1.

Table 3.1: Key Elements for Planning Differentiated Instruction

Content Process Product

•Several elements and materials are used to support instructional content.

•Align tasks and objectives to learning goals.

•Instruction is concept focused and principle driven.

•Flexible grouping is consistently used.

•Classroom management benefits students and teachers.

•Initial and ongoing assessment of student readiness and growth is essential.

•Students are active and responsible explorers.

•Vary expectations and requirements for student responses.

Source: Tomlinson, 2001.

Differentiation involves designing a road map to a particular destination that every student can and will reach. Successful differentiation requires that you pay careful attention to the following:

•Get all of your students "on the same page." Be sure you understand, and make clear to your students, the learning objectives for your lesson. Students deserve to know your expectations for learning. They can be as simple as, "By the end of today's lesson, you will know how to identify a proper noun," or as complex as, "By the end of this unit, you will understand the social, political, and economic causes of the Vietnam War and will be able to explain how those causes transformed into long-term effects that changed the face of American society." Posting lesson objectives is not sufficient. Always build in time for students to ask questions. Explain, expand, restate, and check of understanding. It is time well spent!

•Make assessment your students' "new best friend." Begin your lesson with informal, observational assessments. "Has anyone learned about proper nouns before?" "Is there anyone in the room who knows someone who fought in the Vietnam War?" Use individual student responses to build all students' knowledge. Have students capture their existing knowledge through a quick-write, an "information-only" quiz, a small-group idea exchange.

Throughout the lesson or the unit, continue with formative assessments that allow students to measure how far they have progressed toward meeting the learning objectives. Use "pop" or scheduled quizzes, quick-writes, journals, classroom debates, 2- to 5-minute individual or group presentations. All of these formative assessments give you and your students the opportunity to see how far they have come toward meeting your instructional objectives and what knowledge and skills they still need to acquire and master.

Remember to weight formative assessments in a manner that allows students to be rewarded for mastery. A formative quick-write that earns 5–10 points while a student is learning the material can support mastery on a 50-point end-of-unit essay on the same topic.

•Allow your students to express their creativity. As you ask students to demonstrate their content mastery, consider the multiple modalities by which individual students can express that mastery. Have students work in groups to design quiz questions; stage a competition for the writing prompt that best captures students' knowledge of a particular topic; ask students to construct a "wrong answer" quiz in which they have to select an incorrect answer and explain why it is wrong; hold a debate; stage a news broadcast; have students write a play. Creative avenues to acquire knowledge and creative assessments to display their knowledge will keep your students engaged.

•Revisit, revise, and share the teaching load. As we discussed earlier in this chapter, determining each student's zone of proximal development (ZPD) is critical to successful lesson implementation. Using formative and summative assessments as your guide, constantly determine where students are along the learning continuum. A learning task one student can complete independently may require another student more time working in a group to master. The teacher skilled in differentiation taps those students who have mastered a specific skill or concept as instructors and guides for those students who need the knowledge of the group to scaffold their learning. A truly rewarding teaching moment comes when you remove yourself from "center stage" and watch your students educating each other. That demonstrates the true power of differentiation.

3.3 Planning for Teaching

The consistent delivery of reasonably well-structured lessons ... have we ensured that all educators know that the influence of such lessons, if delivered consistently, would be jaw-dropping?—Mike Schmoker

Legions of educators believe that well-planned lessons stand at the very core of educational success. As with anything worth doing, lesson planning is worth doing well. Doing it well involves a complex process that takes into consideration state and local standards, district curriculum and assessments, learning outcomes, and formative and summative assessment data. Most important of all, effective lesson planning requires ongoing, formative evaluation, in real time, of whether or not your students are advancing toward your intended learning outcomes.

Lesson Planning

When Scottish poet Robert Burns wrote, "The best laid schemes of Mice and Men/oft go awry," he may well have had teachers in mind! Lessons that look perfect on paper can go terribly "awry" in the classroom. Beth Lewis (n.d.) describes the intellectual and emotional tightrope that teachers often walk when designing and implementing their lesson plans. "In my classroom I am constantly amazed by how a thoroughly planned lesson can often fall flat, while sometimes when ‘I'm flying by the seat of my pants,' I can stumble upon magical teaching moments that really speak to and excite my students."

Flying by the seat of your pants? Falling flat on your face? This does not sound appealing. To ensure that instructional magic occurs more often than instructional mayhem, be sure you have a complete understanding of the into-through-and-beyond of each lesson.

Into

First, your students should understand the "why" of the lesson. Was this lesson designed to meet district standards or state standards? Why is it important that students acquire this specific knowledge? Is this lesson a "building block" that will support more complex learning later in the week? Later in the month? Later in the year? When students understand the "why" of your lesson, they will engage more fully and more deeply in the learning.

Getting your students ready to learn also involves assessing what prior knowledge each student brings to the lesson. As discussed in the earlier section on differentiation, assessing this prior knowledge can happen informally, through Q & A and open-ended discussion, or through a more structured assessment such as a quick-write or a pop quiz.

If, at the end of your "into" activities, you realize that a significant number of students are not ready to learn this material, you need to have a backup plan in place. Do not move headlong through the lesson, hoping that students can and will catch up. Take time to reteach now.

Through

Once your students are ready to learn, be clear, precise, and thorough on what you will expect them to know and be able to do at various points throughout the lesson. As you discuss performance expectations, make sure that you capture and post them prominently in the classroom so students can refer to them throughout the lesson. An example of performance expectations for the lesson on identifying proper nouns is: "After working in groups of four to create a skit that explains the role of proper nouns, students will work individually on a short formative assessment where they identify the proper nouns in a paragraph."

Make sure that your students are always working harder than you are. Don't let them become passive learners. Instead, keep them involved in the learning by balancing "sit and get" (your directly instructing students) with ongoing opportunities for kinesthetic learning. Mix up student groups so that physically active learners can move to a different seat several times throughout the lesson. Add noise to the mix. (For example, "Snap your fingers three times if you understand what I just said." "Give me a hoorah if your group got more than four answers correct on that quiz."). Seek feedback (For instance, "Is this the

best way to teach this?" "Am I making this hard or easy for you to learn?" "How would you teach this idea?") Questions like these let students know that you expect them to be active, informed, and opinionated learners. Students understand that they can trust you to listen to and respond to their feedback.

As with your "into" activities, you should be prepared to go where your students' performance assessments and feedback take you. If the majority of students in the class self-identify at the mastery level after a formative assessment and let you know that the lesson is working for them, then you can move on. If the majority of students are performing at a level that doesn't meet their or your expectations for this lesson, you need to have a plan already in place to scaffold the learning.

Beyond

Once students have acquired the knowledge (they know the types of proper nouns; they can identify proper nouns in a piece of prose), your lesson should push them beyond acquisition to application. Just as in the acquisition part of your lesson, students' abilities to apply what they have just learned may differ significantly. Be sure to design your lessons with a range of performance tasks so that every student is pushed to the limit.

These magical teaching moments that all effective teachers strive for must begin with you clearly communicating your lesson's objectives and checking for students' understanding of those objectives. As you learned earlier in this chapter, students link new knowledge with previous knowledge. They make individual connections between what they are about to learn with what they have already learned not only from their teachers but also from their families, their friends, their community, and their cultures.

It is crucial that you bring your knowledge of individual student's intellectual strengths and learning gaps into the lesson planning and implementation process, making sure that you consistently build in differentiation that allows your most accomplished students to stay engaged and soar and your struggling students to gain confidence and mastery.

3.4 Classroom Management

The best classroom-management plan remains an engaging lesson plan (see Section 3.3). Now that you have reviewed and critically considered the fundamentals of effective lesson planning, the focus shifts to creating and maintaining a classroom environment that allows the "magic" of those lessons to be realized.

Engagement is a critical element in creating a positive classroom environment. When you engage a classroom of students, your draw them in, hold their attention, maintain their focus, and keep them involved with meaningful learning tasks. Although it may sound overwhelming, engagement is, in fact, the natural order in the classroom. Learners want to be engaged. They want to explore, discover, reflect, evaluate, and create. Keeping them engaged requires you to "sell" your lesson for the day, infusing excitement and curiosity in your students and creating internal and external motivation in them to engage in learning.

Creating student motivation and engagement is not a one-time process. It cannot simply take place at the beginning of the school year. You cannot lock in students' motivation and engagement when class starts and then expect it to continue until the closing bell rings. Engagement requires a constant hitting of the "Refresh" button in your students' hearts and minds. At any given time, a single student or group of students may go off task and derail the intended learning outcomes for that session. At that moment, wherever you might be in your carefully planned lesson, you must circle back to the basics of classroom management. You must trigger your students' motivation to redirect their energy and reengage in learning.

As discussed in Chapter Two, triggering motivation, like differentiating instruction, requires that teachers know their students' background, family structure, culture, educational history, and learning strengths and gaps. Triggering motivation in the high-performing student is no less complex than finding that trigger point in the educationally at-risk student. Both students need to believe that their teacher is deeply and consistently invested in their success.

Rigor, Relevance, and Relationships

If a student feels a personal connection to a teacher, experiences frequent communication with a teacher, and receives more guidance and praise than criticism from the teacher, then the student is more likely to become more trustful of that teacher, show more engagement in academic content presented, display better classroom behavior, and achieve at higher levels academically.—Rimm-Kaufman (n.d.)

What are the steps to establishing the connection, the communication, and the personal guidance described above? Like most endeavors in teaching, there is no set formula. It varies from year to year, class to class, and student to student. However, some overarching principals for establishing positive relationships do exist.

•You openly and visibly share your enjoyment of the teaching/learning process with your students.

•You honestly share classroom successes and challenges with students. They deserve to know when they have been meeting your expectations and when they have failed to meet those expectations.

•You work to keep personal and professional distractions and pressures outside the classroom. When you can't, you explain these pressures and distractions in a professional and appropriate manner. Students need to respect that you have a life outside their classroom.

•When you fail to meet your own expectations for maintaining a caring and respectful classroom environment, you apologize to your students, seek their feedback, and all of you move on.

•You respectfully push each student's intellectual limits by routinely asking differentiated critical thinking questions. These questions subtly or overtly address individual student's background, academic level, and preferred learning style.

•You provide respectful and timely feedback to students' request for clarification and/or support.

•You design instruction and assessment that allow for as many classroom successes as possible.

Note the word choices: Effective classroom management systems naturally evolve from such a positive environment.

No matter how differentiated and positive, classroom environment alone cannot ensure students' motivation to learn, student engagement, and ultimately, student learning. There needs to be a system of learning expectations established and continually reinforced in the classroom. Make sure that students know, at any given time:

•The learning goal: what they are expected to know;

•The learning relevance: why this knowledge is important;

•The learning activities: how they will acquire the knowledge;

•The learning measurement: when and how they will demonstrate mastery of learning.

The what, when, and how of the lesson will trigger students' engagement; the why (relevance) of the lesson will internally motivate students to stay engaged.

Until you have established a positive, responsive relationship with a student, however, getting that student to rise to the challenge of academic rigor will remain a struggle. While there are a great variety of strategies and programs aimed at school improvement, all of these strategies and programs share a single crucial element: paying special and continued attention to the learner (Kirp, 2011).

Creating an appropriate environment for learning begins with establishing ground rules that include many of the aspects of quality teaching, such as respect, responsibility, honesty, civility and tolerance. Only after these values are established with students in the classroom can real learning based on the other two essential R's, rigor and relevance, begin to accelerate.—McNulty and Quaglia (n.d.)

Application: The Classroom

Students learn what they care about, from people they care about and who, they know, care about them.—Carson (1996)

Your classroom should be a haven of consistency and mutual respect, where you hold high expectations for your students and they hold equally high expectations for you. Many classroom-management systems focus on bringing students to task, asking them to account for and change their behavior. Seriously consider crafting a system of agreed-upon expectations that calls both you and your students to task when the expectations are not met.

These expectations can be as general as:

•I will treat everyone in this classroom with respect.

•I will always be honest.

•I will take other people's feelings into account when deciding what to say or do.

•I will not take or destroy another person's property.

or as specific as:

•I will display tolerance and kindness to everyone in this classroom.

•I will respect the privacy of this learning community and will not repeat information or conversations shared in this room.

•I will share my social, political, and religious views with the understanding that they are mine and do not necessarily represent or support the views of others.

•I will maintain strict adherence to the academic honesty policy of the school and will self-report if I violate any provisions of that policy.

•I will report others whom I observe violating the school's academic honesty policy.

•I will submit all required work on time, out of respect for the instructor and fellow students.

•I will listen to and accept feedback when I violate any of these expectations.

These two sets of expectations presume an ongoing system of self-monitoring and reporting for both teachers and students. They rely on everyone in the classroom admitting when they have failed to meet an agreed-upon expectation. They take behavior management out of the "I say and you do" model and refashion it into a system where "we say and we do" what is best for each other.

Consider the classroom expectation "I will submit all required work on time." The behaviorist educator (Section 3.1) might rely on a system of extrinsic motivators (a hall pass, a homework pass, deleting the lowest grade of the month from the student's grade book) for work turned in on time and negative reinforcements (accepting no late work, lowering a possible grade by 10% for every day it is late, after-school detention) for late or missing work.

Constructivist educators would see "submitting all required work on time" applying as much to their timely grading of student work as it does to students' timely submission of that work (Section 3.1). As such, when they assign in-class work or homework, these teachers must take into consideration whether or not the work can be thoughtfully reviewed, carefully graded, and returned to students on an agreed-upon date to support the class's next learning goal.

When you, as a teacher, have gone through the process of establishing an in-class and home assignment calendar for students and coordinated it with a grading calendar that takes into account your in-class and home responsibilities, your family's needs, and your desire for some free time nights, weekends, and holidays, you clearly see why the considerations you have extended to yourself must also apply to your students. The same holds true for sharing social, political, and religious views, for maintaining academic honesty and grading integrity, for maintaining privacy, and for treating others with respect and tolerance.

Just like planning lessons and differentiating instruction, creating and maintaining a respectful, managed learning environment take time and energy. And like planning and differentiating, it is a skill set that requires patience on the part of all involved. On your way to establishing a classroom of consistent expectations and mutual respect, you will encounter challenges to your authority, setbacks in your implementation, and moments of sheer frustration.

The successful classroom teacher relies on self-discipline along with systematic classroom policies to ensure the emotional, intellectual, and physical safety of both staff and students. The National Education Association (NEA) publishes "Management Tips for New Teachers." In this publication, it states:

•Be consistent in what you say and what you do.

•Quickly learn and use student names.

•Find an effective means of quieting students. Instead of saying "Shhh," consider using a subtle strategy such as dimming the lights, playing classical or other soothing music, or putting on the board a problem, a brainteaser, or an intriguing question relating to the lesson of the day.

•Avoid using threats to control the class. If you do use a threat, be prepared to carry it out.

•Nip behavior problems in the bud. Intervene quickly when students are behaving inappropriately.

•Whenever possible, reprimand a student one-on-one instead of across the room, in front of the whole class.

•Don't permit students to be inattentive to an educationally useful media presentation.

•Use appropriate punishment for classroom misbehavior. (Zauber, 2003)

Key Terms to Remember

ability grouping Grouping students according to their actual and potential development levels.

behaviorism A learning philosophy that relies only on objectively observable behaviors to measure learning.

classical conditioning A form of behaviorism. Specific stimuli are used to elicit a specific response. True classical conditioning will elicit the behavior even when only part of the stimuli is present.

cognitivism A learning philosophy which attempts to answer how and why people learn by attributing the process to cognitive activity.

content pedagogy The pedagogical (teaching) skills teachers use to impart the specialized knowledge/content of their subject area(s).

constructivism A learning philosophy that maintains human beings construct their own interpretation and understanding of their world by reflecting on their own experiences and connecting those reflections to new learning situations.

differentiated instruction A type of instruction that takes into account students' readiness to learn, current mastery of information, cultural background, language, preferred assessment type(s), and personal interests when designing lessons and assessments.

enduring understandings or essential understandings The essential learning objectives that encompass, in broad terms, overarching concepts which are the primary or essential elements that encompass subordinate learning objectives.

engagement Describes energy in action, the connection between a student and a specific learning activity. Three types of classroom engagement have been identified: behavioral engagement, emotional engagement, and cognitive engagement.

external motivation Motivation that comes from outside an individual, such as money or grades. These rewards provide satisfaction and pleasure that the task itself may not provide.

instructional activity An essential component in lesson or unit planning. The specific steps you and your students will take as you move through a lesson. Can include focused note taking, silent reading, Web research, self and peer editing.

instructional objective A description of how learners will demonstrate competence or conceptualization of a concept and/or skill they have achieved. Instructional objectives often begin with, "The student will be able to ..."

internal motivation Motivation that comes from inside an individual rather than from any external or outside rewards. The motivation comes from the pleasure one gets from the task itself or from the sense of satisfaction in completing or even working on a task.

relevance The connections students make between what is being taught and their lives outside the classroom.

SLANT A body language or behavior that shows a student is interested and involved in the learning. The SLANT acronym stands for: Sit up; Lean forward; Ask questions; Nod "yes" and "no"; Talk with teachers both during and outside class time.

theory of adaptation A theory that sees the thinking process as a corollary of the biological process of adaptation. Assimilation and accommodation are the primary components of the adaptive process.

zone of proximal development (ZPD) The distance between the actual development level (where a student can complete an assigned task independently) and the level of potential

development (where a student needs assistance from another student or an adult to complete an assigned task).