Day 6 The Super Improver Team

I introduced my Super Improver Team board today and I think it went over pretty well.  I did not hand out the goal cards today, I don't think they need them yet.
Here was the board from the first day of school until yesterday:

And today they walked in to this:

I explained that the SI Team is like a video game where the object is to "level up".  The way you level up is by improving things like your behavior or academics.  It can be anything that needs improving!  As I observe students doing things better than they were, I will praise them and mark a line on my chart.  Each time I mark a line I am making a star.  When they have a complete start I put an actual star sticker on their card, 10 stars and its time to level up.  I showed them that I had already printed their names on every single color so that they knew I expected them to level up.
It felt really good to be on the lookout to catch students following the rules who normally didn't and a lot of students got 2-3 lines today towards their stars.  It helped with redirecting unwanted behavior too, there were a few students who I simply asked if they wanted to earn some lines and they instantly changed their behavior.  I am hoping I can get  a few of them on the yellow level by tomorrow to get them excited.  The hardest part about this for me is the students who are really great anyway!  Its hard to not want to just give them stars for being "good." I think I will conference with those students to see if there are any goals they would like to strive for that we can monitor on the SI Team.

2013-2014 Goals

I am linking up again finally with Julie at I Speak Math for a Sunday Funday!!

I am having a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that summer is almost over!  Last year I felt so much more prepared with my goals for the upcoming year.  The only thing I wanted to do was to get my NJAsk scores higher.  While they didn't reach the goal I hoped, both the 7th and 8th grade scores did go up by 58%! I'm pretty happy with that!

This year is scary, my principal left, along with 5 other teachers.  I know that so much change in a school can be a bad thing.  I am really hoping that we will get through it and have a good year despite the changes.
In addition to that, we are finally moving fully to common core and got new textbooks: Math in Focus-Singapore Math.  For the past three years I haven't really used a textbook so this should be interesting.

My goals for this year are to incorporate the math workshop model into my lessons. I read this book because  Sherrie at Middle School Math Rules! started a book study blog on it and I was hooked!  I also took (am taking) the How To Learn Math course by Jo Boaler through Stanford University which is wonderful and the two just go together perfectly.  Basically I want to get my kids working on more complex problems and discussing them more.

Over the past two years I've found myself trying to figure out why my kids can't retain what they learned.  The book and the course talk about how when we try to teach kids to memorize procedures they will quickly forget it and we have to get them involved and really owning the math.  This is my goal for this year.
I plan to forget about "the test" and get my kids to learn to think!

My other goal for the year is to blog more often and more mathematically.  Most of the posts I made last year were not very productive and I need to change that!

Discipline Survival Guide for the Secondary Classroom -REFLECTIONS

Okay I will start this off by saying that dicsipline has always been my weak point. I don't know why since I have two kids who never give me ANY problems, but that might be it the reason itself.
I felt last year went pretty well, I definetly had some issues, but I also had a pretty rough group of kids (ex. Talked back/nasty to the principal and called one of  the most loved teachers a "fat skank")
What I really learned last year is that class management is almost effortless/non-issue the less I lecture and have them in groups. That is exactly how I stumbled on flip class methods yay!
So I was given the opportunity last year to read Julia Thompson's book Discipline Survival Guide for the Secondary Classroom for an Amazon review.  It is an excellent read chock full of useful info! The only critique I have is that itis a little overwhelming. Since I got it last year literally 4 days before I went BTS and had most of my plans and ideas formalized already I didnt get to implement and apply what I read in the book. ( or it seemed that I was already.)
What I hope to do here is use my blog as a book study.  Julia gives reflection questions at the end of each section and I plan answering them here. I would love to connect with other teachers reading this!