Classroom Management is essential to the creation of a productive, creative and brave community. It is the bedrock to all the potential learnings that can be. However, it is one of the most nuanced and most difficult things an educator is called to do every single day. Our relationships with our students are the foundation for everything that happens throughout the day. Yet, it is incredibly challenging having to balance the many pieces of our job. Using the Responsive Classroom’s The Morning Meeting Book as our guide, we will dig into the purpose and execution of daily morning meetings in classrooms from grades K-8. 

Think of a lesson that you currently teach – perhaps it’s fractions, structuring complex sentences, Spanish, healthy eating, anything…..  Imagine having students learn the basics of the lesson at home – with video or animation that they can re-watch as many times as necessary until they grasp the concepts. Then classroom time can be spent expanding the lesson and digging deeper into the concept, or helping students in the specific areas where they need help to master the lesson, or complete what was once called “homework.” This is how flipping works – either a lesson or an entire curriculum – and is taking the K-12 world by storm.

Flipping offers numerous benefits for students and teachers – it allows students to learn at their own pace, helps solve the issues of incomplete homework and absent students, helps teachers work with students alone/pairs/groups to meet the many differing needs of our students, allows the classroom time to be used for exploring concepts deeper and more fully.

In this course you will learn:

• The benefits of flipping
• How to flip a lesson, and make it easy by doing one lesson at a time
• How flipping positively affects student achievement
• how to flip when students do not have access to technology at home
• What the flipped lesson/classroom looks like.

Here’s a 3-minute video on the flipped classroom ~ enjoy!

(On a personal note - I was very reluctant to flip my math class and now will not go back to traditional teaching – this is why I am offering this course. I have seen so much improvement with my students’ knowledge and assessment scores that it amazes me.) Used text on Amazon costs about $8. This class is appropriate for teachers of all levels, K-12.

Traditional discipline plans usually frustrate chronically disruptive students and can be overkill for well- adjusted kids. Dr. Ross Greene's “Plan B” is a better approach for dealing with disruptive behavior. It assumes that even disruptive students want to succeed in school, but that they have obstacles in their lives which prevent them from being successful.