How Engaging: It's your happy fun time!

*Note: this, my second post, is actually my third. My second was lost in a tragic app closing accident propagated by my 3 year old son. Sorry you missed it, I may come back to it.

In my 9 years of teaching I have learned a lot about classroom engagement. How to hook kids, gain attention, keep attention, send them to small group discussion and then retrieve them to make small discussions big again. This year, I have leaned very heavily into the concepts of Whole Brain teaching. We start of with our hair on fire and ride the wave in the direction we must go.

In Whole Brain Teaching there are five rule...

#1 Follow directions quickly

#2 Raise your hand to speak

#3 Raise your hand to get out of your seat

#4 Make smart choices and

#5 Keep your dear teacher happy

On Friday, I tried something with a student in one of my classes. This student is bright, but does not seem committed to learning. He' often makes comments about being tired. Knowing that we just needed to get a feel for working through order of operations problems that contained exponents. I decided to hand over a bit of "power" to this young man. I renamed the page that contained our problems on the board (insert student name)'s Happy Fun Friday Math!! There was some immediate low level laughter and the student shot me a few uncomfortable glances.


"Don't worry, my friend! Today is your day. For the rest of class, rule 2 does not apply to you. You have my permission to answer any question as you please. But, if you don't want to answer, feel free to pick someone else in the class to share."

It worked like a charm! The whole period he was either calling out answers as he completed his work, or he would finish and call on another student. Kids would raise their hands as soon as they had answers, hoping he would call them. What was really interesting is that he spread out who he called on around the room. I was watching very closely to make sure no one with their hand up would be left out, totally prepared to swoop in and declare that his next 4 people must be girls. However, I never had too.

So my encouragement to you is be willing to share a bit of the "power". It is still your classroom, but you might just be able to rope in a student or two who is typically avoiding work. Have a great week, everybody!