Edutopia - September 2007 - (Page 12) Sage Advice What’s your resolution for the new school year? For next time: How green is your classroom? Send responses, as well as suggestions for future questions, to sage@edutopia.org. For more answers, visit Sage Advice on the Web at www.edutopia.org/sageadvice. (Responses may be edited for length and clarity.) Get as many students in my district teaching technology to as many of the teachers in my district as I can. The students learn by teaching, and the teachers learn by listening. Stop the increasing use of rhetoric plaguing education communications. Be more visible as an administrator. It makes such a difference to staff and students, but it takes real effort to make it a priority over email, discipline, and returning phone calls. Sit at my desk less and circulate around the room to help my students more. It is so easy to review yesterday’s work, do the instruction, provide guided practice, give the assignment, and then just sit and expect the students to do it without help. Effective teachers search out the students who need help and offer assistance. Ineffective classroom supervisors sit and wait for the problems to come to them. Julia C. Polak Science teacher Exeter-Milligan Schools Milligan, Nebraska Donald Whittinghill Consultant Louisiana School Boards Association Baton Rouge, Louisiana Make my classroom more Earth friendly. My goal is to use daily waste to create a compost pile and let the students use the compost in creating a garden for our school. Children need to know that the Earth’s resources aren’t unlimited, and that we must give back as much as possible. Kern Kelley Technology integrator Maine School Administrative District 48 Newport, Maine Tana Larsen Associate principal Sage Valley Junior High School Gillette, Wyoming Rebecca A. Dixon Fourth-grade teacher J.D. Lever Elementary School Aiken, South Carolina Continue to be an example of kindness and fairness. Allow children to believe in themselves and their unique contributions to their individual lives and the bigger world around them. It is imperative that we are cognizant of how we affect the lives of children. Every day, call each student by name. Christine Termini Passarella Teacher, The Holliswood School Jamaica Estates, New York Be much more proactive in educating our legislative body regarding the needs of twenty-first-century students, which include skills such as technology literacy and critical-thinking, requisite skills for successful twenty-first-century citizens. It becomes increasingly difficult to get elected officials to consider future needs when their frame of reference is their individual educational experiences. Bob Herring Principal Nativity School Cincinnati, Ohio John R. Morton Superintendent, Newton Public Schools Newton, Kansas 12 EDUTOPIA SEPTEMBER 2007 http://www.edutopia.org/sageadvice
For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.