A sensible, bare-bones manual for classroom management.
A debut guide for educators expounds on the importance of establishing a beneficial classroom culture.
Students enter a classroom to learn. But they can only learn if the environment has been made amenable to studying. This requires rules and parameters that the students know how to obey and that the teacher understands how to smoothly enforce. “This is a book about discipline strategies that will help any educator achieve a workable classroom environment,” writes Bouie in her introduction. “In fact, to become an effective teacher, one must first become an effective classroom manager.” The author instructs her fellow teachers on how to manage a classroom from the first minute that students enter it, ensuring that the learning for which it is intended takes place. Chapters cover everything from teacher leadership styles and classroom conflict resolution to scheduling and even the physical layout of furniture. The author discusses various discipline models as well as laying out the do’s and don’ts of making and enforcing classroom rules. (Do provide pupils with two choices; don’t give students ultimatums.) Different strategies work best for different age ranges, but Bouie offers insights on how to manage students from 2 years old all the way to seniors in high school. The author’s prose is succinct and direct, communicating her ideas with the force of a disciplinarian: “Try to avoid criticizing your students because it only provokes hostility as well as being damaging to a student’s self-esteem. If your criticism is positive and supporting, students will most likely react favorably to your suggestions.” This does not make for the warmest reading experience, but it allows Bouie to cram a great deal of information into the book’s short 86-page length. Each chapter is broken up into numerous brief sections, with frequent numbered and bulleted checklists to make the material optimally digestible. Pedagogy is a large field with many opposing schools of thought, but Bouie’s methods are generally rooted in common sense and always keep the needs of the child in mind. Beginner teachers looking for a quick primer to help them strategize for the coming school year should appreciate this slim guide.
A sensible, bare-bones manual for classroom management.Pub Date: July 19, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-984540-94-2
Page Count: 100
Publisher: XlibrisUS
Review Posted Online: Nov. 28, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
American schools at every level, from kindergarten to postgraduate programs, have substituted ideological indoctrination for education, charges conservative think-tanker Sowell (Senior Fellow/Hoover Institution; Preferential Polices, 1990, etc.) in this aggressive attack on the contemporary educational establishment. Sowell's quarrel with "values clarification" programs (like sex education, death-sensitizing, and antiwar "brainwashing") isn't that he disagrees with their positions but, rather, that they divert time and resources from the kind of training in intellectual analysis that makes students capable of reasoning for themselves. Contending that the values clarification programs inspired by his archvillain, psychotherapist Carl Rogers, actually inculcate values confusion, Sowell argues that the universal demand for relevance and sensitivity to the whole student has led public schools to abdicate their responsibility to such educational ideals as experience and maturity. On the subject of higher education, Sowell moves to more familiar ground, ascribing the declining quality of classroom instruction to the insatiable appetite of tangentially related research budgets and bloated athletic programs (to which an entire chapter, largely irrelevant to the book's broader argument, is devoted). The evidence offered for these propositions isn't likely to change many minds, since it's so inveterately anecdotal (for example, a call for more stringent curriculum requirements is bolstered by the news that Brooke Shields graduated from Princeton without taking any courses in economics, math, biology, chemistry, history, sociology, or government) and injudiciously applied (Sowell's dismissal of student evaluations as responsible data in judging a professor's classroom performance immediately follows his use of comments from student evaluations to document the general inadequacy of college teaching). All in all, the details of Sowell's indictment—that not only can't Johnny think, but "Johnny doesn't know what thinking is"—are more entertaining than persuasive or new.
Pub Date: Jan. 4, 1993
ISBN: 0-02-930330-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The sub-title of this book is "Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools." But one finds in it little about education, and less about the teaching of English. Nor is this volume a defense of the Christian faith similar to other books from the pen of C. S. Lewis. The three lectures comprising the book are rather rambling talks about life and literature and philosophy. Those who have come to expect from Lewis penetrating satire and a subtle sense of humor, used to buttress a real Christian faith, will be disappointed.
Pub Date: April 8, 1947
ISBN: 1609421477
Page Count: -
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1947
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
