Return to June 2006 Newsletter Home

Stuck in the Classroom – Regina Stuck

It’s hard to believe that another school year has come and gone… This was such an upside down year with numerous hurricanes and days missed. I always saw teacher work days as a day to catch your breath and get caught up in the classroom, but his year we truly learned how important they were; working without a single workday!

One thing that I am proud of accomplishing this year is the fact that most of my students can now place all 50 states on a map; this is without giving them the list of state names. Many of my co-workers complain that students don’t know geography and yet they do little about it. This was a process that took the entire year; 10 states at a time, first with a word bank, then without, we just kept doing it over and over again. So unlike the 33% of student’s nationally who can’t place Louisiana on a map, only about 5% of mine can’t do that! The trick was to just introduce a few at a time and to keep at it.

As the school year ends it is a good time to evaluate what worked and didn’t work in our classrooms. Our school district has a generic evaluation form that we are supposed to use, however it is so generic and uses only numbers; that students simply circle without reading, making it basically useless. A couple of years ago I started creating my own evaluation; asking specific questions about projects, books we read, classroom activities, etc. Students have to actually write a few sentences for each question. I believe this gives me an authentic sense of what was effective in my classroom; what the teacher believes was beneficial and what the students saw as beneficial are not always the same. We can learn from our students.

Another revealing tool for self-evaluation is video taping ourselves. If you have never taped yourself consider doing so; you may see that how you think you teach and the reality of how you teach, is drastically different. I have viewed a number of teacher videos and the one thing that stands out is that teachers don’t really interact much with students; they tend to be glued to one spot. Move around! Try doing this just for your own information and self evaluation; no one else will see it, give it a try, it’s very revealing.

As you prepare your room for the summer you should also be preparing for the fall. I have never understood why administration makes us dismantle our rooms when we are in the same room in the fall; not to mention that all that is usually done is that the floors are finally stripped and waxed. As I pull down my 20th century posters I organize all my posters so that the explorers will be on the top of the pile, then colonial, then Revolutionary, etc. Since I have workroom where I can store them stacked this way this works well; I used to place them in science boards to separate the different time periods. Take the end of the school year as an opportunity to organize for the next.

Just like the school year I have run out of steam! Have a wonderful safe summer, read a book for enjoyment and return to your classroom refreshed and invigorated.

Regina Stuck is a classroom teacher, the 2005 recipient of the FCSS Excellence in Teaching History Award, sponsored by Prentice Hall.  She offers some sound suggestions for solving everyday classroom challenges.  Regina will be a regular contributor to our FCSS Social Studies Counts newsletter.