Harry K. Wong, Ph.D., best-selling author and motivational speaker, has offered guidance to tens of thousands of teachers and school leaders over the past three decades.

A former science teacher, Wong has written and co-written several books, including “The First Days of School: How to Be an Effective Teacher.” More recently, Harry and his wife, Rosemary, wrote “The Classroom Management Book.” Combined sales of their books total more than 4 million copies. A native of San Francisco, Wong taught middle and high school in Menlo Park, California. The Wongs still reside in Northern California — when they aren’t traveling across the United States or touring the globe to present their no-nonsense teaching style. Their model for helping teachers excel starts with a simple, if methodical, approach: Teaching is all about student achievement. Like every other profession, good teachers are good managers. Hence, positive student achievement begins by developing strong classroom management skills.We caught up with the Wongs between their recent trips to China and Missouri. Through a series of email exchanges, we asked Harry to explain classroom management procedures, as well as his decision not to become a brain surgeon, as his parents had hoped. Fortunately, for the millions of educators who have benefited from the Wongs’ books and columns, videos and workshops, he decided to become a teacher.What advice do you offer new teachers about relying on colleagues when it comes to classroom management techniques?Of course, always seek guidance from colleagues. But it must be done carefully because most all teachers regard classroom management as discipline [and] it is not.Management has to do with organization. When you manage a store or team, you organize the store or team. You don’t discipline the employees, customers or players.The best guidance is to ask other teachers to share or show their classroom management plan — typically in a binder or folder — from whence a new teacher can glean ideas they can adapt. To see something specific is better than guidance.What common threads do teachers share in their approaches to teaching and preparing students for the next education level or careers?I do not see any common thread. What I see are teachers who follow what is the prevailing thread, which currently is to prepare every student for college.Schools love to brag [about] what percentage of their graduates go to college. They fail to see that a great percentage never finish the college they go to.It would be better to prepare students for a career, but there is little or nothing in the curriculum that prepares students for the work-world after high school.In this brief video, Wong discusses the difference between disciplining students and implementing procedures that help teachers avoid student behavior problems.You often point out that teachers don’t discipline students; they manage classrooms. How should teachers manage students in differentiated classrooms?Students do not learn when they are disciplined. They learn when the classroom is organized for learning and success.Differentiation refers to instruction, not to management. A store is managed to run well. The differentiation comes in the variety of merchandise that is offered.There was a recent article in “Education Week” where the writer said differentiation does not work. It caused a controversy, but he had some valid points.I have yet to see a differentiated classroom. Nor have I even seen research that supports differentiation. Here is what I have learned. If a student does not succeed in learning what the teacher wants the student to learn — the objective — here is what works:

John Hattie’s [visible learning] research says, give students the lesson objectives before the lesson begins and you will raise student achievement by 27 percent. The student then learns to understand the objective while the teacher teaches to the objective.In an effective instructional template — the lesson plan — a lesson begins with a lesson objective or lesson target. The next thing a teacher does is called instructional strategy. This is where a teacher uses a variety of activities to teach the objective. For instance, you don’t use technology until you post the objective first.With today’s emphasis on technical training programs that seem to mirror the European model, should teachers be preparing some students for careers that don’t require a college education?Yes. But it is not a European model. Only Germany has a [technical training] model that seems to work. Singapore has an excellent career model.How does your business analogy — comparing classroom management to operating restaurants — fit within the current educational environment?What’s interesting is that all stakeholders understand my analogy. All business people, military people, and parents in the work-world accept my analogy [because] that is their work-world. They all come from or work in an environment that is organized.The problem is in education [systems] where many believe that a classroom should be unstructured to allow students to explore and discover their own learning. If they discover their own learning, then they have ownership of what they discovered — more educational jargon.As a counterpoint, Wong shared a recent communication he received from a teacher that reflects his organizational concepts of how to manage an efficient classroom:

Dougherty Stahl, K.A., & Bravo, M.A. (2010). Contemporary classroom vocabulary assessment for content areas. The Reading Teacher, 63 (7), 566–578. doi: 10.1598/RT.63.7.4

            For this assignment, I read Katherine A. Dougherty Stahl and Marco A. Bravo’s work from The Reading Teacher about vocabulary assessment. The article, titled, “Contemporary Classroom Vocabulary Assessment for Content Areas” had three parts. The first part deals with how the intricacies of word knowledge make assessment difficult. The second is a set of considerations for teacher-made and commercial assessment. The last third of this article provides specific techniques to provide evidence of vocabulary knowledge.  

            The authors of this piece wanted to inform the reader that vocabulary is multidimensional, incremental, content dependent, and a skill that develops across a lifetime. The article tries to answer the question, “What does it mean to know a word?” The authors cite a series of educator’s ideas about the stages or continuums of vocabulary knowledge. These ranges go from absolute oblivion on any aspect of a word to a full understanding of meaning, relationships to other words, and metaphorical uses. They also mention Crohbach’s dimensions of vocabulary, which include generalization, application, breadth, precision, and availability.

            Another important educator mentioned in this piece is Read.   He wants educators to different types of assessment that can be labeled as discrete or embedded, selective or comprehensive, and either dependent or independent of context. To wrap up, they mention three classroom assessment models for EO and ELL students: the knowledge scale, recognition task, and assessment magazine. 

            This article taught me a lot about the intricacies of vocabulary instruction. I usually use a fill-in-the-blank quiz for vocabulary. This article showed me that this is not the best way to assess vocabulary knowledge. I need to dig deeper and get students to see every aspect of a new word. The article also gave me ways to do so. I really like the assessment magazine idea and would utilize it in a class. I think that and other ideas from this article will help my students achieve as high as they can with vocabulary.  

The original PDF can be located at the attached link :
https://steinhardt.nyu.edu/scmsAdmin/uploads/006/716/Stahl%20Voc%20Assess%20RT.pdf

Pondiscio, R. (2014). Literacy is knowledge. City Journal. (I couldn’t find page numbers online and there was no issue or volume mentioned, but this is a great article written by the executive director of CitizenshipFirst)

            For this assignment, I read Robert Pondiscio’s work from City Journal about literacy. The article, titled, “Literacy is Knowledge” hit on an issue I’ve thought about for a while. There is a divide between students who come from literature-rich families and students whose first exposure to literature comes in the classroom. The author uses the analogy of bike riding. Many people think reading is like riding a bike, once you know how to do it, you can ride any bike or read any piece of literature. This simply isn’t true. Good readers become so by reading multiple texts and building up their prior knowledge, vocabulary, and comprehension skills. For this reason, students who aren’t exposed to literature will struggle with the simplest texts. 

The author makes the case that typical teaching styles, including reader’s workshops are not sufficient for low-income, low-knowledge students to achieve reading success. What the author suggests is that teachers create a condition where these students are exposed to as much of the common body of knowledge-science, history, art, and literature- as possible. They need the knowledge that most literate people have to build the bridges to great literacy. This approach creates more prior knowledge for students to access when they are reading new works of literature. The common core standards are one way to help build the background needed for literacy. When teachers follow the standards, they become the guides to the world Pondiscio believes we need. 

            I thought this was a very thought-provoking article. We learn often that repetition and working on comprehension skills is the best way to teach more literate students, however, we also know the results of these tactics are not producing the results we want. Maybe focusing more on background knowledge is the key. I also really liked the analogy about bike-riding. It made me look at literacy differently because before reading this article, I probably would have agreed that reading was like riding a bike.   

The article can be found at the connected link :  http://www.city-journal.org/html/literacy-knowledge-13623.html

·        A whiteboard or a clean sheet of paper

Objectives: 

·        Get students to show what they know for verb vocabulary and get them to help each other expand vocabulary.

Activity:

            Create two teams in the classroom. Have them compete to see who can define the most vocabulary words taking turns. Students show what they know by suggesting definitions and teach each other by explaining words they know that others don’t.

·        Vocabulary Terms

·        Drawing materials

·        Paper

 

Objectives:

·        Get students to visualize the word and its meaning. 

Activity: 

Give students a vocabulary term and blank sheets of paper. Tell them to work as a group to create a cartoon in which:

 

These cartoons can also be made electronically in older grades. 

Every time you read a text you read it the same way, right? Novels, textbooks, magazine articles and Internet web pages are all the same if they are written in the same language, aren’t they? The answer to both of the questions is “not really”. Readers employ different reading strategies and prior knowledge based on the genre (type of reading) and topic of the text. For this reason it is important that teachers help students, especially those in middle and high school, learn how to “tackle” their particular content area’s texts.

Simply put content area reading is the reading that a person (usually a student) needs to complete and understand in a particular subject area. The content areas typically included in this definition are science, social studies/history and math, but any area outside of English literature instruction constitutes a content area. The reading associated with content area courses reflects not only the concepts and ideas important to these subjects, but also the text structures used by those practicing the field.

Since most of the texts used in these subject areas are expository (informational) they require their readers to use different strategies for reading and comprehending them than they employ when reading literature. Consider the differences between a novel and a social studies textbook. Novels are usually set up so that there are distinct chapters, but each page of text looks the same. It features sentences in paragraphs. There may occasionally be a few illustrations, but they are few and far between. Now think about a textbook. While there are chapters and text in paragraphs textbooks also use sidebars, illustrations, headings, footers and colored text to “tell” their “stories”. If the reader focuses only on the components of a textbook that are like a piece of literature, she will end up missing a large portion of the information on the page.

In addition to looking different, content area texts may be written differently than literature. Literature is written in a narrative form which relies on a plot and character dialogue to convey its message to the reader. Content area texts are usually expository meaning that are written to inform, persuade, describe or explain information for the reader. There is no action to tell a story in an expository text. The reader needs to use strategies for harnessing and synthesizing the information in this type of text.

Beyond these general differences specific content areas may use particular text structures or styles of writing. For example, lab reports written by scientists (and science students) follow a certain format that their writers and readers must understand in order to convey information.

Readers need to choose and revise their choices of reading strategies depending on the type of content area text they are reading. Each genre of text requires its readers to use a different set of strategies for accessing its information. The reader must first identify the text’s structure and use his knowledge of this genre to read the text. While reading the text, he must use general reading strategies such as questioning, making inferences and connections and activating prior knowledge and content specific strategies including drawing on subject specific information to make meaning of the text. During this process he is (hopefully) making meaning on three different levels: literal (understanding the information written on the page), inferential (reading ‘between the lines’) and evaluation (making judgments and conclusions about the information). These abilities develop from good content area reading instruction and practice."
http://www.k12reader.com/what-is-content-area-reading/

Students are engaged and motivated to build content area vocabulary through the creation of ABC books. A small-group activity introduces a variety of ABC books, including books for older readers that use the letters of the alphabet as a starting point to present information about a featured subject. Students then decide on a style and structure for their own alphabet books and choose a word for each letter from content area textbooks, encyclopedias, reference books, or suggested websites. A storyboard is constructed including each of the 26 words, the context in which it will appear, and a quick sketch of the proposed illustration. Students' final ABC books are created using either the interactive Alphabet Organizer or PowerPoint."

·        Text

·        Pre-written quiz using pictures as answers. 

Objective:

·        This activity targets ESL students. This quiz gives students answers in the form of pictures which they can comprehend easier than words. 

Activity: 

Give students a text to read out loud as a class. After reading the text, students will take a comprehension quiz with answers in the form of pictures. For example, when asking about setting, the students will see pictures of different settings and choose the one that represents the setting of the story. The class can discuss answers to find where students are struggling and where they are excelling. 

·        Vocabulary Terms

·        Writing Notebook

Objective:

·        Increase writing volume which will increase writing proficiency. 

Activity: 

Step 1: Give students an important vocabulary term or question you’ve been addressing in your instruction and write it on the board.

Step 2: Instruct students to write (or type) “as much as they can, as well as they can” for 60 seconds.  Have them always write in the same place (writers notebook, science notebook, etc. depending on class).

Step 3: At the end of 60 seconds, tell them “pencils up” and ask them to count the overall number of words and tally it in the margin. Have students circle the errors they noticed while rereading their writing.

Step 4: Have students repeat this procedure two more times, giving them a new related vocabulary word or relevant question each time.

Step 5: For each session have them graph the highest number of words they wrote in any one minute period.  Have them set goals for the numbers of words they will write in any one-minute period next time.

Step 6: At least once a week, have them choose a previously written entry to revise and extend into a more formal explanatory or argumentative piece for homework.

Miller’s 12 steps

1.      Develop a set of written expectations you can live with and enforce. 

2.      Be consistent. Be consistent. Be consistent. 

3.      Be patient with yourself and with your students. 

4.      Make parents your allies. Call early and often. Use the word "concerned." When communicating a concern, be specific and descriptive. 

5.      Don't talk too much. Use the first 15 minutes of class for lectures or presentations, then get the kids working. 

6.      Break the class period into two or three different activities. Be sure each activity segues smoothly into the next. 

7.      Begin at the very beginning of each class period and end at the very end. 

8.      Don't roll call. Take the roll with your seating chart while students are working. 

9.      Keep all students actively involved. For example, while a student does a presentation, involve the other students in evaluating it. 

10.  Discipline individual students quietly and privately. Never engage in a disciplinary conversation across the room. 

11.  Keep your sense of perspective and your sense of humor. 

12.  Know when to ask for help. 

- See more at: http://www.educationworld.com/a_curr/curr155.shtml#sthash.nAwph1Hz.dpuf

Time: 20 min

Preparation: Revise how to form questions with the students before you start the activity. Let students imagine they are all looking for a new flatmate for their shared apartment. In order to find the best suitable person, they have to ask numerous questions that seem interesting and relevant to them (e.g. Find out if you have the same interests so you could do things together, Find out character traits and habits (e.g. orderly vs. messy person) etc.) After having asked at least three people in one-on-one conversations (and writing down things they have in common), students decide who to move in with and justify their choice. This activity takes up at least 20 minutes and is fun to the students as they move freely across the room. Students present their choice in the end, so everyone in the class gets to know at least a few details about everyone. Try to let students who are not presenting write down details about their classmates. A good way is to give students different tasks e.g. one group of students writes down character traits, another group collects adjectives of different habits etc. so you can continue working with adjectives for example.

 

Ask for their help in completing the outline on the board. This process clarifies the sometimes confusing and counter-intuitive structure of an essay in an interactive manner.