Teachers Resource Force Blog

The best morning meetings for middle and high school

23/7/2019

Morning meetings (a.k.a. tutor time / form time / advisory period - it has many names!) is an extremely powerful way to start the school day with your students. It sets your students off on the right foot. It gives them a routine that is safe and predictable, whilst still being something exciting to look forward to when done right. Establishing a powerful morning meeting is easy to do and doesn't need hours of prep, if you know where to look! Keep reading to learn some great tips for an effective morning meeting for your middle and high school students.

The best morning meetings for middle and high school | TeachersResourceForce.com

Whether you officially have time set aside for a dedicated morning meeting or not, it is a powerful addition to your school day that can take anywhere from 5-20 minutes. Even if you can't start the day this way, you can still use this strategy to start your lesson that will provide the same benefits!

What are morning meetings anyway?
Well here's the beauty of it - they can be whatever you want them to be! They're often used to develop classroom community and character, but there is no one way to achieve this of course, and things can vary depending on your students' needs at the time. It's just a slot of time at the start of the day (or lesson if you prefer) where you focus on the 'whole child'. I'll give you some suggestions and resources further down this article.

Are morning meetings for you?
That depends... Do you want your students to settle quickly at the start of the day?
Do you want to focus on character development and help your students be the best they can be without compromising heavily on the subject content you need to teach?
Do you want your students to look forward to the start of the school day with you?
If you said yes to any of these things then yes, morning meetings might well be for you!

What are some ideas for a great morning meeting?
For many years I had quite the challenge of coming up with new content for my form group every day - and I had them for 7 years so that was quite a lot of content that had to be brand spanking new each day! During this time I figured out the most effective way of preparing for the mornings and that was to have themed days. This meant that every day was predictable so they felt safe with what to expect, but the content was always new and fresh which kept the anticipation and excitement high! Win, win!
Here's a great example:

In this pack, there are 200 slides - that's more than enough for one for every day of the school year!
Each day has a theme:

• "Motivational Mondays" to start the week with a positive quote / thought / discussion.
• "True or False Tuesdays" to start the day with a bit of fun and engaging trivia! You can have students put their hands up for true or false and then have a short discussion (or giggle) about some of the random facts they'll learn throughout the year.
• "Wellness Wednesdays" to focus on wellbeing, both mental and physical, that will help both themselves and demonstrate acts of kindness to others.
• "Thoughtful Thursdays" to develop their thinking skill with some deep, philosophical thoughts and discussions. This can be done as a whole class or discussed in pairs or groups if preferred.
• "Funny Fridays" to end the week on a high with a funny joke!

This is ideal if all you have is a few minutes at the start of the day, but still want to get a sound routine in place and want to have something for your students to look forward to. If you're interested in trying this resource for free, you can get week 1 right here with the benefit of also joining the mailing list where you will get access to the VIP area which is full of exclusive freebies not found on TpT!

Another option for you if you want to focus more on character education, are these sets:

There are 10 sets of these in total, each focusing in a different trait. They come in both whiteboard and journal version to suit your needs. The whiteboards are convenient for classroom discussions and if you want to go paperless, but the journal can stretch out the activity to last a little longer as your students can work on their writing skills too!

If you want to download a freebie of the Resilience whiteboard and journals then you can grab your copy right here!

Of course you can fill your mornings with anything that takes your fancy, but there's something to be said for knowing you have a kit to pull from that you know will last you all year long - especially great for those emergencies and when your enthusiasm might perhaps be waning and you need something tried and true that you know will work!

What are some ways you like to spend morning meeting in your middle / high school classroom or is this the first time you're considering incorporating it into your routine? Leave a comment below!

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Quick ways to teach Character Education in schools

9/6/2019

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Character Education is fundamentally important to teach our students so that they grow into respectful, honest and kind young people who make good decisions thus enabling them to reach their expanding potential in life, both academically and personally. If you want to learn more about the power of Character Education, check out the training area here.

While we know it's powerful and that we should teach it, the problem is that there is barely enough time in a day to cover all the curriculum we need to teach, right? How are we supposed to make time for teaching Character and building up classroom community as well?

Having grappled with this same dilemma myself, I have come up with a few tips for integrating Character into my curriculum, that can often be done in 5 minutes! Keep reading to learn more.

Quick ways to teach Character Education in schools | TeachersResourceForce.com

Tip 1: look for opportunities
When it comes to Character Education, it's not always necessary to teach is as an "add on" (although this is an effective way to go deep on a topic). Sometimes you can find opportunities to teach character in every day activities. For example, if you notice your students always give up when they find tasks hard, you can take that opportunity to drop a positive quote such as "you only fail when you give up" followed by a little pep talk! Just repeating these mantras and offering encouragement throughout the day can still have an impact on your students and can be done in a few minutes.

Tip 2: secret angels
One of my favourite things to do with students is to encourage them to be someone's "secret angel" for a week. This teaches them the power of acts of kindness, how amazing it feels to be a good person and how they can easily help make the world a better place, all while fostering a positive classroom community.

How it works is simple. Put every student's name on a piece of paper and call them up to pull a name out of a hat at random. They are now a secret angel for that person, and they person they selected must be kept a secret so as not to spoil the excitement.

All students have to do is make an effort to demonstrate acts of kindness for that person without making it too obvious. It could be smiling at them, holding a door open, lending them a pen, leaving notes in their locker etc. they can get as creative as they like with it!

At the end of the week students are to share who they think their secret angel is followed by a conversation about how it made both parties feel as the angel and the recipient! Every time I have done this, it has been on students' mind all week - it's all they talk about, always guessing who is their angel and of course, enjoying being treated so well by a classmate! It is especially powerful if these people don't often talk to each other, as new friendships can even blossom!

Give "secret angels" a go, watch your students be active and kind citizens and see how much joy it will bring to your classroom community each week!

Tip 3: quick morning meetings
Another easy and effective way of teaching Character Education is through short morning meeting activities. Some schools have home room / tutor / form time / advisory class which is a perfect opportunity to do this, but it can equally be the first few minutes of your lesson.

Take 5 minutes to show a quote related to a character trait you want to instil in your students and have some discussions around those quotes.

It can be hard thinking of discussion prompts beyond "what do you think this quote means", so to save you the time and stress, I have created a resource for you that does just that:

Character Education whiteboard morning meetings | TeachersResourceForce.com

Character Education journal morning meetings | TeachersResourceForce.com

This set of bundled resources includes a Digital Whiteboard option for you to display the quotes and prompts up on your wall where you can facilitate a classroom discussion. The other bundle is a set of printable journals with the same quotes and prompts to encourage your students to develop their writing skills while reflecting on character development. Or you can get the whole lot right here!

The character traits included in these bundles include: resilience, courage, compassion, self-confidence, respect, tolerance, honesty, self-respect, leadership and empathy. There are 200 quotes and 600 prompts, that's enough for every single school day of the year!

If you would like to get a free sample of digital whiteboard and printable journal morning meetings, you can download them here:

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Learning by rote: unfashionable, but very, very useful

17/5/2019

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This article has been written by guest post blogger, Bruce Greig, who offers some fantastic ways you can teach your students to learn rapidly!

Learning by rote has, to put it mildly, somewhat gone out of fashion since the days of rows of Victorian schoolchildren reciting their times tables in unison.

But there is no getting away from the fact that learning involves remembering information, and some types of information just have to be learnt by heart. The obvious examples are multiplication tables and foreign language vocabulary.

There are two techniques used by memory gurus which are almost never taught in schools: visualisation and spaced repetition. Visualisation might be touched on sometimes, like these kinds of aide-memoires:

Learning by rote: unfashionable, but very, very useful | TeachersResourceForce.com

(Source: http://forreadingaddicts.co.uk)

But schools don’t teach visualisation in the way that memory gurus use it. Few people realise how effective visualisation can be. Take the parlour game trick of memorising the order of a randomly shuffled pack of cards. Magician shuffles the cards, looks at them one at a time, then goes through the pack again, correctly predicting each card as it comes up. Impressive as it looks, anyone can do this with about an hour’s practice.

The technique is to imagine walking along a familiar route and at key places you mentally position some outrageous image representing each playing card. Young man ripping out his own heart while hanging from lamppost at the corner of your street: Jack of Hearts. Five workmen digging furiously to pull down the lamp post: five of spades. And so on. Try it with twenty cards, you’ll find it surprisingly easy.

Memorising a pack of cards is, of course, completely useless. But this trick illustrates how effective visualisation can be: imagining a powerful, even outrageous, image makes recall very easy.

Learners can do the same thing with foreign vocab and multiplication tables. The crucial step is to make the effort think up an image the very first time you are presented with the word to be remembered. Do this the first time, for every word, even if it takes thirty seconds or a minute to do. It is effortful, much more so than just reading or hearing the word and hoping to remember it. But that effort will be repaid many times over as the recall becomes easier and easier based on the image you have for that word.

Which brings us onto the second technique beloved of memory gurus but almost never found in the classroom: spaced repetition. This was originally a flashcard technique. You start with one pile of flashcards. As you review each card you judge how easy you found it to recall the answer. Easy cards you upgrade into a new pile, hard ones stay in the same pile. The next day, you only review your “hard” pile, ignoring the easy pile. You revisit the easy ones in, say, two days and again promote those you still find easy into a new pile, downgrade hard ones back to pile one, and keep the rest where they are.

Over time, you build up to having a pile of cards you need to review every day, another pile you only look at once a week, and so on, up to a pile which you might review once a year.

The fascinating insight of this technique is that you eventually get to the point where you review each card just around the time you are starting to forget it. You don’t waste any time reviewing cards that you still remember well. That is why it is so efficient: you only review the cards that you need to, you don’t spend any time on other cards.

I used this technique to learn good tourist-level Italian. Curious to rate my own ability I did an Italian GCSE past paper. I completed the paper to A* level, and found the paper far less intimidating that my French and Spanish GCSEs from years ago.

This after around a dozen hours of hours of study, rather than the many hundreds of hours of study I must have spent doing French and Spanish at school twenty-five years ago.

Spaced repetition is extremely effective, but there is a good reason that it isn’t commonly used in classrooms: it is completely impossible for a teacher to administer. The teacher cannot keep track of how well each child remembers every word in their foreign vocab list; or how well each child remembers every multiplication fact.

The only practical way to use this technique in a classroom is for every child to manage their own “piles” of cards. Either with real cards, and real boxes to place them in or (more practical) an app like Anki which recreates this exact technique on a screen. Some language learning apps like Memrise and Duolingo do use elements of spaced repetition, but in my experience a simple flashcard system, using spaced repetition (as Anki does) is all you need.

I’ve encouraged my daughter to use these techniques for her school Spanish, and it works very well. Are you a teacher who has used these techniques in your classroom? We’d love to hear from you in the comments below.

(About the author: Bruce Greig is an entrepreneur and school governor. He has a psychology degree from Oxford University. He served as CoG through two Ofsted inspections and four headteachers. He runs SchoolStaffSurveys.com in his spare time, after discovering how enlightening an anonymous staff survey can be and decided to make it easy for every school to run them.)

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