Please stamp the original text: New school year begins: Bell works? Dr Fred Jones.
Translation/Liu Yanjun
In the teaching building, you can often see students laughing and fighting on the way from one classroom to another. On the contrary, the classroom is an environment for study and work. The students are happy to bring the atmosphere in the corridor into the classroom. They also want to continue the conversation in the classroom corridor at the beginning of the class. All this will only end when you remind them to switch modes, and they will switch to the learning state.
So as a teacher, the first thing to do is to define the difference between classroom and corridor as much as possible. These are two different worlds. Let students do what they should do in class.
The best way to define the learning environment is to let students start learning. The teacher stands at the door and greets the students every day, greets them, and then assigns them learning tasks. What kind of learning tasks should they be given? This is the topic we are going to discuss today: the bell ringer.
Belling, like its name, is what students do when the bell rings. It is usually the first job for students in each class. On the first day of school, when you tell your students about ringing the bell, tell them never to ask, "Is there any ringing the bell today?" This question. Every day, and every day will be displayed in the same place on the classroom whiteboard. Tell the students: when you sit down in your seat, look at the whiteboard, find the bell work of the day, and then start doing it.
As you can imagine, ringing the bell is not very accurate, because many students entered the classroom before the bell rang. So, tell the students: "If you want to chat, just chat in the corridor, that's where you can chat. Come back to the classroom when you are ready to start studying. "
Ringing the bell usually takes the first five minutes of each class. So students who arrive in the classroom early have at most eight to ten minutes to finish ringing the bell. Ringing the bell can eliminate some potential problems in classroom management before the formal class.
Typical classroom teaching doesn't really start until five to eight minutes after the bell rings. Before that, it was difficult for students to concentrate. The students came into the classroom, chatting, sharpening pencils and listening to the radio. The teacher began to call the roll. These processes, which are repeated every day before each class, are called "concentration". This process is also a deep-rooted problem that many teachers complain about. It is the result of letting the class begin naturally. I regard it as a big problem.
If you spend 50 minutes in a class and five minutes in these things every day, one tenth of the class time will disappear every year. This is very expensive.
But suppose you don't have a plan, what will it be like to try to attend class on time every day? When will you call the roll? In primary school, you don't just call the roll-you may charge students for lunch, milk, book club and Friday outing. The school district should give you a cash register. Besides, when you are about to start class, the class may be interrupted by the radio. Then, a student was late with the nurse's instructions.
When the bell rings, not everything is ready automatically. This is why no one can formally enter the classroom when the bell rings. You can try to start class on time according to the bell, and then see how long you can last. How many days can you eliminate all interference and say to the students, "Don't worry about anything, let's have class." The reality is that you really need to call the roll, charge for lunch, pay for milk, etc. The real question is, how can we finish these extra jobs without wasting five minutes before class? What you need is that students are doing things and studying, and you don't have to teach them. What you need is to ring the bell.
First, keep it simple. Secondly, make sure it is closely related to today's teaching objectives and serve them. Think of it as a warm-up before class. This may be a review activity that you have completed after the course begins.
If you are a science teacher, how about extracting four questions from what students learned yesterday? If you are a math teacher, how about asking students to solve four problems with what they learned yesterday? Set these questions within the students' ability. This is not a midterm. If the students were here yesterday and listened carefully, they could start a new course by solving these problems.
Review is just one possibility of Bell's work. Some teachers regard keeping a diary and reading silently as ringing the bell. Some teachers put new word games and games that make students think on the whiteboard. I still remember a teacher who asked a student to read a book borrowed from the library to the whole class when he called the roll. As long as these activities are meaningful to your class, you can use all your imagination.
Finally, ringing the bell should not be an extra burden for you to grade students. Some teachers quickly turned over the students' bell-ringing homework and drew a cross in their grade books, even though these students have worked hard and seriously. Some teachers require specific groups to undertake inspection work every week. Some teachers carefully collect these bell-ringing homework, read it, and then throw it into the trash can after school. In short, the purpose of ringing the bell is to make students start thinking and enter the learning state, rather than evaluating students' performance.
What can Bell do at work on the first day of school? You need something. You may already have a process that suits you. For example, the social studies teacher I met gave a class, including political opinion surveys and questionnaires. I also know that some primary school teachers ask their children to draw family portraits, classify building blocks by color, shape and size, or put together puzzles.
When greeting students at the door, you can also consider giving them a 3*5 card. There is a seat number on one side of the card. There are numbers on every table. Say hello to the students and say, "This is your seat number. Find your seat number, then turn the card over and follow the instructions on the whiteboard. " On the whiteboard, there is a picture telling students what to write-name, birthday, home address, home phone number, parents' work phone number and so on. These things sound simple, but at least you let the children do something. You send them a message with your actions: when you enter the classroom, you are ready to start doing things at once.
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This article is taken from Dr. Jones's award-winning book Teaching Tools. Illustrations of Brian Jones's teaching tools.