The method of Outrageous Teaching and lesson planning techniques are described in my new book above, Teaching Content Outrageously:  How to Captivate All Students and Accelerate Learning, Grades 4-12.

This book is available at a discount on Amazon and Barnes & Nobles' web sites.

How To Post Outrageous Lessons/Outrageous Class Management Suggest

You can either post your Outrageous lessons as a comment to the appropriate content area in the post below, or e mail it to me at: info@hots.org

You can also post your Outrageous classroom management suggestions by submitting a comment to the post on classroom management below, or e mailing it to me at: info@hots.org

All successful Outrageous lessons will be published along with additional suggestions

Saturday, January 31, 2009

Outrageous Classroom Management Techniques

While the emphasis of the book is on Outrageous lessons for the teaching of existing content objectives, there is a major section on classroom management.  This does not just refer to discipline, but also on how to get students engaged in behaviors critical to all learning, such as speaking up, taking notes, listening to other students' answers, etc.  Outrageous classroom management means getting students to engage in these behaviors without lecturing them on it, but by creating a scenario within which they naturally do so.  For example, you can get students to speak up by putting cotton in your ear and pretending to have an ear infection, and that you cannot hear them when they speak softly. 

There are many other such examples in the book, but I would be interested in hearing your effective Outrageous techniques.

2 comments:

Teresa said...

So I've read most of your book on Outrageous Teaching. It truly validated some of the things I do in my classroom which I never considered to be anything special. I use different voices, nicknames, volumes, faces etc. I've always held back a little for fear of what others would think, but look out this year, no holding back. But I thought I'd share one lesson I do with my math students.

It's call the multiplication ChaCha. I start with the boring conventional procedure for doing two digit by two digit multiplication. I usually don't get too far into it before I lose most of my class. Then I stop and make them stand up and we do the steps. Eventually we make up a dance poster of the steps "we" choreographed for doing the chacha. It's very funny and satisfying to see the students feet doing the ChaCha under their desks during test time and knowing that they will be able to do the math. It's been very successful for me so far.
Teresa
Cleveland Metropolitan Schools

Stan said...

Hi Teresa:

Thanks for this suggestion. Movement and dance is a great way to teach mathematical principles.

Stan Pogrow