I absolutely love what it has done to simplify my classroom management strategies, so that I can run classes more smoothly. This year, I did struggle a little with ensuring the primary school students understood expectations, because simply telling them was not enough compared to secondary students. I needed to MODEL that behaviour for the students before continuing on with lessons.
As a specialist in primary school, you don't have time to develop the rapport that a classroom teacher might. So establishing simple yet broad rules that can be applied in any situation really helps. All these skills were easily transferable to a high school context, and I have them to be equally effective.
One of the biggest misconceptions I think I had about teaching as a first year grad is that purely having a great activity is enough to ensure students are engaging with learning.
My class activities always aim to be engaging, but it can be absolutely ruined when students don't adhere to basic respectful behaviours. They can take the game too far, which can stop the learning process for the rest of the class, and stops making a great activity fun.
I think the key is variation within a lesson; include the videos, games, teacher input, student output, worksheets, note taking. Because students have short attention spans, and so many different ways of learning, it's best to have a MIXTURE of it all. I find that students really LOVE worksheets, pop quizzes, and just sitting down and taking notes once in a while just as much as they love games.
Today, I simply asked my Year 7s to write in their notebooks a brainstorm of EVERYTHING they had learned this year. And I was only going to give them 15 minutes, but they wanted to do it for a good half hour! So simple, but all students were fully engaged!
It's also about how I FRAME the activity. If I go into an activity thinking it's going to be a bit too immature or "uncool" for students, they mirror my attitude. I really am the cheesiest teacher with the worst jokes possible, so I find SO MUCH joy in geeky things. Students always appear to love the worst songs I sing because of the joy they see when I sing it with them.
All my high school students always end up singing along to Groovi Pauli & Friends. And that is just the CHEESIEST, most UNCOOL video ever. And they love it!