Tyler Belog – The Organized Teacher

Summary

My submission to the teachers toolbox is, “The Organized Teacher” by Steve Springer, Brandy Alexander and Kimberly Persiani. This book is an overview of ideas on how to set up your classroom and how to plan lessons for your students. It is an easy to use book full of visual resources for many situations and people involved in the teaching process from the teacher to the students, EAs and parents. It contains tools and checklists for teachers to use in their planning process. It also contains ideas for tools and worksheets to give the students. What made this book really appealing to me is that it is directed at the first year or beginning teacher. There are a lot of things to remember and think about when designing a classroom for the first time. I may not be the most organized person of all time but with help from resources like this I think I'll be better able to remember everything and keep things organized.

Chapter 1: First-Day Checklists

This might be my favourite chapter in the book. It's nothing fancy. As the chapter suggests it's mostly a checklist of all the things to be aware of or make sure you have ready for the first day of classes. This would be a great tool for leading up to the school year while you are setting up your class during the summer. I believe it would help alleviate a lot of that, “did I forget anything?” anxiety.

Chapter 2: Sample Room Setups

This chapter gives detailed maps and layouts of how you might want to lay out your classroom and what each section would be for. What is really nice about this chapter is that it breaks down how the classroom layout changes and evolves from kindergarten through grade six. What's great about this is you can really get an idea of what the children might be familiar with and what you might want to prepare them for. It is also a resource that you can use over and over again even if you are switching grades throughout your career.

Chapter 3: Classroom Management

This chapter gives you tools for setting up your daily class schedule and other tools so that you can set up effective policies and procedures for how your class will run.

Chapter 4: Classroom Rules and Behavior Management

This chapter starts with helping you to create a set of classroom rules. How to build effective rules and what rules you might want to avoid or modify. Then it helps you turn the rules you have created into a behaviour management model that you and your students can follow. What is really nice about this chapter is that it breaks down ideas for dealing with the whole class and ideas for dealing with an individual student.

Chapter 5: Classroom Organization

This chapter opens up with creating a parent letter and talking about communication with the home. This helps lead to more consistent expectations in organization and opens lines of communication so that everyone is on the same page. This chapter also talks about setting up a writing table, creating portfolios and managing movement within the classroom.

Chapter 6: Classroom Centers

Having learning centres set up in the classroom is a big part of teaching an early years class. This chapter gives examples of centres that you might want to set up and how you would go about doing that. It also talks about setting up your classroom library.

Chapter 7: Classroom Tools

This chapter talks about all the school supplies and tools that you might want to include in your classroom. In addition to providing you with a number of tools, this chapter also refers you to a number of outside resources that you might find useful. It contains a list of websites for teachers to use and a list of websites for students to use.

Chapter 8: The School

This chapter gives an overview of how to work with the resources within the schools such as taking the students to the library and the computer lab. It also has a list of classroom emergency supplies that I liked.

Chapter 9: Record Keeping

This chapter contains a number of tools for tracking yours students' attendance and performance in the classroom.

Chapter 10: Curriculum

This chapter is a nice resource for teachers to use for remembering what is contained within each subject. It also acts as a nice reference guide. For example for Language Arts, it reminds you about what a vowel digraph is, what the stages of the writing process are, ways to read, proofreading marks and soo much more. It does a nice job of breaking each subject down like this and providing teachers with that handy, “remember this”. The only downside is that this is an American publication and as a result would need to be adapted slightly for the Canadian curriculum. However most of the chapter can still be used effectively.

Chapter 11: Classroom Preparedness

This chapter contains a lot of resources and ideas for being prepared in case of... However what I really liked about this chapter is it contained a lot of resources for helping outside of the classroom. I has a big section on setting up home study folders so that the students can have something to bring home and help parents work with their children on various activities. It also talks about utilizing EAs effectively and setting up a sub folder.

Chapter 12: Lesson Planning

This chapter contains tools to help you build both unit plans and individual lesson plans.

Chapter 13: Portfolios

This chapter is examples of portfolio covers to help with assessing your students.

Chapter 14: Assessments

This chapter gives you tools to help effectively set up a rubric for different subjects and activities. It also gives you tools for setting up and managing weekly assessments of the students.

Critique

I found this to be an excellent book and a great resource for a beginning teacher. What really sold this book to me was that it was not just book filled with bricks of text on how to teach. This is a very visual book. When discussing classroom layout is showed you actual maps and diagrams of how you might want to lay things out. For me this was great, when you talk about something visual you should be able to show it as such.

Another huge positive to this book was the about of actual resources contained within its pages. So many books just list things that you should include when planning a lesson or building a station. This book gives you sample plans and templates for you to work with. The fact that this book is soo practical is was I believe sets it apart. The only downside here is that despite all the great plans it had, there were a few cookie cutter resources that I think could be better done though the students input or design. (However I feel that there are a lot more good resources than bad ones.)

The one bigger drawback to this book is the fact that it is an American publication. I had mentioned this a bit when I summarized the chapter on curriculum. So you would have to modify a few things in using this book here in the Canadian system. However in going through the book and making those adaptions, you end up thinking a lot about those things and ultimately help you with the goal of the book and keep yourself organized as a teacher.

So despite a few flaws this book is a tremendous resource for a beginning teacher. There are a lot of things to remember and think about when designing a classroom for the first time and I feel that this book would help you remember them and keep organized from the first day of classes to the last. I intend to keep this book around and use it when I begin my career. I would recommend it to others and suggest they do the same.