Do I get a grade for my EQ?

Every time I’ve ever been cast in a play I’ve played a mother. In college that was my nickname on every dorm-room floor. When I was a high school teacher it was not infrequent for my students to accidentally call me mom. In my adult life I’ve probably spent more time listening to people share their feelings than I have watching TV. I’ve never been tested, but I suspect my EQ (emotional quotient) could run a few circles around my IQ.

So, it’s little wonder that one of the most meaningful things a student ever wrote to me reads: “through this class I have learned how to create, imagine, and dream. Thank you. It’s because of your encouragement I’ve become comfortable expressing myself.”

The standards I was supposed to teach her focused primarily on comprehension and analysis of various American literary genres, and she did an amazing job of learning everything she was taught. But that’s not what she remembered from my class.

Without knowing what I was doing, I was building my students’ emotional intelligence. And I was just doing what came naturally. I think one of the biggest errors people make as new teachers is assuming emotion has no place in the classroom. I loathe the old saying, “don’t smile until Christmas” because it forces teachers to suppress one of the true joys of teaching! If I didn’t smile at least once in class I knew the day was NOT going well.

How we feel, what we feel, and why we feel are core elements of what makes us human. Teaching about these elements of our humanity comes naturally if we’re in touch with these elements of ourselves. You don’t have to deviate from your general instruction. You just have to bring emotional intelligence into your instruction.

Here are a few ideas to get you started:

End of Class Shout-Outs – At the end of the class period (especially one in which you’ve worked through a complex assignment or had a particularly intense discussion) invite students to give shout-outs to their peers. A shout-out is a piece of positive feedback like: “I’d like to give a shout-out to Rashawn for helping me understand this math problem.” Push your students to be as specific as possible. In this way they’re not only learning how to support each other but how to identify their own good qualities.

Pre and Post Test Reflections – Have students write a brief description of how they’re feeling prior to taking a test. After the test is completed, have the last item on the assessment be a question that asks how they’re feeling after finishing. Be sure to ask WHY they are feeling this way – that really helps students examine where their feelings come from.

Birthday Silhouettes – For younger students, trace their bodies on a piece of butcher paper or bulletin board paper on their birthday (for older students you can just use a decorated piece of poster board). Ask each student in the class to offer a positive statement about this student that you write on the paper. Make sure students’ comments are specific. The birthday girl or boy takes the paper home at the end of the class.

Life Boxes – Ask students to bring in shoeboxes that they’ve decorated at home along with 5 things they can put into these “life boxes” that are very important to them (but not things that could get stolen). One at a time, invite students to share the contents of their life boxes with the rest of the class and to explain the way they decorated the boxes. The rest of the class should be encouraged to ask questions and make comments about what is shared. The life boxes should stay in the classroom for a while so everyone can look at them, and when students are doing writing activities they can go to these boxes for inspiration!

What can I do in my classroom to maximize student success?

So you have 5 and a half months of school to go, and a room full of students primed and ready for the most important stretch of the academic year. You want every one of them to be successful, but you have SO MANY to keep track of! What can you do to maximize their potential right now? Consider the following questions and ideas as they relate to your class:

The Physical Classroom
Study your classroom throughout the day and look at how the space is being used. Consider the following questions and think about new ways to organize the room to best suit the needs of you and your students.

• Do you have a quiet corner for students who need to get away from external stimuli to focus?
• Can you easily move students from individual work to group or partner work?
• Do students know where to find things in the room if they need to get their own supplies (pencils, paper, staples, paper clips, scissors, etc.)?
• If you have a teacher-desk, where is it located? How do you use it? Is there another way to use that space that would be better for students?
  
• Do you have computers in your room? If they don’t work, is there a way you can move them to free up space? If they do work, is there a way you can use them more for students who learn best with this tool?
• How do you move around the room throughout the day? Is it easy for you to reach all students? How could you rearrange desks so that your path is even easier to travel?
  

Student to student relationships
There is only one of you in the classroom at any given moment, but there are always many students. At this point in the year you can use that to your advantage and share a little more of the responsibility for teaching with the class. For example:

• Partner students of different abilities so some have teaching opportunities and others have an additional support.
• Create small working groups that focus on different projects (reading different books, taking math problems at different levels of complexity, research projects on different topics).
• Try the “ask 3, then me” rule where students can ask for help from 3 of their fellow students before they ask you. This gives you more time to work individually with students and fosters more self-reliance in the classroom.
  

Creative Techniques for Each Individual Child
You can’t possibly meet every student’s needs all the time, but there are some tiny individual things you might consider that end up helping everyone in the class. For example:

• Can you give your more physical students something to manipulate (like a squishy ball, or a piece of yarn) so they can burn off energy and pay attention?
  
• Do your students always have to sit in chairs? Some might be more comfortable on the floor (consider getting some cheap carpet squares, pillows, or yoga mats for this purpose), and some might even be more comfortable if they can stand. See if a local office supply store will donate clipboards to your class for those students who hate to be confined to a desk.
  
• What happens when you play music in class? Some students really do learn better when there is a little noise in the air. Some need total quiet. Think about what would happen if you allowed headphones in class when students are working independently. (In some schools these aren’t allowed and they pose problems when it comes to stealing, but for some students they can make the difference between acting out and getting down to the business of learning.)