Teaching Outside the Box: How to Grab Your Students By Their Brains

Teaching Outside the Box: How to Grab Your Students By Their Brains | LouAnne Johnson | A gem for teachers old and new!

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Teaching Outside t...

	Teaching Outside the Box: How to Grab Your Students By Their Brains LouAnne Johnson Jossey-Bass, 2005 - 352 pages average customer review:based on 24 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Excellent, pragmatic approaches for building a classroom

I've already used some of the methods I found in Ms. Johnson's book, and share much of her general philosophy of working with kids from difficult backgrounds. Even after 10 years of being fairly successful at teaching "at-risk" kids, I found that seeing the logic and reasoning of her approach on the page clued me in to many of the principles behind a successful classroom which I already used, but never saw fully articulated on the page. It sounds a bit bizarre, but I now have a better understanding of the "hows and whys" of what I do from reading her work. These are the tips that you didn't get in college regarding working with challenging older kids; it's both an intellectual and visceral approach to teaching that will help you avoid many confrontations with kids before they ever happen, and give you the understanding of how to handle the battles you can't avoid. Holding kids to high standards of behavior sends the message to your students that you believe that they are capable great things, but it can take years to build the skills a teacher needs to get to that point. This book is the blueprint for building a successful classroom.

There is also a lot here about understanding kids that have to return everyday to very difficult lives at home. Many teachers of kids with tough home lives fail because they never really understood the lives of the young people they were dealing with. Understanding the reasoning and emotions behind unreasonable classroom behavior is the key to minimizing it and surviving as a teacher, and this book reminds us that these behaviors have roots in what these kids have to go through everyday. There is much here to remind you of the positive and long-lasting effects a caring teacher can have, and that the balance of positive reinforcement with a tough determination for high standards is key to getting the best out of our kids.

I've always been struck by the fact that a greater community hasn't been built by the teachers that work with challenging students, but maybe that comes from the fact that we're cut from a different cloth. The unfortunate aspect of this lack of community is that many of us build our approaches from scrap, taking the best of what we see in our coworkers, and trying methods that we come up with on the fly. There's just so little accumulated knowledge on our curious line of work passed down from one generation of experienced teacher to the next. Also, there are many aspects of working with tough kids that will never make it into the education school textbooks, a manifestation of the great and ridiculous divide between educational research and classroom practice (don't even let me get started on that topic). The helpfulness of educational academia's theories can be said to be directly correlated to the years they've spent teaching in difficult circumstances. You may be able to quantify the number of kids that respond to a reading program that your district will never have the money to buy (and you will never have time to teach), but they will never fully comprehend the necessity of learning to deliver a warm and sincere compliment, or chillingly-cold stare, at just the right moment. This book delivers the goods to those that wish to help the kids that most people have given up on, to work for little more than the knowledge that they did something that needed and deserved to be done.

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A gem for teachers old and new!

This book is a must for beginning teachers and for pros who need new ideas. It combines street smart practicality with the creative thinking we need to reach kids today. I plan to use it immediately in my university level teacher training courses and recommend it highly to the teachers I work with in the field. We do need to teach outside the box to make education meaningful for today's adolescents. LouAnne Johnson understands that and her book will make it possible for more teachers to get there.

Review of Teaching Outside the Box

The book arrived in excellent condition very promptly. I would use this person again.

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New teacher and soon to be teachers

This book was recommended by a professor in one of my classes for new teachers because she felt it had lots of common sense information and advise new teachers need to be successful. The author also wrote Dangerous Minds and seems to have a realistic take on teaching. I like her distiction between three basic flavors teachers come in - super, excellent and good. Being a super teacher may not be the best for all because throwing everything you have into each and everyday all day and into the night can lead to burnout. Johnson suggests that maybe aiming for excellent or good might provide a better balance to sustain a teacher's moral, motivation and job satisfaction because they are not giving everything up for the job; they have something left for themselves and their families. Strategies is a big word in education and this book is full of what I felt were useful ideas for new and experienced teachers covering everything from how to have a successful first day of school to effective classroom environments and planning ideas. I have not read it cover to cover, but jumped from chapter to chapter that interested me, but seems like a good book to have with me on my first day and beyond.

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reviews: 1, 2, 3, 4, page 5

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