I lost my voice again this year. Couldn\u2019t speak at all. Croaks, whispers, whistles and frantic waving of hands in gestures not even remotely resembling sign language were all you could get from me. It happens about once every school year, and you think I\u2019d learn\u2026<\/p>\n
Yelling at students is a bad idea. It makes students feel bad, and it makes the teacher look bad.\u00a0 The yelling can also damage vocal chords, causing temporary laryngitis or long-term injury to the voice. No one wins with yelling in the classroom. Some might think that a good old-fashioned \u201cchewing out\u201d with raised voice might have benefits, like an episode of \u201cBeyond Scared Straight\u201d or something. But we are working with students here, not criminals.<\/p>\n
When I needed to take a couple of sick days in early December because of a case of laryngitis, some people thought I had been yelling at the students and wrecking my voice (along with my reputation as a relatively cheerful teacher). I don\u2019t yell at my students; in fact, it has been a rare occurrence in my 18 years of teaching to even raise my voice, unless I am that enthused about a topic in class. It\u2019s just that as a mute, I simply just couldn\u2019t teach the way I was used to teaching, and that\u2019s where you think I\u2019d learn.\u00a0<\/p>\n
You think I\u2019d learn some different ways of managing a classroom that wasn\u2019t so dependent on a teaching voice!<\/strong> <\/span>And I don\u2019t mean the methods I\u2019ve tried over the years: whispering instructions through a microphone hooked up to an amplifier, writing instructions on the whiteboard, typing instructions and then projecting them on the screen or simply having students participate in an all-day-extended-marathon-silent-reading session. No, I mean something different entirely.<\/p>\n A couple of quotes I read by Alfie Kohn may help show what I mean. In his, A Dozen Essential Guidelines for Educators<\/em>, (http:\/\/alfiekohn.org\/teaching\/dozenguidelines.html) he writes, \u201cIn outstanding classrooms, teachers do more listening than talking, and students do more talking than listening.\u00a0 Terrific teachers often have teeth marks on their tongues.\u201d<\/em>\u00a0 He goes on to write, \u201cChildren learn how to make good decisions by making decisions, not by following directions.\u201d\u00a0<\/em> That gets me thinking about the possibility of a classroom that still functions even when the teacher (that\u2019s me!) loses their voice.<\/p>\n I\u2019m early in developing some solid thinking about this possibility, but I feel that our school is onto something good. One of the characteristics of project-based learning is that students are given real, meaningful opportunities to make decisions after a lot of talking with teachers and other experts who listen and then provide guidance to help students revise and reflect. It is called Voice and Choice, and I think that if I work towards providing more chances for my students to develop their voice, then perhaps I can continue teaching even when I am without mine.\u00a0<\/p>\n Otherwise, I will keep losing my voice and taking days off\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I lost my voice again this year. Couldn\u2019t speak at all. Croaks, whispers, whistles and frantic waving of hands in gestures not even remotely resembling sign language were all you could get from me. It happens about once every school year, and you think I\u2019d learn\u2026 A bad idea.\u00a0 Yelling at students is a bad […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":142,"featured_media":1172,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wds_primary_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,33],"tags":[],"post_folder":[],"class_list":["post-1169","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-project-based-learning","category-elementary"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/abbotsfordchristian.com\/insideout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1169","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/abbotsfordchristian.com\/insideout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/abbotsfordchristian.com\/insideout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abbotsfordchristian.com\/insideout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/142"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abbotsfordchristian.com\/insideout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1169"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/abbotsfordchristian.com\/insideout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1169\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abbotsfordchristian.com\/insideout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1172"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/abbotsfordchristian.com\/insideout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1169"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abbotsfordchristian.com\/insideout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1169"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abbotsfordchristian.com\/insideout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1169"},{"taxonomy":"post_folder","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abbotsfordchristian.com\/insideout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/post_folder?post=1169"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Students do more talking.<\/h2>\n