Winter is in full swing now with this morning's temperture being 1 degree (celsius) at 8.30am. You may be noticing that many full time teachers have been taking time off due to illness. All the coughing going on for them and you can have a serious impact on your voice!
A couple of weeks ago, I didn't really have a voice. This is only the second time in my eight years teaching that I have lost my voice (the first time being in my first 9 months in the profession). During this week I continued to teach but looked at different strategies that I had seen other teachers use or talked about. This was interesting, my main behaviour techniques would not work and I felt a little lost.
Now don't get me wrong, I don't yell. I have come a long way in my time teaching and I found out early on that yelling doesn't work. I try to keep my voice in the middle of the volume range and sometimes when I need the classes attention, I would raise my voice for one word. This would grab their attention allowing me to drop the volume and talk to the class normally.
I had a conversation a couple of years ago with a group of career full time teachers at lunch time. In between sandwiches, fruit and coffee, we talked about which engagement techniques they had seen work in classrooms. Quiet teachers! I nearly feel off my chair.
What? How could this be?
What? How could this be?
I continued to listen carefully to the conversation and what unfolded in front of me was a technique that challenged my way of teaching. The conversation turned from different techniques to why this technique in particular works.
Take a class of students sitting on the floor listening to a story. The lower your voice is the more the students need to lean in and pay attention. The leaning forward reaction supports the engagement as students don't have as many distractions between themselves and the teacher. As long as the students were not sitting on top of each others laps, I found this technique intreged me.
The second was the tone and volume of the teachers voice. The lower it got, the more the students needed to work to listen. This, I thought, could work both ways. The quietier the teacher got the more students you would have fooling around or losing interest so I was a little skeptical. In the end I gave it a try and I found that it works wonders. I found I wanted to talk quietier for the benefit of the engagement with the students. Students were paying more attention to what I was saying and understanding instructions better.
The other technique I used, and I have always tried to use in my teaching, is some sign language. I teach my students specific signs that I am able to use to ask questions or identify silly behavours and emotions. These signs don't need any voice and the students help others that struggle to remember the signs.
I also use small messages on the whiteboard. For the 2/3 class that I had during this week, I made sure the words were age appropriate and the sentences were simple, sometimes including a picture or drawing. It turned my husky voice into an engaging and thoughtful activity that the students had to participate in to make work.
I found that not having a fully functional voice made me look at different teaching techniques and strategies that I wouldn't normally look at. As CRTs we have many different things stopping us from exploring new techniques due to the nature of our work. I encourage you to try different things and reflect on how these techniques change your classroom, how students react and how that effects their behavour and engagement.
Below is a video on how to take care of your voice aimed at teachers.
Sorry, the uploader has disabled embedding!
As well as some articles
Regards,
Mel
No comments:
Post a Comment