Tag: gender

Combating Wokeness in Schools: A Guide for Teachers

Posted on by richardjamesrogers

An article by Richard James Rogers (Award-Winning Author of The Quick Guide to Classroom Management and The Power of Praise: Empowering Students Through Positive Feedback)

Illustrated by Sutthiya Lertyongphati

As teachers, it can be challenging to navigate the diverse groups of students in our classrooms while also upholding the values and principles we believe in. With the current trend of progressive ideologies being pushed in schools, it can feel overwhelming at times to combat ideas that are contrary to our own. However, there are strategies that teachers can implement to promote critical thinking, encourage diverse viewpoints, and foster an open-minded learning environment. Here are some ways to combat ‘woke’, or ‘progressive’, ideologies in schools:

#1: Promote Critical Thinking

One of the most effective ways to combat progressive ideologies in schools is to promote critical thinking. Encourage your students to think independently, question assumptions, and analyze facts. Give them the tools they need to evaluate arguments objectively, and let them come to their own conclusions. Encourage debate and discussion, and create an environment where students feel comfortable expressing their viewpoints without fear of judgment or ridicule.

Here are some good resources that can help you facilitate the critical thinking process in your lessons:

#2: Teach the Value of Diversity

Another way to combat progressive ideologies in schools is to teach the value of diversity. Encourage your students to appreciate different cultures, religions, and perspectives. Emphasize the importance of tolerance and respect, and create opportunities for your students to learn from one another. When students understand the value of diversity, it becomes harder for progressive ideologies that promote exclusivity to take hold.

#3: Encourage a Growth Mindset

Progressive ideologies often promote victimhood, entitlement, and a lack of personal responsibility. To combat these ideologies, teachers can encourage a growth mindset. Teach your students that they are capable of achieving anything they set their minds to, and help them develop a sense of personal responsibility for their own success. Encourage them to embrace challenges and see failures as opportunities for growth.

Here are some resources that can help you get your students to adopt a growth mindset:

#4: Help Students Develop Strong Values

To combat the influence of progressive ideologies in schools, it’s important for teachers to help students develop strong values. Encourage your students to think about what they believe in, and teach them the importance of virtues such as honesty, integrity, and respect. When students have a strong sense of values, they are less likely to be swayed by ideologies that conflict with their beliefs.

#5: Stay Informed

Finally, it’s important for teachers to stay informed about the progressive ideologies that are being promoted in schools. Attend workshops and seminars, read blogs and articles, and participate in discussions with colleagues. By staying informed, we can better equip ourselves to combat these ideologies and promote a learning environment that is free from political bias.

Conclusion

In conclusion, it’s possible to combat progressive ideologies in schools by promoting critical thinking, teaching the value of diversity, encouraging a growth mindset, helping students develop strong values, and staying informed. As a teacher, it’s our responsibility to create an environment that fosters intellectual curiosity, promotes debate and discussion, and encourages students to think independently. By doing so, we can help our students become well-informed, thoughtful, and responsible citizens who are able to make a positive impact on the world.

We welcome you to join the Richard James Rogers online community! Join us on Facebook and Twitter for regular updates, giveaways of Richard’s books, special offers, upcoming events and news. 

Challenges Faced by Teachers in Diverse Classrooms

Posted on by richardjamesrogers

What is the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the word ‘diversity’?

Most people will come up with a variety of answers, which may include race, gender, economic background or even neurodiversity. As educators, we must first be able to recognize diversity when we see it (which isn’t always obvious), and then work to both embrace it and manage the challenges posed by it. Classrooms are becoming more and more diverse as international travel and the ability to work overseas become easier, migration increases, and neurodiversity becomes easier to diagnose. The cost of living crisis has also hit schools hard, and we are seeing more children coming to class without the tech tools that some of their more affluent peers may have, or even basic essentials such as stationary.

Today, I’ve invited Kiara Miller from The Speakingnerd to share her ideas on how teachers can respond to the unique challanges present within diverse classrooms.

This blog post has been beautifully illustrated by Pop Sutthiya Lertyongphati

Accompanying podcast episode:

Diversity is a growing reality of the modern world. Whether it’s in the education sector, communities, the workplace, or political realm, the age of diversity is here to stay. Diversity generally refers to the state of varying dimensions.

Diversity commonly captures the differences among people (i.e. culturally, politically, socially, and religion-wise among other aspects). Diversity also takes into consideration age, social background, ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation, race, and belief differences among people. Like in any other area of life, diversity in education presents administrators with both opportunities and challenges.

Diversity in the classroom is an excellent avenue for teaching the immensity of the world we live in. When students are introduced to the vastness of the world we live in, they learn to embrace differences at the personal, regional, national, and global levels. They also attain better insights and skills.

Diversity in the classroom can exist due to varying intellectual abilities or learning disabilities, interpersonal or social skills, beliefs, and language differences. Diversity in educational institutions, including universities, isn’t a myth due to a range of factors like globalization, technological advancements, and scalability goals.

However, despite the fact that the world is now a global village, diversity presents a range of issues. Within classrooms, diversity cultivates several challenges for teachers, and these include the following:

#1: Complex disciplinary issues

Diversity in the classroom can cultivate a new set of disciplinary issues. Their complexity can also exacerbate due to equality and inclusion problems in the educational institution, or even the fixed-mindset nature of school leadership. Some teachers may find it difficult to manage learners of diverse backgrounds, gender, religion, and different languages.

It can significantly worsen behavioral issues and also lead to teacher burnout. In situations like this, teachers who lack emotional intelligence and professional agility may find it hard to prevent and control disciplinary issues.

Leaders, on the other hand, must check their leadership styles in order to exercise authority as per the extent of diversity. There are different leadership theories and understanding plus assessing their efficacy can help teachers manage diversity effectively. The most common disciplinary issues in a diverse classroom may be aggression, bullying, disrespect, and defiance.

In these situations, teachers need to exercise excellent overall behaviour management skills and communicate regularly with heads of phase, line managers, senior leadership, school counsellors and even parents to gather information and respond appropriately to what may turn out to be a range of evolving scenarios.

#2: Communication and language issues

With the fact that students may come from different backgrounds and nationalities, there may be a language barrier. It may be difficult for teachers to communicate with students from other regions or nations. With such communication inefficiencies, it becomes difficult for students to understand the concepts in the classroom.

It will also require a teacher to leverage creative teaching strategies that can help learners comprehend material better. On the other hand, foreign students may find it hard to communicate their needs or attain the help they need. This can trigger feelings of loneliness and depression in students.

#3: Observance of holidays

Diversity in a classroom requires a proper approach to inclusion. Failure can trigger feelings of injustice and poor conduct among students. This means that the institution must ensure they celebrate cultural and belief differences.  For example, it must recognize official public holidays like Christmas, Independence Day and others. This helps to prevent student outrage.   

#4: Teamwork and collaboration difficulties

Diversity in the classroom also impacts teamwork and collaboration. Differences among students can either help them learn how to collaborate or they can prevent them from working together. This can present complications in teaching such students as they may not be willing to interact with others in order to attain new insights. In this case, students become highly teacher dependent. In the long run, it increases pressure on the teacher’s side.

#5: Individual differences

Diversity in the classroom can increase the likelihood of individual differences. Students may fail to recognize and respect each other due to their race, culture, or ethnic orientation. Such differences can affect communication and collaboration in a classroom. It may also prevent students from conducting group assignments or collaborating during extra co-curricular activities. This can hinder progress and academic achievement.

Managing Diversity in the Classroom

Diverse classrooms require a unique art of classroom management whether at K-12, college, or vocational level. Diversity challenges are surely predicted to increase and their management may prove difficult in case educators aren’t professionally trained in this area. A lack of professional experience in managing diverse classroom environments can increase behavioral issues and also affect students’ academic performance.  

Diversity management in classrooms requires a range of guidelines to be set and followed. First and foremost, the educational institution must be open to equality and inclusion. Equality and inclusion in educational institutes are fundamental for creating a positive learning environment. 

Generally, an environment that can help students learn, share ideas, collaborate and cultivate quality networks is the goal. Additionally, there should be programs to help students learn the common language to improve communication. That should be emphasized before joining an educational institution or within the first few months of commencement.

Besides that, there should be no partiality or favoritism. School rules and policies must apply to all students to ensure respect for all cultures and individuals. With this, chances of disciplinary issues will be reduced and teachers will be able to manage classrooms better.

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Good Teachers Are Also Good Students

Posted on by richardjamesrogers

An article by Richard James Rogers (Author of The Quick Guide to Classroom Management)

Accompanying video:

I have always loved mathematics, but I’ve not always been ‘good’ at maths. I got a grade A for GCSE Mathematics when I was 16 years old (a grade I worked really, really hard for) but I struggled with mathematics at ‘AS’ and ‘A’ – Level (the UK’s pre-university qualifications). 

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“An AMAZING Book!”

It just so happened that mathematics wasn’t a subject I needed as a prerequisite for my university course anyway. So, in a sense, I committed the cardinal sin of thinking that it ‘didn’t matter’. I was planning to study molecular biology at university, and my admissions tutors were mainly interested in my biology and chemistry grades.

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I achieved my goal of going to uni and doing my PGCE in order to become a fully qualified Science teacher in 2006. I was happy for several years, but my failure to complete my mathematics education at school kept gnawing at me like an annoying itch. I needed to do something about it. 

I decided to complete the Certificate in Mathematics course with the Open University in 2009, after three years of being a full-time science teacher. This course covered everything in my ‘A’-Level syllabus with some extra, university-level topics thrown in. It was challenging and offered me just what I needed: closure. As a distance-learning course, it also offered me the chance to study and work as a teacher at the same time. 

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As I started studying the course and handing in assignments (which had to be snail mailed to the UK  – I was living in Thailand at the time), I began to realise how much I had become disconnected from the student experience as a teacher. It had been around three years since I had ever studied anything seriously, and this mathematics course was teaching me how difficult it was to:

  • Meet deadlines
  • Seek help when in doubt
  • Have the self-discipline needed to study at a regular time-slot each day

These skills were, of course, things I had to do whilst completing my degree course and schooling earlier in life, but it had been a few years since I had been immersed in serious study like this. I was slowly losing empathy for my students: that was until this course gave me a wake-up call. 

Another big thing I took from this experience was just how stressful it can be to prepare for a difficult exam (and to complete it). I had to fly to the UK to take the end of course mathematics exam (a three hour beast), and along with the intense revision that came in the few days running up to the exam I had the misfortune of not sleeping so well the night before the big day. And then, once sat down and actually completing the paper, three hours felt like it went by in an instant.

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I guess I’m trying to make a number of points in this trip down Memory Lane – namely that by immersing ourselves in the ‘student experience’ we can, as teachers:

  • Regain, or enhance, our true understanding of just how many hurdles await our students on their race to the exam finish-line.
  • Learn new skills and concepts that can be applied to our roles as classroom managers, leaders and ‘purveyors’ of specialist knowledge.
  • Build self-discipline, and pass on the lessons learned to our students in our roles as mentors, homeroom teachers, form tutors and coaches.

One final point to stress is that, whilst we can study almost any subject we want via online platforms like EdX and Coursera these days, it’s also important that we take the time to thoroughly reflect on a regular basis. Keeping a journal of things we’ve done well, and things we messed up, can be a great way to have a written record to read over when we want to celebrate successes and remind ourselves of lessons we have learned on our journeys as educators. This video I made a few years ago goes into this in more detail:

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We welcome you to join the Richard James Rogers online community! Join us on Facebook and Twitter for regular updates, giveaways of Richard’s books, special offers, upcoming events and news. 

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Online Learning: A Risk-Assessment List for Teachers

Posted on by richardjamesrogers

An article by Richard James Rogers (Author of The Quick Guide to Classroom Management, The Power of Praise: Empowering Students Through Positive Feedback and 100 Awesome Online Learning Apps)

Accompanying video:

Teaching online can be a very productive and worthwhile experience for both the teachers and students involved. However, at this time of widespread school closures due to COVID19, many teachers have had to quickly adapt their skills to teaching online without full knowledge of the heightened risks involved. 

This blog post aims to educate teachers everywhere about the things we can do to protect ourselves when teaching online. I believe that this list is so important that I’ve included it in my upcoming book for teachers: 100 Awesome Online Learning Apps (Release date: 8th April 2020 on Amazon globally). 

100 Awesome Final Cover
Available on Amazon from 8th April 2020 onwards

‘The List’: What do we need to be aware of? 

  1. Anything we say or do online can be recorded, stored, edited and forwarded without our knowledge. Google Hangouts Meets, for example, can be set to autonomously record your meetings and auto-generate a transcript of what was spoken and by whom. We must keep every interaction with our students professional and clean. The same high standards of personal conduct that are expected of us in the classroom apply even more when we are teaching online.
  2. Know when your camera and microphone are switched on. When you start doing video conferencing for the first time, you might inadvertently set your students on a task after a live stream video briefing and then proceed to make a coffee; yawn and stretch in front of the camera; or even chat casually about how messed-up life is with your spouse who’s also working from home. Be careful. This is a very easy trap to fall into (I’ve come close to doing this myself on several occasions!). Make sure your camera AND MICROPHONE are switched off when you no longer need to engage with your students in real-time. In addition, be equally aware of video conferencing apps that can auto-generate captions. If you switch your camera off, but fail to switch off your microphone, then that next YouTube video that contains expletives and blares out of your mobile phone will not only be audible to your students, but captions may even appear on their screens!
  3. Parents will watch you teach, so be prepared for that. In my experience, many students like to switch off their cameras towards the beginning of a lesson and, unbeknownst to you, a parent could be watching. This places us, as teachers, under even greater pressure to deliver high-quality lessons than when we are snug and comfortable in our respective classrooms. Be professional and keep standards high. If we aim to be clear, caring and professional, then our students and their parents will respect and appreciate our efforts all the more for it.
  4. Be aware of chat features that are built into apps. These can contain casual emojis that one can choose to use; but we must be careful not to chat casually with any student (even by adding emojis to our messages). Keep all communication conducted through integrated chat as professional as you would in the classroom. I expand on this advice in a separate blog post (How Should Teachers Behave on Social Media?). This section is well-worth a read if you want to see some real examples of teachers who lost everything because of their lack of alertness to this point!
  5. If you are not sure about an app’s appropriateness for use, then check with your school’s Senior Leadership Team or your line manager. Some schools like to keep all their prescribed online learning apps under the control of their domain (e.g. schools that use Google Classroom and Gmail may prefer to use Google Hangouts Meets as their video conferencing system, as opposed to Zoom). A great story that illustrates this point is a slight blunder that a former colleague of mine made several years ago. Knowing that Flipgrid was a popular video-exchange system used by many American schools, she recommended it to her colleagues in an upcoming collaborative teacher-training session. However, the school’s head of ICT followed up on that training session by e-mailing all the secondary teachers to tell them not to use Flipgrid – because it wasn’t a system under direct control of the school.
  6. Check student well-being on a regular basis. When students work from home they can feel lonely, extremely bored and anxious. At this very moment, for example, as I write this prose; the novel coronavirus pandemic has snared much of the world’s population with fear and confusion. This fear and confusion is certainly being felt to varying degrees by many of the students I currently teach. Check that your students are having regular breaks and are sticking to a routine. E-mail parents of the students you are responsible for to find out how things are going. Recommend any tips you can for working from home productively and maintaining a personal sense of happiness and wellness. Share any tips that your school counselor or Student Welfare Officer sends out. When interacting on a video-call, check how your students look and feel. Are they dressed properly? Are they tired or stressed-out? Are there any student-wellbeing issues that come to your attention? Is the technology working correctly for your students?
  7. Effective online teaching requires effective technology. This can be a challenge when using old hardware or software (or both) and when internet connections are slow. We must adapt: no matter what it takes. Set work via e-mail if video conferencing is not an option. Experiment with using the apps listed in my book (100 Awesome Online Learning Apps) on your phone if you don’t have a tablet or notebook/laptop. Figure out how your device’s integrated microphone works if you don’t have a headset. Go through the apps in this book that seem appealing and test the efficiency of each when setting tasks through the technology that’s available to you. Check-up on your students regularly – do they have the technology required to access and complete the tasks you are setting?

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We welcome you to join the Richard James Rogers online community! Join us on Facebook and Twitter for regular updates, giveaways of Richard’s books, special offers, upcoming events and news. 

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Exciting New Online Course for Teachers!

Posted on by richardjamesrogers

UKEd-Acad

The Fundamentals of Classroom Management: An online course designed by Richard James Rogers in Partnership with UKEd Academy 

I’m very excited to announce that I’ve been busy building an online course that covers all of the fundamental concepts in my widely acclaimed debut book: The Quick Guide to Classroom Management, in partnership with my good friends at UKEd Academy. Details are given below:

Course link: https://uked.academy/product/cmf/

Price: £30.00 (which includes a copy of my book) or £20.00 if you’ve already got a copy of my book (you’ll have to enter a discount code found within the book)

Launch date: October 21st 2019 (but you can start the course at anytime)

End of course certificate? – Yes, endorsed by UKEd Academy and Richard James Rogers 

Course structure: Videos, quizzes, study notes, reflections and activities

Course schedule: Flexible (work at your own pace)

After successful completion of this course you’ll earn a certificate that will look very impressive on your C.V. and you will gain lots of knowledge, new techniques, tools and skills.  

I look forward to mentoring and guiding you through the key concepts that make an excellent teacher, well, excellent!

If you have any questions at all about this exciting course, then please e-mail me at info@richardjamesrogers.com

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