Fred Jones Tools for Teaching: Discipline, Instruction, Motivation
In Tools for Teaching, Dr. Jones describes the skills by which exceptional teachers make the classroom a place of success and enjoyment for both themselves and their students. Tools for Teaching integrates the management of discipline, instruction and motivation into a system that allows you to reduce the stress of teaching by preventing most management headaches. Dr. Jones helps you reduce student disruptions, backtalk, helpless handraising and dawdling while helpi… More >>
Fred Jones Tools for Teaching: Discipline, Instruction, Motivation
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The book took a while to reach me from Amazon but the book is very well written.
Rating: 4 / 5
Good information for first year teachers, but if you have taught for a while it is definitely just a review of everything that you already have experienced and know.
Rating: 3 / 5
I would recommend this book for new teachers of any grade level. It gives awesome strategies to try to successfully manage a classroom in a positive way. Even after reading it once, it is written in a way that it can be a resource to return to time and again. It gives logical, step-by-step descriptions of what managing a classroom looks like and what to do in difficult situations.
Rating: 5 / 5
“The best disciplined child is a self disciplined child.” This quote comes from the staff manual in my current placement as a student teacher. The author makes the point that discipline and order need to be established in the classroom before we can do what we want and that is teach. How do we move the discipline away from being teacher directed and extrinsic to intrinsically motivating the student to become self-disciplined? Using poker as an analogy, the author answers that very question.
I bought this book on a friend’s recommendation. I will use it in conjunction with Minute Discipline and Harry Wong’s book about the First Days of School when I have my own classroom.
Rating: 5 / 5
This book covers a lot of the things that ought to be covered in teaching courses, but all too often are not. For the most part, the recommendations are consistent with established learning principles. The focus seems to be on classroom management (discipline & motivation, in Jones’ terms) rather than instruction. Classroom management is the major headache for new teachers, so there’s a good basis for that bias. But we’re not in the classroom solely to keep order — that’s baby sitting; we’re there to teach, and new teachers need to know how to do that as well.
The discussion of incentives is very good, but while incentives are important, I think B. F. Skinner’s comment is worth remembering: Skinner said that we have to get the student to the point where he does things because of the satisfaction gained from doing them because the teacher is not going to follow the student around forever handing out smily faces. (I’m paraphrasing Skinner, but that’s the idea. See his The Technology of Teaching for the exact quote.) I think part of the solution is to see to it that the student’s efforts are successful most of the time. (As I say in my own book, success is the great motivator.)
One thing in Jones’ book that I think is not helpful is the recommendation for warnings and a reliance on punishment. Punishment may be necessary from time to time, but I fear that teachers will jump to this “quick fix” and find themselves in a fix. If you give multiple warnings, as Jones recommends, you are telling the student that multiple disruptions are OK. Once the student learns that there are going to be 4 warnings, for example, he knows he get to do three bad things without any real consequence. Some of the recommended punishments are also of doubtful value. Writing a letter home to the parent is likely to get results only if the parent cares enough to take action. The disruptive students are typically the ones whose parents could care less. One teacher called a parent and said, “Joe is not doing his homework. Can you tell me why?” The parent replied, “Beats me. You’re the teacher. You figure it out.” This parent was not somebody from the slums, she was a graduate of an ivy league school. I think we have to get to where the teacher and the student are on the same side, and problems that arise in the classroom stay in the classroom unless there is a health or safety issue.
So, while most of this information is very sound, I would be cautious about adopting the recommendations on punishment. That’s the caveat.
Rating: 4 / 5