Katy Ridnouer

Managing Your Classroom with Heart

Katy Ridnouer

Teaching is as much about students as it is about curriculum, and no one understands this better than middle and high school teachers. But even the most dedicated teacher can sometimes feel defeated by the challenge of reaching distracted, disconnected, and defiant adolescents. Drawing on her own experience as a high school teacher, Katy Ridnouer shares an approach to classroom management that will help you spend less time «dealing with» your adolescent learners and more time inspiring them to be their best selves in school and beyond. Managing with heart means accepting teenage students as they are and recognizing what they need: a connection with the curriculum; a sense of order; and most essentially, a sense that someone cares. In this book, you'll find practical strategies for * Balancing care and discipline* Interacting with students and their parents* Establishing classroom routines that keep students on task* Communicating expectations and ensuring accountability* Handling common challenges, from classroom noise and personality conflicts to inappropriate clothing and disrespectful language* Building trust and helping students feel emotionally and intellectually safe. Vivid, real-life examples and questions for reflection make this a perfect choice for faculty reading groups and any middle or high school teacher looking to create a positive learning community, enhance students' confidence and interpersonal skills, and rediscover the reward of being a teacher.

Everyday Engagement

Katy Ridnouer

In this book, author and teacher Katy Ridnouer focuses on the potentially overwhelming, sometimes puzzling, often delicate work of engaging both students and parents in the pursuit of learning and achievement. Structured around the questions teachers ask themselves about engagement goals and challenges, Everyday Engagement offers specific strategies to try—in your classroom, with your students, and with their parents—that will help you* Connect with students and parents as individuals. * Communicate invitations to engagement (and regroup and respond if your initial invitations are rejected). * Provide appropriate, ongoing support and encouragement that will keep students in class, behavior in check, and learning on track. * Anticipate and handle setbacks and complications in teacher-student and teacher-parent relationships. * Tap outside resources to extend learning beyond the walls of the classroom. Ridnouer believes that every teacher has the power to make students and parents partners in learning. When a teacher embeds pro-engagement action and attitudes into everyday practice, the question is not if students and parents will be engaged in classroom learning, but how they will choose to engage and how far that engagement will take them.