My First Power Teaching Conference

I've drunk the Kool-Aid.

Today I attended a short (3 hour) Power Teaching conference at Crafton Hills College in Yucaipa, CA with four of my colleagues. I'm a third-grade teacher at a small charter school in San Bernardino, CA. I haven't had a lot of difficulty with my class this year (certainly not compared to last year), but I was inspired by what I saw today. I'm going to start using some Power Teaching strategies and games in my class next week, and am really excited about it.

If you haven't heard of it, Power Teaching consists of a suite of classroom management strategies and educational games designed to create fast-paced, engaging, and of course educational classroom environments for students of any age. What I am so impressed with is the robustness of the approach. It starts with a basic management plan that is easy to wrap your head around, and then adds more and more "levels" as time progresses and as challenging students present themselves.

If you want to learn more about the specifics, the website gives just about anything you would ever want to know about Power Teaching. The folks that run the program don't consider themselves a business, and don't charge anything for use of the website or for attending the trainings, so it's not just like a taste; everything is there.

At any rate, as I said I've swallowed the Kool-Aid and intend to implement a lot of these strategies next week. I thought it might be a good idea to blog about it. There are case studies and testimonials available, but I didn't see any accounts of teachers recording their experience as they go, so I thought this might help others, in addition to giving me an outlet to reflect.

My first step is going to be to make a plan for when to implement which pieces, and what order and how often I will explain them to my students. I'll be working on that tomorrow, so hopefully that will be a post up then.

Should any experienced Power Teachers stumble upon this blog, I would welcome any suggestions you have; likewise any teachers thinking about Power Teaching themselves can ask me any questions about how things work out for me that I don't answer in my entries. Please comment! That is the blogger's lifeblood.