Ryan+Rish

Ryan Rish

[Kaitlin, you may get more of a response if you post this in the discussion area. I have found that talking to the students about the ground rules for interacting in class is a necessary first step. In this conversation, you can establish some type of cue to let students know that you need them to be silent. Make sure you use this cue purposefully and never punitively. You may also want to work in opportunities for students to interact with one another, such as explaining the directions of a task to one another. If they are a particularly social group, you can leverage their social interactions for your purposes. Hope that helps. Feel free to post all of this in the discussion area of this page. -RR]
 * Kaitlin Watkins **
 * 1) ====I am in a school that is a lower socioeconomic status school. It is a title one school and many of the students that I am working with are lower level students. I have been working in three different eighth grade classes. All three are co-taught classes. Two of the classes have a large chuck of special education students and the other class has a large number of ESOL students. I am having a problem with my students talking and chatting while I am trying to teach. I have to constantly redirect the students. I have tried to be stern and strict, but it only works for a limited time period. Then, they are back to chatting during my lesson. I will give the students instructions and ask if there are any questions. There are no hands. Within five minutes, there will be 6 or 7 different student hands in the air. The students then proceed to ask me information that I just explained. I don't know what is going on with these students. I don't know how to stop the talking or what actions could be taken.====
 * 2) ====For example, I gave the students a quiz on compound-complex sentences. It was made up of six different questions that they had to identify. The quiz only had three types of sentences, compound, complex, and compound-complex. There were no simple sentences. I told my students that before they took the test because the pre-quiz had simple sentences on it. I said it two different times during my instructions. When I got the quizzes back, I found out that I had three students who identified simple sentences on my quiz. This illustrated the fact that the students were not listening to me or my instructions. I will attach a student handout when I can figure out how to scan it to my computer. However, attached to this is a copy of the quiz. [[file:Sentence Types Quiz.docx]]====
 * 3) ====What are strategies that you have seen displayed by your CT that eliminates the talking? Do you have any ideas as to how I can stop the chatting during my lessons? What has been working in during your teaching to eliminate talking? Has anyone else had a similar issue like the one I am experiencing?====