 Hi, this is Jennifer Gonzalez back again for Cult of Pedagogy and we are now going to talk about using a notebook for classroom management and this is part two, the more advanced way of doing this. In part one I described how you could use it as just an emergency flotation device to just calm everything down in your classroom. You can actually use it much more thoughtfully though. You could use a simple spiral notebook like this or I found a three-ring binder where each student would actually have their name printed at the top and you may actually even get more, it may mean more to them if that student actually has to write their own name at the top of each page and you can sort of alphabetize these are due by class period or whatever but basically one page per student okay and you can talk to your students about this at the beginning of the year or at the beginning of when you decide to start doing this because my feeling about things not going well in a classroom is that you don't have to wait for a new school year to turn things around and make things start to go better so this could be February and you could decide all right starting today we're going to try something different. So what you can say to your students in the day that you start this is you've got a fresh start right now you have a blank sheet with your name on it what I am going to write on these pages are my observations of the things that you do in class I will be writing down positive things that I see you doing and I will be writing down negative things if those things happen happen to happen and so you don't necessarily have to do anything else with this notebook or with this information and the students might say well what are you going to do with that are you going to show it to our parents are you going to show it to the principal um you don't necessarily have to promise anything or say that you won't just say I don't know what I'll do with the information but what goes on these pages is your character and so your behavior and your decisions those things are what tell other people about who you are as a person and so I will just be recording for example if you come in a few minutes late to class or even a few seconds I might record that you know Tasha came in 30 seconds late to class not necessarily a positive or a negative but if three days later Tasha comes in late 30 seconds again three days later Tasha comes in late one minute again and I start dating them what I start to see then is a pattern of behavior and that is you that's not necessarily a mistake one time and that's a pattern of choices that you're making and you can choose to keep these private or you can choose to share them with your students as you write them the main rule that I would say for sure is that you don't share one student's page with another student so you need to keep this notebook pretty secure keep it in your bag on your body or in a locked cabinet or something like that but it's interesting that for the most part there really is no other consequence for their behavior besides going in this book but um I've found that students really respond to this that they they don't want you to write down something bad about them and um it also will provide you a really good system of documentation in the event that you end up with a child who is a chronic discipline problem and you need some sort of documentation of a pattern of behavior you would have that um additionally if you have to write a student a letter of recommendation at the end of the year and you are looking for some examples of things that they've done again you'd have a record I would say the biggest challenge with keeping this kind of a system would be to be consistent with it and it would take some energy so the simpler that you can keep it the better if you can come up with a coding system like putting a tea for tardy um then you may be more likely to do it more quickly but um I found that that this keeps the power of classroom management in your hands as opposed to passing it off to someone else and I actually I even used a similar system to this when I was working with college students because um I worked with students who were not yet admitted to a program where they were going to become teachers and I would have to at the end of the semester recommend whether or not I felt they were a good fit for the program and I had to recommend them on a lot of different parameters so sometimes it was hard to remember you know is this person always on time for things or you know how are their communication skills how's their relationship with their you know colleagues and so having uh some sort of a record of of their patterns over the semester it was helpful I had something to refer to if I wasn't sure about a person I could check back and see what I had written about them so anyway it's real real handy and I thought I would pass that along and see if it can help you too thank you have a great day