The first few days of school, I have tried to incorporate some behavioral expectations into what we were accomplishing with the content in Living Environment.  I’m really trying to be more organized too (for my sake and the special education teachers I work with sake’s too).  I feel like I have so many students with different needs:  gifted students in the same class with very high needs special education students, that I wanted to make sure our classroom was really functioning while we were starting to learn some content. 

Some things that worked well this past week while focusing on classroom climate:  Well, the first day of school I had the students write me letters.  One of the things I asked them to talk about in their letters was three rules that we should have to help make our classroom run smoothly.  The next day I read some exerpts from the letters dealing with rules I agreed with.  Then, I gave the students a chart that had our school wide rules on it Be Productive, Be Responsible, Be Respectful and asked them to come up with some specific examples of how we could show those things in Living Environment class (the sheet had some models on it already too).  They did this in random groups.  They had a chance to “peer review” another groups work.  Then, a few days later, I typed up their responses and we posted them on the wall.  The process seemed to go ok; I guess we’ll see if they uphold those expectations they set for themselves as the year goes on. 

As far as content goes, I gave my students a “quiz” which seemed to go well.  We had done a lab and a differentiated activity based around life processes.  I gave them a multiple choice Regents question “quiz” (after they had studied in a jigsaw group).  After the quiz was over, I picked up one student’s papers to be the answer key for the quiz and started reading off the answers and the students started arguing over the answers.  Then, I picked up another students paper and read 3 more questions as the answer key.  By the time I had gotten to the third set of questions, I had a student volunteer his paper as the answer key and students were still arguing over the answers.  It was great!  They argued for the rest of the period and I just kept track on the overhead which questions we had to go back to.  The questions we had to go back to, students who felt strongly one way or the other argued their points.  The next day we went back and consulted again with each other and with me to verify our answers.  I feel like the students learned that they hold the answers too, not just me.