Class-Yes

 I'm writing this post with my hat in hand, since it's been almost a MONTH since my last post! Things at school have been SO crazy lately. I'm wearing a lot of hats in my building (science department leader, PBIS internal coach, local union president, just to name a few...) and they've taken over my life lately! Not to mention my usual jobs of lesson plans for my 6th graders and running after my three crazy children.

But it's no excuse. So here I am! I'm REALLY going to try and be better, and post at least once a week for the rest of the school year! There, I wrote it, so I have to stick to it!

I wanted to give a quick should out to my amazing mentee, Naomi. We've been paired up throught the Whole Brain Teaching community, and I'm working with her to help her with WBT certification. She is amazing! Once I finally got my head wrapped around the fact that we are in different time zones (seriously, it's not that difficult, but I messed it up twice! lol). Naomi, you are doing great things - I am so blessed to be working with you!

This week, Naomi and I are taking a closer look at class-yes, so I thought I would repost about it. I've been using it all year, and definitely felt a wave of habituation enter my classroom after Christmas. In January I started enlisting certain students in each class period to be my "class callers". These were students that I had yell out "class" instead of me. I chose students that were leaders in the classroom, but the majority of these student had been using their leadership abilities for the wrong reasons. Enlisting their help with the class yes helped them to use their powers for good instead of evil.

I quickly noticed a change in some of my challenging students and fence sitters. This extra responsibility really helped to pull these students back on task. One of my very challenging 6th graders even said to me during one teach-ok sequence a few weeks ago, "Those kids over there aren't doing gestures, should I call out a 'class' so we can remind them about the rules?" It was SO great! I almost fainted!

It's so important to switch up how the class yes is used so that it's used correctly. If that "light switch" in the prefrontal cortex isn't instantly switched on during the class-yes, then it's not being done correctly.

If you haven't yet read it, here's the new WBT manual. Chapter 6 talks about class yes. On the WBT website or on YouTube you can watch video 514 on the class-yes as well. If you haven't yet used these great resources,  you should check them out today!