Your Best Practices Journal - Virginia Tech



Your Best Practices Journal

For this course, you will use spreadsheet software (such as “Excel”) to produce a “Best Practices Journal” in which you will collect a variety of classroom management strategies, philosophies, ideas and personal reflections for your professional practice. Information from your Best Practices Journal is used in the lesson assignments for this course, and in your final project for the course. You will submit this journal for a grade in the 14th and final lesson of the course. After completing the course, you may find it convenient to continue adding ideas to your journal so that it becomes a resource to enhance your professional practice.

A link to an Excel template for the journal is provided from Screen 4 of Lesson 1 for your convenience; otherwise, you can use these instructions to develop your own journal. To take a tutorial on using Excel, go to the VT Software Skills Gateway ( ), enter your PID and password and click on the “ElementK” button, then search for “Excel” to take a self-paced tutorial. Detailed instructions for creating the journal in Excel are listed below.

To produce this journal using a different spreadsheet software package, create a worksheet (section) for each of the following parts of the journal:

• Practices – Containing classroom management practices or strategy ideas with descriptions, website links, reference or acquisition information.

• Research – Containing research facts with citations for future reference.

• Self-reflection – Containing your thoughts on areas you need to improve and ideas for how to improve your professional practice.

• Resources – Containing general web links or resources on classroom management strategies that you would like to remember, either from the “Where can I find out more?” section of the course, from your own personal research or resources suggested by your course peers.

• Philosophy Comparison – Containing classroom management philosophies from each of the course texts, articles and websites assigned for this course.

Creating A Best Practices Journal in MS Excel:

Your Excel workbook file will consist of five worksheets with the names, Practices, Research, Self-reflection, Resources, and Philosophy Comparison. To create the journal:

1. Open MS Excel and save the new workbook document with the filename bestpractices.xls (Go to File ( Save As and then type in the filename). You may wish to save it to your computer desktop for convenience, or, if you have created a folder for this course on your computer, you can save the journal within that folder.

2. Add worksheets so that you have a total of five worksheets displayed at the bottom of the document (to add a worksheet, click on the first worksheet tab at the bottom of the file and go to Insert ( Worksheet).

3. Double-click the worksheet tabs at the bottom of the file to rename them as: Practices, Research, Self-reflection, Resources, and Philosophy Comparison.

4. The column headings for each worksheet will be different.

5. For the Practices worksheet, create the following column headings:

o Lesson

o Topic/Subject Area

o Practice/Strategy

o Description

o Source (URL, book, article, etc)

o Examples/Implementation Notes

o Keywords (NOTE: these would be keywords you might want to search by to find entries related to several topics)

6. For the Research worksheet, create the following column headings:

o Lesson

o Topic/Subject Area

o Fact or quote

o Keywords

o URL/Other Notes

o Citation [When making entries in this column, you will include Author, date, article or book title, journal volume & issue & page numbers (if not a book), place of publication and publisher (if a book).]

Example:

Book: Marzano, R.J., Marzano, J.S., & Pickering, D.J. (2003). Classroom Management that Works. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

Article: Ingersoll, R.M., & Smith, T.M. (2003). The wrong solution to the teacher shortage. Educational Leadership, 60(8), 30-33.

7. For the Self-reflection worksheet, create the following column headings:

o Lesson

o Topic

o Reflective Notes (what & how to improve)

o Other

8. For the Resources worksheet, create the following column headings:

o Lesson

o Topic/Subject Area

o Type of Resource (book, article, method, website, etc.)

o Description

o Citation or URL

o Other Notes

9. For the Philosophy Comparison worksheet, create the following headings:

o Classroom Management Philosophy

o Topic Description

o Wong Text

o Fay & Funk Text

o Stone Text

o Morrish Text

o Marzano eBook Text

o Other Article, Text, or Website

o Other Notes

10. As you complete the learning activities for each lesson, you will be instructed to enter information on these worksheets. However, this journal is intended to be a resource for your future professional practice, so be sure to enter additional items that you want to remember and be able to use after completing this course.

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