MORE best practices :)

Governance:
- Making a personal connection with each student: one teacher stood at the door at the beginning of each class and greeted each student by name!
- Acknowledging positive actions, rather than pointing out the negative misbehavior. For example, acknowledging the class for their attentive listening throughout peer presentations

Resources/material:
- bringing concepts to life through presenting small video or audio clips, never more than 5-10 minutes or there is a good chance students will lose focus and the ability to link the video to the lecture topic.
- Work books: handing out a workbook at the beginning of each unit (vocab, questions about concepts and material covered in the class text book). This gives students a great study guide and if a lecture or activity ends earlier than planned, you can have students pull out their work books for the last bit of class
- Structured notes- for example putting an outline on the board of the main points or topics that will be covered in class and students can fill in the details as you lecture

Activity/Teaching Strategies:
- doing in class simulations (i.e. the fur trade or UN panel discussion) – allows students to fully understand a topic through active participation
- Mosaic: each student got a theme (ex. Cree people in WWI, the Home front) and a colour scheme and they had to visually represent their topic on the piece of the mosaic that the teacher gave them.
Questions/Problems:
- Our biggest concern was teachers who were not passionate about their subject area. When they are not motivated to teach, this rubs off on the students and they lose all motivation to learn that subject material