Common wisdom has it that 95 percent of the problems in a classroom are caused by 5 percent of the students and occur in the first five and last five minutes of the period.
It's what's known as Rule 555, said Dr. Jwanza Kunjufu, leading a CTA Summer Institute session on issues in low-performing schools that can affect the success of all students. The author of 22 books including Solutions for Black America and State of Emergency: We Must Save African American Males, Kunjufu helped participants analyze their classroom management skills and question their assumptions about which students they expect to excel.
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Dr. Jwanza Kunjufu encourages Summer Institute participants like Joni Clark of Fremont, Jan Klinger of Sacramento and Joyce Aguilar of Fremont to analyze their presumptions about student ability.
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Teachers with good classroom management skills know it pays to come to class prepared, have assignments on the board ahead of time and otherwise communicate to students that they mean business in the first few minutes of class, he said. They also anticipate that students who finish their work early and have nothing interesting to do might cause a disruption during the last few minutes. If all else fails, good classroom managers figure out who the leaders of the unruly few are and co-opt them.
Kunjufu's presentation kicked off an intensive five-day series of workshops in the Instruction and Professional Development (IPD) Strand, one of three parallel strands that included Communications, and Negotiations and Finance. Approximately 600 CTA members spent the week at UCLA picking up new skills and honing old ones. Some sessions were designed to help them serve their students better, and others to help them be more effective leaders.
Negotiations and Finance participants had a choice of eight tracks, ranging from how to analyze district budgets to how to help students living in poverty reach their potential.
Communications Strand participants had a choice of three tracks, giving them the skills to communicate with members and the community through creating newsletters and websites, working with the news media, and developing public speaking skills.
It's worthwhile to focus on a single interest for the week, said Ron Woods, a member of the Monterey Teachers Association. "There's a lot to learn, and it's really going to be valuable."