Chapter 4: Creating a Culture of Success

I found these chapters to be helpful in describing how to keep your students interested in your class and how to make them want to come to school and learn. This chapter is really devoted to having faith in your students and believing that they can do the work. I really liked the section on not giving support for only final drafts. It makes it easier for the student if they are being coached the entire time and if they get continuous feedback. This way if the student is doing something wrong then they do not practice the wrong way and then find out that they are wrong. Continuous feedback allows students to constantly be improving. I really like the section about how to help students take risks and answer questions in class. I felt that they really hit the nail on the head with the different types of pressures that students feel at all times. Most people understand that a student feels pressure from their peers and from home and some of the other obvious places, but it seems that you have to be a student to understand about the pressure of always getting the right answer. Always being the one that the teacher relies on holds a lot of pressure and can be just as demanding as the other pressures.

I found that in a lot of my classes I was one of the students that the teacher would rely upon to keep the class moving. At times I would be thinking, “Oh, come on. Don’t call on me. Both of us already know that I know the answer. Ask someone else that does not get to answer questions a lot.” There was just as much pressure for me to pass in all my work and get good grades as anyone else even though I was getting good grades. I have had English teachers that would not correct your paper until the final copy. This always made me mad because I felt like I could not learn about the writing process if I did not know what I had done wrong. Then I have also had teachers that seemed to want to write my paper for me. I found this even more annoying than the teachers that gave no feedback. I understand that there is a certain format that the paper should follow but allow me to choose the topic and the words that I use to convey my point. I really liked how the book talks about setting clear standards. I have had teachers that did not have clearly stated standards and I would always wonder what was allowed during class. This added one more pressure that I did not need as a High School student.