My Personal Approach to BTSA Training

October 31, 2011
By

I was cleaning out the back room all weekend.

You might well ask why, considering that my regulars know the state of my classroom. (Here are a couple of flashbacks to last year’s picture tour: Part I, Part II.)

The answer is… My wife bought me a pinball machine for my 50th birthday (still a little over a week away, but close enough when a machine goes on Craigslist only 25 miles away) and it’s being delivered on Wednesday, and I have to make room for it in the pantry/junk room.

I have wanted to have a pinball machine in my house for over 40 years. Finally! Here’s a picture of the kind I’m getting. Mine’s a little more “well-used,” but plays beauty.

I CAN NOT WAIT.

Anyway, while I was hauling shtuff out of the back room, I came across an “artifact” from one of my BTSA training sessions a few years ago.

We were supposed to be brainstorming with our table groups about what teacher behaviors we would be looking for to cover each of the California Standards for the Teaching Profession (CSTP). We were, I guess, supposed to watching our BTSA charges, and encouraging said behaviors. It looks like I ran out of steam after the first one. I think I was at the snack table for the Creating a Learning Environment one.

The assessing learning one looks sort of like my old PE teacher in junior high.

My “notes” at faculty meeting are pretty similar, except they have a lot more guillotines and tanks and laser-firing space ships.

 

 

 


Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

Random Featured Post

“There’s already something on the back of mine.” (Also: Racial Harmony.)

It was our first day back in the classroom after 8 days in the library. We were all glad to be back. “Oh, my clicker…how I’ve missed you.” One of them actually said that. OMG. What a day. Full of action, and laugh after laugh. First there was the video. YouTube is blocked in our district. Our head of IST keeps bleating about CIPA and how YouTube doesn’t filter, and…anyway, we can’t use YouTube. But finally, they created a workaround for us. We have to do things from home rather than from school, but it works OK. We find the YouTube video we want to use, and copy the URL. Then we go to the district’s “safe video portal” and paste it in. Then we can approve our own video, and use the safe portal to show it at school. It’s a bit clunky, but it works fine. Yesterday I added a video. I hadn’t even showed it yet, when I got an e-mail from my principal. I have only added a couple of videos before, but both of them were of the nutty variety, rather than the “educational” sort.  One of them is near the top of the most [...]

more -->


Mr. Coward has been teaching on the beautiful central coast of California since 1989. He sometimes tweets when he's in the right mood: @mrCinSLO.

Archives

May 2013
M T W T F S S
« Apr    
 12345
6789101112
13141516171819
20212223242526
2728293031  

Recent Comments

  • Mrs. M~ commented on Speaking of…Here is another good one for you. What is going on in our country??? http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/04/22/school-warns-students-no-test-no-sports/
  • Mrs K commented on TweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeetDude... you haven't tweeted since January. Come back! ;)
  • Meg commented on No Soup for YouWell, cold soup CAN be rather scary... ;) Thanks for the laugh!
  • Heather commented on No Soup for YouGazpacho beats Jhonny any day of the week.
  • Heather commented on MAUS is back. (Rerun)I like the idea of a fairly steep age requirement for an interview project. Interviewing is one of our standards for eighth graders, and I usually have them interview someone about what middle school/junior high was like "back in the day" after reading The Outsiders and Garrison Keillor's anecdote "Something from the Sixties" from
  • Carly Sween commented on Even “Disneyland” is in Danger (Part 1)Sure. I'm all for the sharing idea. :)
  • Carly Sween commented on The PitchI'm in Fairbanks and we rarely have snow days. We don't usually get dumped on. It just starts snowing in October, a little bit at a time, and doesn't melt until April. Temps stay so cold that roads aren't slick. However, the last few years we have had issues with ice. It gets too
  • Mrs. M~ commented on Even “Disneyland” is in Danger (Part 1)I like the discussion board idea--as long as you put your two cents in too! :-) I shudder to think where our country is headed with all of this testing and corporate involvement. OMG, Survivor. As one of my other favorite bloggers put it, "Survivor’s fun sponge was finally squeezed, drenching
  • Meg commented on Even “Disneyland” is in Danger (Part 1)I find it funny how much the US is trying to change the system to "up the test scores" when China is trying to figure out how we produces such creative and innovative thinkers. Seriously, China, Japan, all of those 'high test score' countries are sending people over to the states to learn how
  • Mrs. M~ commented on The Pitch@Carly, how do you handle snow days in Alaska? Do you have to make them up? I imagine you must have tons of issues with that every year. This year we had a day of school called off because it was too cold--that has never happened before. You must deal with
  • Carly Sween commented on The PitchHad to laugh about the snow comments. I teach in Alaska so we win the God-awful winter award every year. Yes, it was 20 below this morning. We are having an unusually cold spring. Supposed to be great northern lights tonight, though, so that gives us something to look forward to. Always enjoy your
  • Mrs. M~ commented on The PitchYes, yes, FIVE snow days in the last three months, and two of them were this week. In APRIL. This has been a god-awful winter. People are becoming almost laughingly crabby and morose. To the south of us they got a terrible ice storm, and lots of people have been without
  • Mrs. M~ commented on Retirement is for WimpsAnd here is one more, as I sit at home during our 5th snow day of the "spring!" http://www.huffingtonpost.com/randy-turner/a-warning-to-young-people_b_3033304.html
  • Mrs. M~ commented on Retirement is for WimpsJust in case you have not seen this, check this out: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/09/teacher-resignation-letter-gerald-conti_n_3046595.html
  • Mrs. M~ commented on Retirement is for WimpsYou bring up a good point--will blogs like this even be around in 10 years? Will we all be wearing those goofy Google glasses by then? I am still waiting for all of the Jetson's inventions to come to reality, by the way. THAT would be a good use of technology.