Pivotal Book Review:

Teaching Outside the Box:

How to Grab Your Students By Their Brains   by LouAnne Johnson

From the reviews

This book is a must for beginning teachers and for pros who need new ideas. It combines street smart practicality with the creative thinking we need to reach kids today.

Teaching Outside the Box is the unique resource that also acknowledges the importance of each teacher’s personal attitudes and beliefs about teaching

Teaching Outside the Box offers a wealth of important questions and answers that all teachers should seriously think about."

Teaching Outside the Box shows how you can be an awesome teacher if you just use some common sense, a little creativity, and a lot of caring."

Even after 10 years of being fairly successful at teaching "at-risk" kids, I found that seeing the logic and reasoning of her approach on the page clued me in to many of the principles behind a successful classroom which I already used, but never saw fully articulated on the page.

These are the tips that you didn't get in college regarding working with challenging older kids; it's both an intellectual and visceral approach to teaching that will help you avoid many confrontations with kids before they ever happen, and give you the understanding of how to handle the battles you can't avoid. Holding kids to high standards of behavior sends the message to your students that you believe that they are capable great things, but it can take years to build the skills a teacher needs to get to that point. This book is the blueprint for building a successful classroom.

There is also a lot here about understanding kids that have to return everyday to very difficult lives at home. Many teachers of kids with tough home lives fail because they never really understood the lives of the young people they were dealing with. Understanding the reasoning and emotions behind unreasonable classroom behavior is the key to minimizing it and surviving as a teacher, and this book reminds us that these behaviors have roots in what these kids have to go through everyday. There is much here to remind you of the positive and long-lasting effects a caring teacher can have, and that the balance of positive reinforcement with a tough determination for high standards is key to getting the best out of our kids.


From seating plans to Shakespeare, Teaching Outside the Box offers practical strategies that will help both new teachers and seasoned veterans create dynamic classroom environments where students enjoy learning and teachers enjoy teaching. This indispensable book is filled with no-nonsense advice, checklists, and handouts as well as

·          A step-by-step plan to make the first week of school a success

·          Approaches for creating a positive discipline plan

·          Methods for motivating students, especially reluctant readers

·          Strategies for successful classroom management

·          Suggestions for creating and grading student portfolios

She describes endless specific examples of what exactly a teacher could do if a teacher has more than 40 students in a class and it seems like no one is listening or on task.

This book is available from Amazon where it is selling for $16.47 which is a 34% saving on the list price of $24.95.

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