💪🏽 Empower students with classroom jobs

📢 How to give students choice and autonomy in class

Students are our future. Our world will be in their hands very soon. What can we do today to prepare them for that responsibility?

Let them practice having autonomy and choice. Now. In our classes.

Our Class, Our Voice shares practical ideas to help students make decisions and own responsibility by practicing it daily in small ways.

Classroom jobs. Surveys. Voting.

They're all small steps toward the ambitious goal of prepared citizens of the future.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ So many good ideas to help your classroom! And it’s broken up in to easy sections to help you get ideas where you need it in your classroom. — Rebecca (Amazon review)

Get Our Class, Our Voice in paperback or Kindle ebook on Amazon

💡 THE BIG IDEA 💡

💪🏽 Empower your students to become leaders with classroom jobs

In a four-part video series, I chat with Gina Ruffcorn, a fantastic fifth-grade teacher and author of Our Class, Our Voice, who swears by classroom jobs.

Gina explained how classroom jobs not only give students more control and a voice in the classroom but also take a ton of tasks off the teacher's plate. We even brainstormed a bunch of different jobs students can tackle, from timekeeper to insurance officer (yes, you read that right!).

What are student jobs?

Student jobs are classroom responsibilities assigned to students to foster essential skills like responsibility, collaboration, and leadership. These jobs go beyond delegating tasks and contribute to a vibrant learning environment.

Why are they important in the classroom?

Student jobs are important in the classroom because they:

• Teach students responsibility and ownership over the classroom environment.

• Allow students to develop collaborative skills by working together.

• Foster leadership skills through tasks like leading lines or teaching mindfulness activities.

How can I get started?

It’s not as hard as you might think. We shared Gina’s ideas and expanded on them in our new post, Getting started with student jobs.

In this post you’ll find:

• A step-by-step guide for incorporating student jobs into your classroom.

• The complete list of jobs that Gina talks about in the video and her book Our Class, Our Voice.

• An editable Canva job card template with all 20 job descriptions and tips for introducing each one.

• A list of other job ideas that you can use to cater the list to your class.

🗄 Template

🍐 Pear Deck: Quick templates for instant feedback

I’ve been using Pear Deck (peardeck.com) a lot since I went back in the classroom two months ago.

Their interactive slides are my go-to. I LOVE that I can assess my students’ understanding immediately — and provide feedback right away.

I use their pre-made templates all the time. If you have the Pear Deck extension installed in Google Slides, you just go to Extensions > Pear Deck and open Pear Deck.

Then just click the template library (see image above). There are lots of pre-designed ones for different parts of a lesson — and different content areas.

Sneaky tip: The draggable and drawing slides are premium slide types. But the template library has draggable and drawing slides! You can use one of their pre-designed ones … or … just add a draggable or drawing template and delete everything off the slide (and change the background color to white). It gets you free draggable and drawing slides!

Quick template: I keep a 20-slide Pear Deck presentation ready to go any time. It just has 20 short-answer questions with the words “answer the question” on the slides.

If I’m in a hurry — or decide mid-class that I want to run Pear Deck — I’ll start a new Pear Deck activity with it. I can ask the questions verbally in class — or write them on the white board. Then students respond via Pear Deck where I can see their responses quickly and easily.

👋 How we can help

There are even more ways I can support you in the important work you do in education:

1. Read one of my six books about meaningful teaching with tech.

2. Take one of our online courses about practical and popular topics in education.

3. Bring me to your school, district or event to speak. I love working with educators!