Positive Classroom Instruction
This book deals with the basic building block of the entire educational enterprise – a single lesson well taught.  It is the companion volume to Positive Classroom Discipline.  Together they comprise a two-volume treatment of the highly interrelated skills of successful classroom management.  While Positive Classroom Discipline focuses on the production of the time on task and student cooperation within a positive classroom atmosphere, Positive Classroom Instruction focuses on enhancing the students’ rate of learning and their desire to learn.  Indeed, these two volumes represent a fusion of the three component topics of classroom management: discipline, instruction, and motivation.Positive Classroom Instruction begins with an analysis of the subtleties of the classroom social system that profoundly yet invisibly link instructional practice with discipline management.  The book then moves to an area of instructional methodology that is a massive blind spot in the teaching of a typical lesson.  That topic is the precise means by which one gives corrective feedback to a student who is stuck.  Although appearing totally innocuous and common-sensical, the giving of corrective feedback in the traditional fashion is the indirect cause of almost all the problems of discipline, helplessness, chronic failure, and low self-concept in most classrooms.The topic of corrective feedback then leads to issues of lesson design and lesson presentation that are crucial to producing independent learning in students.  The last topic to be dealt with is quality control – the systematic production of diligence and excellence in any place of work.  This fresh look at student motivation clarifies the teacher’s options and actions and empowers them to produce learning where they might otherwise feel blocked.The final section of Positive Classroom Instruction details explicitly with teacher training and staff development.  All the fundamentals of instruction that apply to students in the classroom apply to teachers within the context of teacher training.  Consequently, the major part of Positive Classroom Instruction, while being a guide to effective classroom practice, is also a guide to effective teacher training.Positive Classroom Instruction, therefore, is not only for teachers, but also for administrators, educational planners, staff development specialists, and legislators.  Along with Positive Classroom Discipline, it makes the complex and often baffling job of classroom management understandable and doable.