405582rr – building the encouraging classroom
1. Which one of the following is true regarding the notion of contact talks?
A. There’s no difference in a contact talk for a preschooler and one for a primary school student.
B. Contact talks are designed for a group of students.
C. Contact talks are regularly scheduled discussions with parents.
D. The main goal of a contact talk is to establish a means of communication with a child.
2. Which one of the following statements about class meetings is true?
A. Class meetings may also be called circle time or peace talks.
B. Class meetings involve parents in the process of deciding how the classroom should be run.
C. Class meetings give everyone in the class an equal chance to offer an opinion on how the class should be run.
D. Class meetings allow students to practice public speaking skills, as one student per meeting delivers a speech that he or she wrote.
3. Which one of the following is a good guideline to follow when having a parent-teacher conference?
A. Come up with an instant solution that you can use with the child.
B. Use technical terms and jargon to convey your professionalism.
C. Use reflective listening to make sure you understand the parent’s thoughts.
D. Convey your role as an expert in early childhood education.
4. In Gartrell’s opinion, which one of the following statements best describes an encouraging classroom?
A. It’s a place children want to be even when they’re sick.
B. It depends on parents to succeed.
C. It works only if the noise and traffic patterns are designed in an agreeable arrangement.
D. It allows children to successfully reach each stage of development.
5. Which one of the following sounds more like a classroom guideline than a rule?
A. No running in the classroom.
B. We work together to keep our classroom clean.
C. Don’t talk with food in your mouth.
D. Don’t chew gum in school.
6. If you want to include show-and-tell in your classroom, what is a good guideline to follow to keep
children interested and avoid focusing on material possessions?
A. Have each child bring in an object from home.
B. Schedule only one child to do show and tell per day.
C. Conduct an interview with the child to ask about the object.
D. Hold show and tell in small groups during center time.
7. Which one of the following statements best describes one of the dangers of educational accountability?
A. It forces teachers to be responsible for the education they’re providing to the children.
B. It doesn’t take into account any of the considerations of an encouraging classroom.
C. It’s often confused with political accountability, which pushes the school to achieve with statistics such as test scores.
D. It puts all the responsibility of education on teachers’ shoulders, removing the responsibility from parents.
8. You find yourself getting very frustrated at work lately. When you step back to take a break and refocus, you realize that you’re doing too much and it’s affecting you both in and out of the classroom. What are you probably doing?
A. Compulsively focusing on one issue and thus overwhelming yourself
B. Suffering from childism
C. Suffering from school anxiety
D. Overfunctioning by trying to be too many things to too many people
9. When communicating with parents, which one of the following guidelines should you keep in mind?
A. Establish yourself as the expert in the classroom, so they value your opinion.
B. Give advice to the parents on how to improve their child’s behavior.
C. Use proper educational terms to frame the ideas you want to discuss.
D. Try to establish a collaborative system and welcome the family’s suggestions.
10. Which of the following is true regarding encouragement when addressing a child?
A. Encouragement reinforces the successful completion of tasks.
B. Encouragement puts the focus on winning and success.
C. Encouragement must be given carefully, since it implies value judgments.
D. Encouragement empowers the child in his or her efforts.
11. If a child in your classroom doesn’t want to get up when naptime is over, what should you do?
A. Call the parents and ask them to pick up their child because he or she is too exhausted.
B. Move the child to a quiet corner of the room and have an older child sit with the younger child.
C. Let the child sleep, but make sure he or she is OK.
D. Insist that the child wake up and join the others in an activity.
12. One of the dangers of educational accountability is that it’s often confused with _______ accountability,
where schools are pushed to achieve at a cost to teachers and students.
A. teacher
B. political
C. reformation
D. classroom
13. Which one of the following is an effective technique for encouraging children to appreciate books?
A. Insist that children focus on the story and not focus on any other activity.
B. Avoid using different voices for different characters; it only confuses the children.
C. Allow children to read other books while you read to them.
D. Use books of all age groups and levels for variety.
14. Which one of the following statements accurately describes a logical consequence of mistaken behavior?
A. “You spilled your milk? That’s OK. Let’s clean it up together.”
B. A child spills some milk. You realize he is too young to understand his actions, so you simply clean up the milk.
C. “Get some paper towels and clean up your mess, please.”
D. Logical consequences are essentially the same thing as punishments.
15. A child in your class complains of a stomachache every week. How should you address the situation?
A. Ignore the child because you know she’s making it up to get attention.
B. Use distraction techniques to get her involved in classroom activities.
C. Let her know you’re listening to her, then look for a root cause at home or in the classroom.
D. Send her home and tell the parents she needs medical attention.
16. When you talk to a child, Anna, about how she hurt another child’s feelings, you make sure you do so
without Anna feeling attacked. So you frame the issue within positive comments about how nicely she has
treated other children in the past. This technique is known as a/an
A. childism.
B. contact talk.
C. compliment sandwich.
D. problem solver.
17. The most important reason for having parent volunteers in the classroom, according to your textbook, is that it
A. shows parents how to teach their children in accordance with school policy.
B. gives the teacher a break so she can recharge her batteries.
C. allows the parent to see firsthand how their children function in the school environment.
D. encourages parents to be proactive in their children’s education.
18. To encourage children to appreciate books, what is an effective technique you can use in your classroom?
A. Read the same books daily so children anticipate what’s going to happen next.
B. Include an anticipatory set to introduce children to the story.
C. Include a buffer activity between books to keep children occupied.
D. Read to only one or two children at a time; reading to a small group is disruptive because children get bored.
19. Under which one of the following Myers and Maurer categories does the idea that children select materials according to their own interests fall?
A. Exploratory
B. Self-directing/open-ended
C. Self-directing/self-correcting
D. Self-correcting
20. Which one of the following is an appropriate practice in response to the traditional approach of ostracizing children who have engaged in mistaken behavior?
A. Center the group’s activities around those that require “no one right answer.”
B. Give a supportive evaluation of every child’s work.
C. Accept all members as part of the group.
D. Increase the number of small groups.
