Manager of the week

Trying to make teams of teachers enthusiastic by sharing my Dalton expertise with them is a great job. During workshops the interaction with teachers, or listening to their discussions during one of my assignments, is very inspiring.
Sometimes I discover a brilliant idea. I share this one with pleasure with you all.

Once I admitted to a group of colleagues that it was sometimes difficult for me to be consequent in handling the agreements in the classroom.
The more independent the children were, the bigger the risk that I forgot the phase of ‘process evaluation’ at the end of the period of independent work.
As long as children demonstrate that they know what to do, that they solve their problems and cooperate in a pleasant way, there is apparently no reason to evaluate the process.
And this is a big risk, because a strong group of workers deserve the compliments for their attitude. It is always good to memorize what happened during the period after the planning and the start of the work. Before you realize a kind of nonchalance has crept into the routine. And I finalized with the statement:
“Never forget the process evaluation”.

One teacher from the Kindergarten department of the school admitted this problem and she told me that she gave a special role to one of the children every week.
She gave it the title ‘Manager of the week’.
“The children are very proud to have this role and to play the game with me”, she said.
The task of the manager of the week is to keep an eye on the colour-clock and to give a signal to the teacher 5 minutes before the end of the work period.
A signal to memorize that she has to start the important process evaluation.

We normally forget this crucial teaching strategy especially when our children are working well.


I promote to use buttons for special roles or functions the children have.

Last period I designed many of these logos for buttons.

They can also be used at the board where all the tasks of the children are visualized.