A Vision Document for Your Classroom
a tool and template I used this year that I found really valuable as a teacher
It feels like every school year begins with quite the discourse around the syllabus.
What is the best shape and style of a syllabus? What should or should not be included in it? How should you introduce it to your students?
Today I want to side-step that discourse, though, as this year I leaned into a different document that proved to be far more valuable: a classroom vision.
While we still had our usual syllabus with course expectations, I got a lot more out of my investment in the vision document that I’ll share in today’s post, which will explain each part of the classroom vision document I used and why I cannot wait to double down on this priority in the years ahead.
Before delving into the details, here are two resources you’re welcome to use and adapt for your own classroom:
Sample Course Vision Document (as explained in this post)
Blank Course Vision Template (you can create your own copy here!)
What Do You Want To Be True For Your Students?
While I think the rest of the vision document matters, this initial step is probably the most important for me—particularly going into a school year.
Indeed, there is something pretty powerful about this simple question as a teacher: what do I want to be true for my students by the end of their time with me?
It is an act of imagination and also accountability once it becomes a list like you see above. Discarding the limitations and artificialities of SMART goals, too, a “vision list” is admittedly, purposefully, and ambitiously hopeful.
This is important, I think, as it is very difficult to surpass a ceiling you set for yourself—and too often I fear that we construct our own ceilings out of fear of writing down a goal that we might not surpass, especially when it may be attached to an end-of-year evaluation.
While understandable, this ceiling-making as teachers impedes what the classroom can become for our students. That is why I love leaning into a vision document instead: it allows me to be hopeful about our classroom.
Another thing that matters? Refusing the false dichotomy of rigorous learning versus community and rapport by listing all these goals alongside each other. A really important both/and, to borrow again from .
I both want students to be more confident writers and to feel a sense of belonging.
I both want students to deepen their understanding of literary texts and to feel seen and affirmed in sharing their own stories.
I both want students to develop the rigorous academic skills this course is designed around and to build an authentic, supportive community amongst themselves, and to know that anyone who says you have to choose between those two things is absolutely wrong.
It is very difficult for your classroom to arrive at a place you weren’t able to envision—so my recommendation? Start from a place from hope.
Purposefully and ambitiously and both/and-ly.
Why Does This Matter? How Will You Measure It?
At the end of the day, I think of this document as primarily teacher-facing—though I do share it with students and families! For me, it is important to not only name for myself what I want to be true for students at the end of the course, but to then spend time sitting with these two follow-up questions:
Why does this goal matter?
How will I measure this goal?
The time spent reflecting on these answers is incredibly worthwhile for me, as it allows me to consider and develop my own beliefs about our course—what we are doing as class as well as the why behind the what.
For some of the more academic goals (ex: preparing for the AP Exam), having a strong answer as a teacher to this why is incredibly important; however, on the flip side, I think many teachers might lay out a goal such as “students feel a sense of belonging” without any plans of how to measure this.
Measurements don’t have to be perfect, in my opinion, but for me they are an essential part of the vision work. For our classroom, that is why I love Jim’s check-in surveys so much as barometers for the idea of belonging alongside our peer nominations. Along with these, the student Writing Story reflections in our classroom allow me to read things like this from students at the end of the year:
Before this class, I honestly thought that building a classroom community was trivial, but now I can confidently say that being able to share so many of my own sentiments with my classmates and vice versa was actually really cool and made the class so much more meaningful. It felt just as, if not more important than the coursework itself.
Belonging in the classroom: check.
This begins with my own reflections going into the school year, too: ⓵ Why does this part of my vision for our classroom matter—and ⓶ how will I know if we got there?
Two questions worth spending some time with, I’d argue, for any teacher. This vision document insists on spending that time, too, which is yet another reason I appreciate it so much for my own classroom.
A Place To Return To When The Year Ends
As someone who likes to spend a considerable amount of time reflecting in the final stretch of the school year, what I’ve realized this year is how this vision document transitions perfectly into a lens to consider in retrospect how the school year went.
In these final weeks, I found myself looking through the lens of this vision document more and more year: what does “belonging” feel like?" How do students feel about themselves as writers? Has their ability to reflect intentionally improved?
I’m a better teacher when I arrive full-circle to hold myself accountable—with generosity and grace, of course!—to the goals I laid out back in September via this vision document. It helps me ask the right questions in our classroom surveys and discussions as the year comes to a close, and it then frames my own reflections as I try to learn forward into the years ahead in the classroom.
Of course, as I’ve shared here before, the other benefit? Sometimes the systems can reinforce the systems, as their end-of-year reflections offered gems like this year:
As you can see in the student reflections above, there were a lot of reasons to be proud of this school year.
It’s important to name and celebrate our wins as teachers! And I’m definitely making sure I sit with that pride in what the classroom was able to become along with gratitude, immense gratitude, for what students invested in it…
—which then becomes even more fuel to consider the areas where I feel like we could have done better, to learn from whatever the results are from the AP Exam this summer, and to keep aspiring towards whatever awaits next year.
Why Create a Vision Document For Your Class?
I should acknowledge the context of my own classroom first: I just finished my thirteenth year teaching and haven’t had any schedule changes the last few, which means that I’m at a place where I have the time and confidence to invest in reflection like this. Throw in a new curriculum or school, and I definitely would have to go back to the drawing board with this and myriad other systems. In my first few years, I wouldn’t even have known where to start with something like this.
As always, context is everything.
Yet we can only arrive where we’re willing to look—and for me that begins with not only dreaming about the classroom but codifying those dreams into words. This vision document was a foundation for how we began the school year and it became the best possible way to “land the plane,” so to speak, in terms of my own understanding of what the classroom was this school year.
And as exhausted as I am, I cannot wait for August when I get to go back to the drawing board yet again for Year 14 and start imagining what we can make possible in the classroom going forward.
Great post! Have you ever tried having students annotate your syllabus or your vision document?
https://remikalir.com/annotatedsyllabus/
It could be a great way to collaboratively build a classroom community vision.
Thank you so much for posting this. I will be revising based on your share. I think we can be very passive consumers of models, even in the act of creativity (creating a syllabus), by relying on form. I never considered how the form itself could be a place of creative engagement/play (as a teacher). Also, thank you for the context at the end. I am VERY hard on myself when I reflect on what I can attend to now (vs. earlier teacher years). You are right: consistent schedule/course opens bandwidth for evolving one's work.