Before The Year Ends, Audit Your Own Choices as a Teacher

Included: a reflection form you can use, if you want!

We make a lot of choices as teachers over a school year.

A quick sampling to consider:

• How are desks arranged in your classroom—and how often does that change?

• What do opening/closing procedures look like in your lessons?

• If you have control over grading policy (%’s for grades, late penalties, minimum grades, etc.)—what is something you do that is different than others in your building?

• What content/materials did you choose to bring into your classroom, especially if they’re different than others teaching a similar course?

• How do your lessons balance collaboration versus teacher-driven instruction versus independent work time?

• Pacing: how fast does your course move? (Along with that: what amount of homework do students regularly have?)

• How do you choose to assess your students’ learning—and what does feedback look like?

• What is your own approach like as a teacher when a student shows up having been absent for an extended stretch?

Yes: context matters. Some teachers have more control over their curriculum than others; other teachers have more flexibility on what specific policies look like in their individual classroom. Some schools have pretty consistent alignment across PLC’s or evening building-wide both with content and systems. In others, you’re on an island.

Acknowledging different contexts, though, I believe teachers still make a lot of choices no matter their context.

However, in my experience, far too often there is too little time actually spent considering and reflecting upon the choices we make as teachers.

So that’s what I wanted to write about today—along with a tool that I’m using refocus my own reflections around the choices I’ve made in my classroom this year.

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Framing Reflection Around Choices

Over the years, I’ve filled out many end-of-year forms and self-evaluations, ranging from those aligned with the Charlotte Danielson rubric to extensive checklists that get filed away to gather dust or, perhaps even worse, are submitted into some digital ether to become perpetually archived.

Then it is summer.

Then a new school year begins.

Rinse/repeat, again and again.

What I think would be much more beneficial for all teachers before the school year ends: to think back and “audit” a handful of key choices you made over the school year and then, following your own self-reflection, to have a conversation with someone else about how these choices went and what you want to take away going forward. (Or potentially to have that conversation with your students!)

For the individual reflection stage of this, I came up with this template for myself that others are welcome to use:

• Preview of the template (also pictured above)

• Link to create your own to use

• Sample of my own filled out for my English 10 course

The goal in designing this was to create a place to consider the rationale behind choices I made, both the benefits and downsides of those choices—with individual student outcomes and the classroom community overall—as well as my own learning from them as I look forward to future years.

Why two different choices? For me, this allows me to aim for a balance between a choice I feel relatively good about along with one that I’m frustrated with. (I also happen to believe that there is a quantity v. quality relationship with reflection, as too much ends up yielding, in my experience, quite little.)

Keep it simple, too! Start with a simple question: what is an important or interesting choice you made as a teacher? Give yourself time to think about it a bit, and then, potentially, to reflect on it more intentionally through writing.

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After that? I’d Suggest Going One Step Further

As I wrote about last year for Edutopia, I very much believe in [a] being transparent about your own choices as a teacher with your students and [b] asking them to consider what they would do if they were in your shoes.

Just like with students in our classroom, individual reflection is much more powerful as a starting point rather than a finish line—so after doing your own personal reflection on choices, potentially consider bringing that choice into the classroom space for students to consider.

As the year ends, one of my favorite annual things to do (pictured above) is a “teacher choice gallery walk”:

1. I choose 4-5 choices I made as a teacher in the classroom and post them around the room with my own reasoning and different alternatives I considered

2. Students rotate in groups and leave an “X” on what they would have done, discussing their own hypothetical choices with their group

3. Then we move to whole-class debrief, where I very much try to take on the role of 100% listener as students share and discuss their choices amongst themselves while I furiously take notes on what they say.

Here’s an example of one “policy choice” slide that we centered as a whole-class discussion in one of these lessons a year ago:

What I’ve realized after doing this regularly the past few years: the students in your classroom are the best and most important perspective on what is taking place in the classroom—including the choices you make within it as a teacher!—and it is quite a missed opportunity to not take advantage of their feedback in an intentional, authentic way.

(Even if that can be really nerve-wracking, admittedly, to lean into at first!)

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Why I Believe In Using the Word Choice

Despite how frequently I believe we make choices in our classroom as teachers, I worry we don’t think of them as choices nearly enough—and even when we do, we very rarely name aloud that they are indeed our choices as teachers.

This is understandable, though, right?

In a time when we are far too over-extended and far too under-appreciated, taking on the additional burden of acknowledging and owning our own power in the classroom can feel like a bridge too far.

To say “choice” means assuming agency which also means inviting scrutiny; to say “choice” means acknowledging power which also means accepting responsibility.

That’s a lot to step into these days as a teacher.

My final suggestion, then: don’t step into it alone.

Find another teacher to share your reflections with and, potentially, to have conversations that build on them.

One of my favorite things about my own English 10 PLC team in my building is that these conversations ground much of what we do—but for others, this might mean networking outside of your school.

And since you already have my reflections linked above, I’d be happy to read some of yours and trade feedback/further thinking around them! You’re welcome to reply with them in the comments or to even use the comment section as a place to reach out for more connections, which is something we hope this Broken Copier community evolves into even further as we move forward.

(Also: since I’m the only AP Literature teacher in my building, if you want to trade AP Literature “choice audits” we could even hop on the podcast and call it an episode as we discuss them!)

We all make choices as individual teachers. That means, I think, across all of our different teaching contexts there’s a some sort of shared experience as well as an earned empathy out there to lean into.

Which is why I believe reflecting on our choices should be followed by talking about our choices. With our students as well as with each other.

And reaping the rewards from doing so.