New Goals for a New School Year

my own "new-better-stronger" goals going into Year 14 as a teacher

This week began Year 14 in the classroom for me—but it also began another important journey in our household: my son entering into his own K-12 experience as a kindergartener.

It has thrown me for a bit of a loop, too, as in preparing for this school year I have found myself drifting off to contemplate what his K-12 journey will be like.

So while sitting in a district training last week and hearing repeated encouragement to just have “AI create reading materials for students” and to “save time by having AI generate the feedback,” I found myself spiraling a bit, admittedly.

Is this what education is going to look like for him?

It takes very little effort at this point, unfortunately, to imagine how K-12 bends itself towards even further AI-generated, test-driven slop in the years ahead and, in doing so, alienates students even more than they’ve already been alienated.

Which is why, I will continue to argue here and elsewhere, that we need to double-down on an authentic, meaningful classroom.

“No one is keeping me from doing that right now,” I said in this conversation with Jared Fox that we recorded in mid-July. A little over a month later, though, there I was, hearing about this district-purchased tool to potentially inundate classrooms in my own district with AI-generated lessons and feedback.

Right now, I think to myself, with considerable anxiety, as I cannot keep from reflecting on how my son will be stepping foot into an education system that seems increasingly willing to forfeit so, so much.

At the same time, however, I remind myself that the only thing I know how to do is to choose the adversarial position of hopefulness by refusing as much as I can what I know to be bad for student learning and instead living out values of iteration and imagination in my own practices as a teacher—values that Jared Fox himself captured throughout his book, Learning Environment:

“The nice thing about being a teacher is that when you get an idea,” Jared observed in our conversation, ”you can try it with your class the very next day if you want to.”

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my own reflection on goals for the year using this template

Iteration as a Path Forward

In Learning Environment, Jared writes that “the pursuit of passion-driven pedagogy is rife with potential.”

Even when worried and frustrated about so much as a teacher (and now as a parent of a K-12 student, too!) I want to double-down on Jared’s advice with my own iterations as a “passion-driven” practitioner as the school year begins.

This leads to today’s post as I move into the school year once again with a three-fold lens of improvement and iteration as a teacher:

• My new: intentionally bringing literary theory into our classroom space

• My better: consistency and depth of student interpretation with our readings

• My stronger: meaningful, ceiling-raising whole-class conversations

Today’s post is admittedly a bit disjointed, consequently, as I share three different goals I have for our classroom this year along with the how/why that accompanies each.

But the first step in any goal is naming it—and what better place than here?

(Oh, and if you want to try out this new-better-stronger lens yourself, here’s the template—I could not recommend it more!)

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an image from our toolkit for literary theory analysis in our classroom this year

New: Literary Theory in the Classroom

One of my favorite things of the online community our work with The Broken Copier has helped me find is learning from so many incredible educators—and one of the most impactful for me this summer was Trevor Aleo and the work he is doing with his own Substack, Becoming Literary.

(Note: If you haven’t yet, pause reading and go subscribe to it!)

“I cannot tell you the number of students I’ve had,” Trevor observes in this must-read post, “who have essentially said they had no idea what to look for or pay attention to when they were asked to analyze a book.”

I read this at the beginning of summer break and it resonated completely with my own experience in the classroom, so I went and did two things: (1) I bought the book that Trevor recommended as an entry point for this work: Deborah Appleman’s Critical Encounters in Secondary English; and (2) I designed a three-week unit for my juniors to intentionally bring literary theory into our classroom this school year.

(Once we have moved through the unit in October, my plan is to share more resources along with a reflection of how it went!)

I also went one step further and adapted Trevor’s tools into a slide deck for our students to use not only in our new literary theory unit but over the rest of the school year as well, which I believe is critical if this work with critical theory is going to become a skillset and mindset that is sustained within our classroom community.

Admittedly, bringing literary theory explicitly into our classroom is very much a new thing for me as a teacher—but I also found myself energized by pursuing this new over the summer.

Which I think is yet another reminder of why we never should stop looking for our next new as teachers, right?

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Better: Student Interpretation with our Readings

I went into my goal for “better” in much more detail in a post earlier this summer, so I’ll just offer a quick summary here of where it came from and what I hope it will look like:

• At the end of last year, I felt like we lost our momentum around close-reading and did not finish with as much confidence in our classroom around our TQE system of annotation from Marisa Thompson as we had in previous years

• In end-of-year surveys, students themselves expressed as much, too—and I also felt like a gap had formed for too many students in rushing to annotation without being able to paraphrase what they had read and, in doing so, consolidate their understanding more frequently and emphatically.

• Therefore, in committing to do better with these systems and shift more towards an emphasis on paraphrasing as part of our process, I did two things: (a) I created a slide deck tool for students to lean on for close-reading—yes, so many slide decks, I know!—and (b) I redesigned our desk labels to also include the terminology and framing around close-reading and interpretation.

Unlike the excitement that I feel around my goal of “new” for this year with literary theory, this improvement goal is much more about acknowledging where I could have done better as a teacher and committing to specific steps to address that.

Nevertheless, there is something empowering, I think, about moving through your own reflection alongside the feedback from students to arrive at a potential solution—and I am eager to see how this potential solution with close-reading and student interpretation plays out in the school year ahead.

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Stronger: Whole-Class Conversations

I feel really good at this point as a teacher in facilitating conversations in small groups in our classroom.

By leaning on a variety of collaboration tools and “backwards-planning” from my vision of what academic community can and should look like in our classroom space, across all my class periods last year we got to a really cool place with students much more comfortable working together in conversation. I genuinely feel confident in naming this as a strength as a teacher, too—and I even had opportunities last year to work with other teachers to help bring some of these collaborative tools to other classrooms.

However, I still recognize that it is a strength that can and needs to get stronger.

This is where I was very intentional in seeking out conversations with two of the best I know when it comes to this part of the classroom: one excerpted in the above video clip with Joe Ferraro (and his website, damngoodconversations.com) and the other with Matt Kay (and his book, Prompting Deeper Discussions: A Teacher’s Guide to Crafting Great Questions).

And of course also very grateful that they were both willing to share their experiences and consequent expertise with me and others.

My commitment with this “stronger” goal is to help our classroom evolve to better whole-class conversations, as too often last year when we tried to move from partner and small-group conversations, our momentum faded. (Unlike what Joe describes in the video clip at the beginning of this section—that’s the dream!)

Along with leaning on Joe’s resources, I spent time reading and reflecting on Matt’s book and his argument about the importance of high-quality questions, too. This is why I’ve committed to writing down three “good questions” each day before we discuss a reading—as I know that the quality of my own questioning has a direct impact on the conversations that can take place in our classroom.

Stepping back, I also think about how I would have considered our TQE system around close-reading in previous school years to be a strength. This is why I believe in not just building personal goals around areas that need improvement, then, as by investing in areas you are confident in it keeps them from stalling out.

While also, hopefully, raising the ceiling of what your classroom can be.

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What About Beyond The Classroom?

In my eyes, it was a phenomenal summer with The Broken Copier.

The conversations we had; the resources we were able to share; the community that continues to build.

More than ever, it feels like The Broken Copier is aligned to our initial hopes when Jim Mayers and I started it three years ago: to be a place for teachers and educators that uplifts voices from the classroom and shares what can and is good within the classroom.

That said, living out that mission in our own lives also means something else: the classroom does (and always will) come first—so now that students are back in the classroom, the pace will slow down for a bit in terms of posts and conversations here at The Broken Copier.

Our twice-a-week pace from the summer? Now likely will be at most once-a-week as the school year gets underway.

For those looking for more, I tried to provide lots of links to other folks in this post—and I’d recommend looking up any of our guests as great places for more learning. Community, after all, isn’t about one specific place but rather the recognition of how many different people and places there are to learn from.

From guests we’ve been able to feature here at The Broken Copier (including in this post!) to excellent platforms like The Cult of Pedagogy and The Human Restoration Project to new projects like Edutopia’s Ask-and-Answer Discussion Board, the opportunities for further exploration and growth as an educator are incredible in this moment.

So whether you’re already a few weeks into your school year or just getting started like me, I wish you the best. Keep going and keep learning, and we’ll keep posting here from time to time as we get our “school year sea legs.”

“The pursuit of passion-driven pedagogy is rife with potential.”

It’s the only path forward, too.

Note: featured image for post from Pexels.com, taken by Bruno Bueno