Three Ways I Know I Want My Classroom To Be Better in 2023

One for our classroom community, one for teaching writing, and one for me as a teacher

Even as I was writing my reflection on what I was proud about from 2022 over Winter Break, I found myself drifting forward, more with purpose than anxiety, and imagining the ways I wanted my classroom to be better in 2023.

Though the summer is often the better space for me to commit to deeper changes as a teacher, I also very much recognize how mid-year shifts, even small ones, can make a difference. Moreover, at this point in my career I recognize that I’m at my best as a teacher when I’m reflecting on how I can be at my best as a teacher, so even this exercise of targeting goals for improvement can have myriad benefits, I believe.

This post isn’t nearly as extensive as far as resources and examples for several reasons—the most obvious being that I’m still very much working on what path to take to address each of the goals below! However, I very much want to value the “both-and” mindset as a teacher in this space: yes, I’m very proud of where our classroom is at and who I am as a teacher within it and yes, I very much want to get better and continue growing as a teacher.

Last post was about the former, and this post is about the latter: how I want our classroom to be better in three different ways.

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Goal #1: I want my classroom to be better for students who are not always in my classroom.

I’ve been thinking a lot about absences lately.

A quite-common occurrence in a class of thirty students for me is to have 4-5 students absent on a given day—and often not the same students. There are a multitude of reasons for these absences, and though I’m sure that some are better than others, I cannot know the difference and instead choose to grant generosity to all those who are not in the room.

If they aren’t there, there’s a reason they aren’t there, and that’s okay.

As someone who believes a lot in the idea of a shared classroom community, nevertheless, one persistent struggle throughout my career has been how to build and maintain a collective learning environment even for students who are not in class from time to time.

In some ways, the shift to remote learning offered a pathway to make this more possible as far as provide resources and skills to teachers (admittedly, not always with adequate time to utilize them) as far as online platforms students could lean upon to review materials and stay much more up-to-date than they would have been able to prior to COVID-19’s necessitated change.

I have remarked often to colleagues as well as students that “it has never been easier to miss class and still keep up with the work than it is right now.”

Yet.

The first semester of 2022 has reminded me repeatedly—and humbled me, really—that “keeping up with the work” is very different than staying a part of the collective learning environment and community of the classroom.

And the latter is where I want to focus my improvement in 2023.

One idea I have for this: identifying “on ramps” within each instructional unit for students who might have missed several previous classes.

An immediate shift I’m trying to make happen is to create activities in the latter half of instructional units that help support and scaffold for students who were absent or struggled with the earlier aspects of this.

In our English class, this often ends up centering around helping students who have missed large chunks of the longer text for the unit (currently: The Catcher in the Rye) still be confident and a part of our conversation towards the end—which also is pivotal in their success on summative assessments (in this unit’s case, an essay as well as a socratic seminar).

An example of what I think this can look like: before moving forward afterWinter Break, we created a review activity in which groups competed against each other to order the different events of the novel correctly and then reflected on which chapters were most important in a whole-class debrief. It took a mere twenty minutes, but those twenty minutes were incredibly helpful for several students who had a handful of absences earlier in the unit.

Not only in understanding the material they needed to move forward, but in joining our classroom conversation around that “moving forward,” too.

There is no perfect solution to the problem of student absences, of course, but one small thing I want to be better at in the year ahead is to create more of these “on ramps” more often: lessons as well as activities within them that are designed specifically to help “on ramp” students back into our classroom learning experience.

Even if it’s not a comprehensive solution (narrator interrupts: “it isn’t”), I hope it’s a start.

Another place I want to double-down on as I work to be better: tools for student advocacy as well as space for it.

At the beginning of this school year, I was very excited about a new system of student advocacy involving students using hand signals to let me know where they needed support—not only affixing explanations for the system to each desk, but having a large set of posters at the front of the room to support this process, too.

Nevertheless, it feels like each school year inevitably has systems that go better than you could ever hope (#TQE!) and then others that fade into the background more than you had initially envisioned.

This system was one of the latter—as the initial success has turned more to a sputtering as we near the midpoint of the year.

That’s on me, of course, as a teacher, and my hope is to use the “reset” that comes with second semester (including lots of students shifting class periods) to reiterate and prioritize a system for students advocating for support within the classroom space.

Additionally, though, this means creating more space for individual, flexible work within more class periods—where students can go the direction they needed based on where they are at and what they need to accomplish.

I’m a big believer in bell-to-bell, whole-classroom-community learning (with lots of collaboration), as it is my firm conviction that this still one of the most powerful things in education that we can create for students. Regardless, though, there are downsides to this—and one of them is how this often blocks out the real time and space needed for differentiation and the support that goes along with it.

So along with my “on ramps” goal, I also want to more frequently create chunks of time in our classroom community that allow for me to give students individual support and to address larger gaps in skill more intentionally—even if that means not covering as much as far as curriculum/pacing as we might have been able to with our foot fully on the pedal.

Prioritizing the classroom community only matters if you are actually willing to prioritize the classroom community, after all—which means prioritizing all of the students in it, not just the ones who always show up.

Note-to-self (I hope) going forward: systems for student advocacy only work if you create time and space for it, too, particularly as far as teacher support in response.

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Goal #2: I want students to write analytically “outside of the box” more often, more intentionally

Over Winter Break, I tried to shift some of my reflection forward to parts of my practice as an English teacher that I wasn’t super content with, and the thought I couldn’t get past ended up being this one:

Without question, there are systemic constraints that make the “five-paragraph essay” (or however many body paragraphs you need) format so common: a) it is a widely-taught format that students and teachers feel most confident with; b) standardized testing, particularly within time limits, rewards structured writing like this; and c) often times when we are increasing complexity or changing the tasks within the structure, we are reluctant to step away from the reliability of the structure itself.

I still have a lot of thoughts and questions about this, too, even after so many of my “Twitter PLC folks” were incredibly helpful in sharing their own ideas and resources.

Many of the suggestions and resources I found over Winter Break were built around stepping outside of the analytical genre and bringing in other types of writing (narrative, etc.) to weave into the more-formal piece—which I’m a big fan of, but wasn’t quite what I was looking for. And there were also several dead-ends in which I’d find incredible theoretical ideas around this shift towards more structural versatility, but then few specifics.

Basically, I’m still working on this.

Yet while part of my goal is simply to read more and learn more, I do have two specific shifts I’m trying to make starting in 2023 right away in my classroom:

Shift #1: trying to create multiple exemplars per writing task, with at least one outside-the-box example of how students can push beyond traditional structure:

example of what the “exemplars” look like for our next essay prompt

This takes more time, yes, but I’ve quite honestly found it to be very enjoyable to sit down and force myself to consider how I myself would complete the task of analysis outside of the way that was drilled into me for two decades before I spent another decade paying that same, confining lesson forward to students.

It hasn’t been easy! However, that additional thinking that goes into not just what you want to write but how you want to deliver those ideas? That thinking has been missing from my classroom too much—and I want 2023 to fix that.

And it starts with forcing myself be better as an “outside-the-box” analytical writer.

Shift #2: asking students to identify and reflect upon specific sentences and “moves” they made within their writing much more often to create a conversation and focus around the “how” of writing

an example of what I’m adding on more often to the end of writing assignments

Especially with shorter tasks of writing, I’m trying to more frequently have students stop at the end to identify specific choices they made within each writing sample to a) explain the purpose of what they did and b) reflect on their success/concerns prior to receiving feedback.

Building on some of the broader meta-cognitive shifts I made last semester, the goal here is to establish a norm of having students consistently reflecting on their own writing throughout the year—and not only on larger, summative assignments.

Admittedly, both of these shifts are new for me and also require more time on my end at the moment, so I also am going into this particular goal most of all with humility.

This is not something I can solve on my own and it certainly is not something I am going to solve this year. I’m going to begin the work towards that solution in our classroom, though, and try to learn through success and failure as we proceed forward.

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Goal #3: I want to keep a firmer grasp on my own identity as a learner in 2023—knowing that it will ultimately make me better as a teacher within our classroom

One of my favorite experiences during remote learning occurred in the initial part that took place in Spring 2020—a stage that availed more time for us as teachers before the daily Zoom classes, LMS platforms, etc. of the 2020-2021 school year.

I essentially had every evening entirely free for the first time in my career, so I decided to sign up for a free online course that piqued my interest: Modern and Contemporary American Poetry via Coursera. (better known as “ModPo”)

I approached it seriously, too, with a dedicated spiral to mind-map my own notes for each lesson, a hardcopy print-out of each poem for my own close-reading and analysis, and then serious time invested in each of the required discussion posts and essays to be submitted for peer feedback online.

Essentially, I was an English Literature student again, and I loved it.

It helped that this was without-question one of the highest-quality online courses you’ll find online—and I highly recommend it for anyone reading this!—and it also helped that I was doubly-invested in trying to prepare myself for what the experience of remote learning might be like in the year ahead for the students I would be working with.

Still, there was a spark as a learner there that at times gets pushed out of the way when I’m so invested in my work as a teacher. And only after I fully experienced that spark in that month of “ModPo” (and what a month it was!) did I then realize how much I had been missing it.

Yes, that spark takes time—and as a father now of not one but two little boys, time itself is even more of a scarcity—but that time is worth it.

I’ve felt this spark at other times throughout my teaching career, particularly when I was working on publishing my own fiction, but my hope in 2023 is to sustain it with more of a priority: to find time and space to push myself creatively, to seek out new learnings, and to simply ruminate on curiosities that so often get pushed into corners and crevices.

Why? Because that “learning spark” so often becomes a “teaching spark.”

Simply put, I am at my best as a teacher as a teacher when that part of my identity walks hand-in-hand with my best self as a learner. Yes, this “cup” gets filled in many ways by conversations around education and pedagogy, but not nearly to its potential.

So goal in 2023: to honor my identity as a learner by affording time to my identity as a learner. And when the spark arrives, to not take it for granted for even a second.

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One broader The Broken Copier note: Jim and I are well aware that it has been a good while since our last podcast, and that is directly tied to how hectic our Winter Break’s were combined with the multitude of exhaustions that being a teacher in January can bring.

We’ll endure, we’ll regroup, and we’ll get back to recording before long! Thanks for your patience on that end of this platform—and of course thank you for continuing to read, share, and provide feedback around the resources and ideas we try to offer on this side of platform with posts like this one.

As I said in my most recent post, teaching is community work. I can’t say it enough, so I’m just going to keep saying it.

Isolation is where we falter, after all.

We really appreciate you and your role in the community we’re trying to build here, too. Much appreciation, and good luck in your own entrance into 2023!
—Marcus