Three Ways I Think My Classroom Got Better in 2022
Along with some additional reflections before 2022 officially comes to a close
Looking back on 2022, my first reaction: this year was mostly a fog.
From the Omicron mania of January 2022 to the birth of our second son in July to, well, the now-perpetual feeling that there is never enough time and NEVER enough sleep, I recognize how this “season of life” can very much feel like myriad iterations of survival mode.
Justifiably, I think! Getting through a normal week of school with our two-teacher, two-toddler household without any daycare closures or stacks of essays accruing? The new Olympic decathlon in our family.
And that’s with potty-training ongoing for one and teeth incoming for another…
Still, though, in taking time this Winter Break to reflect intentionally on the year that has been—with the help of FutureMe, once again!—I find myself really proud of ways I have shifted and strengthened my teaching practices over a year in which “survival” would have been completely justifiable and, in some ways, a victory in itself.
That is not to suggest, of course, that there have not been challenges. And it goes without saying, I hope, that I am simultaneously reflecting on the growth I want to prioritize in the year ahead, inside the classroom and beyond it (that post should be coming early next week, I hope).
Teaching is ongoing learning, more than anything. Part of that is staying committed to ongoing learning, which I am, but part of that also is naming and affirming, as much as possible, the learning that has already taken place.
Without further ado, then, here is what I learned about myself and my classroom in 2022:
Learning #1: It’s My Job as a Teacher to Make Sure Students Write Differently
Anyone in education knows that there is tremendous pressure for students to write within, well, boxes.
Whether it is the drilling of “re-stating the question in your answer” with constructed responses on standardized tests or the memorization of efficient essay outlines for AP Exams, well-intended teachers all over the country daily feel pressure to design their classroom around moving students to excel within traditional styles of writing, particularly essays. Add in “best practices” like graphic organizers and exemplars—sometimes even written into individual student learning plans and thereby legally mandating that teachers create and utilize them—along with over-sized classrooms and considerable gaps in reading and writing within almost all of them, and it should not take much imagination to consider how quickly “teaching students to write” becomes “teaching students to write a specific way.”
The intentions are good, too, as Jim and I discussed in our most-recent podcast. The ability to communicate within normed methods from professional emails to standardized essays is a skill that unquestionably benefits students. For example, AP graders are moving through each student essay, for example, in less than a minute, and adhering to the expected structure heightens your chance at a higher score that could directly result in college credit.
And there’s also a pragmatic admission from the teacher perspective: focusing on a specific method of writing repeatedly throughout the year works, at least as far as getting students to be more successful at that writing. It is easier to direct various resources and scaffolds, re-teach when necessary, and continue “looping back” again and again to reify and strengthen the norms of a traditional style (ex: “thesis + body paragraphs + conclusion” essay format).
My lesson from this year, though: that’s not enough.
Realizing that lesson is entirely different from manifesting it within the classroom, however, especially given the many aforementioned barriers that can keep a teacher from doing so.
That said, looking back I’m very proud of the different ways I was able to push against the gravity of centering the classroom around a specific type of traditional writing over the past year:
In both of the courses I teach, we used the second semester of last school year to push beyond the “standardized” focus of the first semester (which I had, in hindsight, over-prioritized to “make up for online learning loss”)—and this included bringing in choice-based writing projects. For example, for one class’s independent reading project, they had the option of re-writing their book in a different form, such as an extended poem; in another class, they could create their own "graphic novel” interpretation of what they read.
We also elevated narrative writing in our classroom community as more than just a “one-off” activity, which happens far too often at the high school level, offering students various exemplars, time to fully move through the project, and then space to read and affirm the writing of their peers afterwards.
For AP Literature, we then used the final stretch of the year for a quite-different writing experience that asked students to synthesize several different genres into one project—and it was a phenomenal experience that I can’t wait to build on this upcoming May and June!
And in mapping out this current school year, I didn’t want to make the same mistake of front-loading one specific type of writing, so our calendar looks far more diverse as far as the genres students write. Here is a glance at what that looks like for one of my courses:
The “menu” for the year: Focused Literary Analysis (fiction) and then Flash Fiction and then Novel Literary Analysis and then Narrative Poem and then another Focused Literary Analysis (poetry) followed by Synthesis, an AP-prep writing experience, and then the previously-mentioned multi-genre project.
Going back to this initial lesson I’m trying to live out more and more: it’s my job as a teacher to make sure students write differently.
This also means that the “how” needs to shift, too, especially with artificial intelligence sure to make a considerable impact (I know, enough already, Marcus!) in the year ahead. This is why I’ve tried recently to inject more metacognitive writing into our classroom, too, and will lean even further into that in 2023 and beyond.
I still have a lot of work to do in this area, too—and this will be a major emphasis in my next post about how I intend to get better going forward!—but looking back at the way my classroom shifted in 2022, offering students many more opportunities to write in different meaningful ways?
That was a win, and something I’m really proud of.
Learning #2: It’s My Job as a Teacher to Align the Values of Our Classroom Community with How We Spend Our Time
Near the end of my conversation with Jennifer Gonzalez at The Cult of Pedagogy in Spring 2022, she asked a powerful question regarding the “why” behind our narrative poem gallery walk. My response?
“I think about this constantly: ‘How are you allocating time in your classroom?’ Because as teachers we have a position of power, and it’s really important to be intentional about how we distribute the time.”
Thinking back on my own career, this is the two-fold lens I wish I had started holding myself accountable to far earlier:
Reflecting on and then being transparent about what my values for our classroom community were
Then looking at the way time itself was allocated within our own classroom—and reconciling any gaps that I could.
At the beginning of last school year, I had already begun to reconcile this issue much more intentionally, too, with our weekly SEL mindmapping and a return of celebrating student writing regularly—after nearly a year of Zoom learning, this was a major, important step forward.
Yet going into this current school year, I made two further adjustments to respond to this even more intentionally—and I’m really grateful about this choice:
The first value-driven shift: student rosters with values in each spiral.
One of the teachers on our 10th grade team gave me the idea of adding a class roster in each spiral to build community this year—and considering my own goal of leaning more into the idea of a value-driven classroom, I decided to add in one additional step: having students take notes on their classmates’ top values.
To be incredibly clear: this means that in each spiral notebook in our classroom community, a student has a complete list of their classmates alongside a complete list of their classmates’ most important values.
(Here is the lesson we use to get the list in the first place, if that’s helpful!)
Beyond the symbolism of this value-driven system of our classroom community, I’ve also found it helpful as a tool to come back to again and again throughout the semester—and one I very much plan on re-visiting as we move into a new semester (and many classrooms shift as far which students are in which period).
The second value-driven shift: adopting a new inquiry model for classroom
I’ve written before about and will continue to heap praise onto—into perpetuity, likely!—Marisa Thompson’s TQE method of analysis, which I cannot recommend highly enough to consider for your own classroom!
But why I want to include this here is that my motivation to seek out this new system in the first place was a direct response to regular student surveys on our classroom core beliefs. Out of our five classroom core beliefs last year, the lowest-rated was around the idea of curiosity:
The average student rating was still relatively high (3.9/5.0) but considerably below all other core beliefs, which solidly scored in the 4.0 and above range. That led me to spend the summer looking into different systems, having conversations with Marisa around how the system worked in her classroom (a result of her incredible generosity to dialogue with a random teacher who reached out!) and craft a way to embed this system into our classroom community going forward.
The results have been incredible, but for me they also all are a visible, daily reminder of how our classroom community is designed to reflect the values built into every facet of it—from desk decals to the syllabus to our classroom walls, we make visible our core beliefs as a tool of teacher accountability more than anything.
This is a deep conviction I hold as a teacher: name your values so that others around you—especially students—can hold you accountable to them.
2022 was a good year for that in our classroom space, and I’m proud of this step forward.
Learning #3: It’s My Job as a Teacher to Be Transparent About Choices as Well as Constraints With Students
Over the last month, I thought a lot about what word or phrase I would use to define education in 2022, and I landed on this two-word phrase: “Unacknowledged Constraints.”
In education, there are many constraints that obstruct or obscure the ideal vision we are working towards. I won’t take the time here to exhaustively list them all, as I will instead rely on the assumption that, if you know, you know. (Especially if you’re a teacher.)
That has always been the case—yet what I feel has been different this year is my recognition of how adamantly some people in education choose to not acknowledge these constraints. The intentions for this can be good (ex: a pragmatic focus on "what can be controlled” rather than what cannot) or not-so-good (ex: toxic positivity that refuses to name and discuss downsides or problems), but the end result? Taking the constraints already there are exacerbating their harm upon those doing the work.
Teachers as well as students.
In 2022, then, I made the conscious choice to not repeat this pattern in my own classroom nearly as much as I had before, and I tried to do this by a) being open about constraints in my own space and b) being transparent about choices I made with my power as a teacher—and then asking for feedback from students about these choices.
As teachers we are very aware of the constraints in front of us, but often we share them with students only after something has happened in which we need to be open about our limitations—and one way I’ve tried to invert this dynamic is by sharing student feedback with students and discussing my own lens as a teacher.
Above is an example of data I shared with students after asking them about the pace of our course through the first unit of instruction: when combining the two versions of the test, roughly 60% of students said the pace was “just right,” 30% of students said it was “a bit fast,” and 10% said it was “a bit slow.”
From my vantage point as a teacher, these are pretty good results! But I wanted students to see this data so that regardless of where they were at personally, they could have a visual reminder that many students sitting next to them had been experiencing the course differently.
Then the question: “Okay, let’s pretend you’re the teacher: with your group, come up with at least one thing you would do in response to getting this data?”
The following small-group conversations led to them sharing their own feedback with me whole-class—a great moment in our classroom this semester, and also one that gave me not only a handful of ideas/strategies, but some built-in trust, I think, in having been transparent with them in the first place.
The other shift I made at the end of last school year was to create space in the classroom for students to reflect upon and discuss course policies they had experienced—and to give feedback/suggestions for the next school year, even if they wouldn’t be in the class anymore.
For example, the screenshot of the slide above was from a conversation with 10th graders about our “No Late Penalty” policy. With this and other policies during the final month of school, we would go through a three-prong process:
Along with reviewing the actual policy, I would share my values-aligned reasoning for why I made that choice regarding the policy to begin the year
Students would then independently reflect on what choice they would have made as a teacher (and I offer them different potential choices to help guide this)
Then we moved from small-group to whole-class discussion on the policy, with me listening and writing down their feedback as well as following-up with a multiple-choice survey so I can collect data that way, too
Alright—so why do all of this?
As teachers, it is a very real constraint to try and meet different students in different places within the same classroom, from skill level to learning preferences to even classroom systems and policies—and this activity helped me acknowledge that constraint authentically, proactively and consistently with students
I also think there is honesty in acknowledging that often we as teachers have considerable power in choices we make—and not only is the transparency important here to build trust, but it also holds me accountable to making better choices going forward in knowing that I will once again be sharing and receiving feedback on these choices from students at the end of this school year.
I believe strongly that this is a better way for the classroom community to exist: teachers being open with constraints they face as well as the choices they make within them, and students having a chance to meaningfully have their voices heard in this process.
I can’t wait to do this even more in 2023.
Finally, Two More Learnings Beyond The Classroom
Before coming to a close in my “looking backward” reflection for 2022 as a teacher, there are two other learnings that I want to center:
First, maybe my most important self-learning this year was to be more generous to myself in how I showed up in our classroom community.
In full honesty, the arrival of baby #2 this past summer has been an even bigger adjustment to my teacher identity than baby #1’s arrival, especially as far as the very-real constraints of time and energy I have for the classroom. September this year immediately felt like the drudgery of October, and when October arrived, it felt like…well, you can imagine?
And yet, the classroom is still okay and the students are still amazing and even those lessons that didn’t get quite as much planning and revision still worked out and even the student writing that didn’t get quite as much feedback still got what it needed for meaningful growth moving forward. Yes, there were days that were hard and lessons that didn’t go quite as well as they potentially could have—but, in being fully honest with myself, every year there are those hard days and unsuccessful lessons.
Perhaps my biggest win of the year, then? Not just telling myself that all of this is okay—but actually, authentically believing it and accepting the generosity of spirit towards myself that is so important to being an impactful, positive teacher for the long term.
(Note to self: do not forget this in 2023 or any other year after.)
Then, of course, the second lesson that I was so appreciative to learn time and time again this year: we are better as teachers when we open ourselves up to the resources, ideas, and collaboration of other teachers.
This starts, without question, with my incredible school team—especially the teachers I get to collaborate with each day who have pushed me consistently to be a better version of myself in my own classroom, and then also especially the supportive, broader school culture that believes in us as teachers and empowers us to do what we believe is best for our classroom community.
I walk into our building with gratitude each day, and 2022 affirmed that gratitude countless times.
However, this gratitude also extends beyond my physical workspace to the online community that I’ve found the past year: to the countless back-and-forth’s with Jim on The Broken Copier podcast to numerous platforms that have helped with both the sharing and receiving of resources and strategies (especially Cult of Pedagogy, Teacher2Teacher and FutureMe.org) to the myriad, incredible educators I’ve been able to connect with on Twitter that have pushed my own thinking and expanded my perspective of what a classroom can and should be.
This work is community work, locally but also expansively, and I believe deeply in the sharing of resources as well as the critical dialogue we need to have as an education community. I’ve received so much from so many this year that has made my classroom better—and of course that is also why we have this Substack platform: to give back what we can, when we can, to the broader education community, too.
The moment this work becomes individual is the moment this work becomes constrained. And as I noted already, there are enough constraints already before the ones we create for ourselves and our students.
One More Final Gratitude:
When we started this Substack platform in the summer, we weren’t sure what it would look like as the year progressed—but now after hundreds of educators around the country have joined in, Jim and I are that much more excited about what this could be going forward.
As mentioned above, teaching is community work. Jim and I believe that to our core, so please don’t hesitate to let us know how we can make The Broken Copier even better in 2023! We always appreciate your feedback, ideas, and critiques, and hopefully we can do even more to bring myriad voices onto this platform.
Jim begins every podcast episode by naming that it is a “conversation about teaching,” and that conversation means so much more—both with the podcast as well as these posts—having all of your support and participation, and for that we are incredibly thankful.
(On that note, feel free to subscribe if you haven’t yet and also to continue sharing these posts and episodes in your circles, as we would love to continue building this Broken Copier community of readers and listeners even more in the year ahead!)
This will be the final post of 2022, so we wish you a happy New Year and cannot wait to continue this conversation and work in January.
Take care, get as much rest as possible, and buckle up for 2023!
—Marcus