Your New? Your Better? Your Stronger?

a back-to-school reflection for educators (and my own answers!)

Managing expectations going into a new school year is always a tricky juggling act as a teacher.

Too many and too ambitious? A recipe for feeling overwhelmed far too quickly and sometimes even disillusioned.

That’s no good.

But not enough? Nearly as inevitable of a path, I think, to a place where at best you are holding stubbornly, if not desperately, onto a type of status quo.

If that.

So here I am looking at yet-another school year (#13!) and trying to find the right way to be both hopeful and realistic as I step into it.

Which is how I arrived at these three questions to ask myself:

1. What is one thing I want to do new this year?

2. What is one thing I want to get better at as a teacher?

3. What is one strength I want to be even stronger?

Three questions that are really three lenses to look forward with and hold myself accountable for:

This three-fold reflection is what I filled out this past week for my own classroom going into the school year, and is what I then intend to return to at three check points as the year moves forward:

You can find my own reflection tracker here (and I’ll update it as the year moves forward) but I also made a blank template in case you want to join me in committing to a new, better, and stronger for this year!

The rest of this post, then? A more-complete reflection on what I want my new, better, and stronger to be in the classroom this year. Feel free to let me know what you think—and potentially to share your own in the comments, too!

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My New: More Intentional Openings and Closings

I wrote about this in a recent post, but last school year—especially in the second semester—I recognized how the closings of my lessons were far too inconsistent. Sometimes this was me talking right up to the bell. Sometimes this was students packing up too early. Sometimes this was ending on a fantastic point but then not leaving nearly enough time for students to process and reflect on that point.

Furthermore, I also found myself worrying sometimes that my lessons openings weren’t connected as directly as they could have been with my closings—and additionally at times worry that our core beliefs could have been centered more clearly in what we were doing daily.

How you begin and how you end matters, after all, right?

I think anyone observing my classroom wouldn’t necessarily notice it as much as I did, but it bothered me and, eventually, became the type of tidal force that abided by a separate gravity, one not aligned with what my own vision of the classroom intended, if I was being honest with myself.

So by summer break it was time to come up with a plan to do something about it.

What will “new” look like? I designed these two slide templates that I’ll use to begin and end each lesson: having students set intentions aligned with our classroom core beliefs and then close with a “takeaway” that asks them to revisit their opening intentions as well as our essential question.

Of course, this system is going to be much more dependent upon my own fidelity to it as a teacher—especially at the end of lessons, as I often find myself forfeiting timeliness in favor of spontaneous conversation and elaboration.

(Yes, this is particularly a sin of the English teacher. I know that.)

Still, I’m naming my own opening intention now as a first step in holding myself accountable—with the hope that my own takeaway will be that the classroom is better off for having named that intention going into this school year.

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My Better: Valuing Reading with More Level 1 Questioning

As Jim and I have debated in the past on the podcast, I am not a big fan of multiple-choice questions as a form of assessment. I think its limitations are undeniable and that this is particularly problematic if multiple-choice is the dominant form of assessing student learning in any classroom.

That said, I also recognize how it can be a formative tool that creates a pathway to the deeper, more-nuanced thinking that we want to arrive at in our classroom—and I think I need to do a better job this year leveraging that tool.

In recent years, I think I’ve tried to avoid focusing too much on “quizzing student reading” and assessing content knowledge of assigned books. There are logistical reasons for that (seriously: try balancing accountability quizzes for reading with our current attendance environment) but more importantly pedagogical ones, as I have a particularly strong bias against “reading the book” as the primary skill focus in an ELA classroom.

The answer to “What skill are students working on in your classroom?” should not be “We’re reading ________,” in my opinion.

That said, as can happen in life, I think my bias against Level 1 questioning and multiple-choice assessment has left me skewed too far towards the other side of the seesaw, leaving students adrift, legs dangling as they struggle to find footing without the content understanding they need to access the critical interpretation we are aiming for.

So what will “better” look like? First of all, I’m making sure to create time and space for check-in questions on the readings more often—mostly formative and sometimes just a list of true/false questions—to make sure students understand what happened before we start analyzing and discussing the why and how.

This also means holding myself accountable to making sure all students can take care of a Level 1 understanding of a text before we move forward as a class, and (don’t tell

Jim Mayers

I said this) leveraging multiple-choice assessment at times as a tool to build more efficient-and-effective accountability into our classroom environment.

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My Stronger: Focusing on Reflection as a Skill Itself

I’ll fully admit: I’m sort of a broken record on the importance of embedding reflection into the classroom for students. It has been an emphasis of mine for a few years and I feel really good about where we’ve gone in our classroom with it.

But something I know from other past “strengths” as a teacher: if I just leave them be, they sometimes stop being strengths.

So I tried to spend a bit of time this summer thinking about how I wanted to “level-up” what reflection looks like in our classroom, including in how I messaged and centered it (and with some serious brainstorming help from

Sara Candela

).

So what will “stronger” look like? I came up with this rubric that I will use myself in how I communicate and design reflection—and then will ultimately bring to students at specific points throughout the year for them to “self-reflect on their own reflection skills.”

More broadly, my goal is to message the value of reflection as a skill that translates beyond the classroom walls—and then to follow-through by continuing to create time and space for it within our classroom.

(And I’ll add: at a meta-level, this post and the new-better-stronger reflection practice is a way for me to live that out transparently as a teacher throughout the school year as well. So good job, Mr. Luther!)

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Finally: for those already back with students—good luck!

It has been energizing this week to see pictures of classrooms being set up and sharings of first-week-of-school activities—an energy I know I’ll need shortly once I’m back going through the same motions!

For now, though: I wish the best to those of you who have already returned.

I know it’s a marathon, but there really is nothing like that first week with students. Amidst all that is difficult and cynical and draining, hope always seems to find a way to emerge.

Look at that hope clearly, take a deep breath, and keep going!

(And take care of yourselves, too!)