Your End-of-School Checklist

With a little over a week to go before your summer break, you don’t have the time or the motivation to read anything too long or too thought-provoking from me, so this one is going to be short and sweet. It’s a checklist of 5 things I want you to do before you leave for the summer.

1.  Find a student who has worked hard and has improved in your class this year—not one who received the highest grade on his or her report card but one who should be proud for having come a long way. Privately let that student know that you are proud of his or her hard work and have noticed the improvement and growth. Students get so focused on grades that they don’t often feel validated or noticed for their progress. Be intentional about pointing it out and you might provide some momentum that carries over into the next year and beyond.

2.  Leave yourself a note somewhere where you will find it when you return to school in the fall. Tell yourself something nice and motivational, but, more importantly, remind yourself of something you want to make sure you remember to do differently next year to impact student learning or to help you maintain your sanity. The beginning of the school year can be a blur. Let this note be a reminder of what is most important to your wise end-of-school self that your harried back-to-school self needs to know.

3.  When you sign students’ yearbooks, don’t put comments about anything that reinforces a fixed mindset. Don’t write about how smart, creative, athletic, talented, or beautiful your students are. Those seem to imply fixed abilities that students either possess or don’t. Provide descriptive feedback about traits that are under their control and show the positive choices or qualities they have demonstrated. Most of the time, praising the behaviors you like to see when you see them brings them to the attention of the students and causes them value those behaviors in themselves.

4.  Say thank you to a colleague and to an administrator for something they do or have done to make your year better. Everyone likes to know they’re appreciated, and busy times are when people need to hear it most.

5.  Peruse the bookshelves at work and find one book you can read over the summer to help you grow professionally. Don’t take too many. You mostly need to read things for fun during your vacation, but a little professional learning during your break might give you some new ideas to start next year afresh. If you’re not a reader (yet you’ve managed to make it to bullet point 5 in my list), maybe you can commit to some professional learning online.

Thank you for all you do to improve the lives of students, to build community in your school, to change the trajectories of lives, and to support your fellow educators. Thanks for the late hours, the early tutorials, the after-hours event attendance, the feedback providing, the parent phone calls, the positivity, the perseverance, the problem solving, the patience, the planning, and the other duties as assigned. Your hard work and dedication make a difference. You are a hero.  

Enjoy a well-earned summer break.  

Riding Into the Home Stretch

Have you ever been on a horseback ride? I’m not talking about the kind where you take a horse from the barn and gallop freely through a meadow in whatever direction you please. I’m thinking of the ones where you and a whole crowd of other city slickers pay money to hop into a saddle and ride slowly in a long line of horses along a dusty trail in a loop that the poor animals have walked several times a day for years. The horses follow one another mindlessly out of the barn and know the path by rote. Riders have the illusion of control, and they receive instructions about how to slow down, speed up, and turn the horse by kicking gently or moving the reins. Ultimately, though, the horses are in charge. What these horses want to do—in my experience—is walk lethargically with their noses uncomfortably close to the backsides of the horses in front of them.  

There is a moment in such horse rides, however, when the horses realize that the stable is just around the bend. They start thinking about hay, oats, and water and about getting these annoying tourists off their backs. At that point, for the first time in the ride, the horses perk up and try to break into a trot—or perhaps a canter—to get back to the barn. This is the only time in the horseback riding experience where the rider has to make any effort to exert control because the horses have reached the home stretch and are determined to get this ride over with.

A similar phenomenon is occurring in schools across the country at this very minute. Students have realized that the end around the corner, and they are resisting all control as they gallop into summertime.

At this point in the school year, I have three pieces of advice for teachers (who, I hope you have realized, are the riders in this extended metaphor):

1.  Hold on. The last weeks of school can get pretty bumpy. Even the kids who usually make great decisions will do something stupid. Several are going to quit working altogether and try to scrape by, making end-of-the-year grades a nail-biter for you and for their parents. There will probably be a random pulling of the fire alarm or some other shenanigans. Things will be done that try your patience. Don’t freak out. Be the adult in the room. Someone needs to be thinking calmly and rationally, and it might as well be you. And the kids won’t be the only ones testing your fortitude. Your principal will probably add on some extra paperwork, a meeting or three, checklists, sign-out sheets, textbook inventories, goal conferences, and other end-of-school fun and games. Make a to-do list and check off tasks with a smile, knowing that there’s a break in your future. Don’t let stress overwhelm you. You’re not alone. Everyone is feeling it. Hold on, and you’ll get through.  

2. Maintain control. The state tests are over, the AP test party is coming to a close, and final exams seem further away than they are. But there is instructional time remaining, nearly three weeks’ worth. If you don’t fill the time with something worthwhile, you’ve (A) wasted some opportunities to teach your students things that will make them smarter, more skilled, or better prepared for whatever the world is going to fling at them in the future, and (B) inadvertently communicated the idea that the real purpose of school is to prepare students for the state tests.  The mentality that the rest of the year is playtime since the STAAR test is over harms students—and the teachers they will have down the road—by reinforcing the test-prep mentality and eradicating authentic learning. The last few weeks of school should be a time for students to pull everything together, reflect on the year’s growth, set goals for the future, and showcase what they have learned in your class throughout the year. It’s a time to enrich, to extend, and to move beyond the basic skills. It’s also a time to keep students busy; that’s the best way to keep them in control until the final bell rings on the last day of school and you send them out into the world. We only have a limited time with our students to help them become literate, functional, thoughtful, competent, independent adults. Shouldn’t we take advantage of every moment?  I’m all for letting students have some say in what they are learning and how they learn it, but they don’t get to decide that their choice is just to hang out and do nothing for the last three weeks of the year.  

3. Enjoy the ride.  Kids are awesome. That’s why we got into education, right? So don’t forget to take the time during these final weeks to enjoy your students. If you’re one of those people who doesn’t smile at the beginning of the year and has forgotten that at some point it’s okay to do so, now is probably the time to retire the frowny face. Don’t let your ever-growing to-do list turn you into a grumpasaurus. Laugh, especially when things get crazy.  Keep the pacing in class relaxed but productive. Form some happy memories. You don’t want your students’ final memories of you to be “that teacher who yelled at us until she broke a blood vessel in her neck the week before exams.”

I wish you a safe and enjoyable ride to the end of the school year and hope that you’ll leave with happy memories that will keep you coming back with renewed excitement for another lap next year.     

Your Teacher WICOR Summer Homework

As school draws to a close, here are my suggestions (using AVID’s WICOR acronym) for some relaxing summer professional development for those times when you want to think a little about work but don’t want to hunker down in full-throttle school-preparatory efforts. 

Writing:  Keep a journal of your summer travels or recording your daily thoughts in your off time.  In addition to allegedly being therapeutic, journaling allows you to flex your writing muscles, something we ask our students to do but perhaps don’t practice often enough ourselves.  If you get stuck about what to write, push through your writer’s block and just write something.  Then you’ll have empathy for what many of your students experience.   

Inquiry:  Make a list of interesting get-to-know-you questions that go beyond the usual where-were-you-born/do-you-have-any-hobbies variety.  Use Costa’s levels of thinking to craft some intriguing higher-level questions.  Cut the questions up into slips or write them on cards and put them in a jar that students can draw from throughout the fall semester for ice-breaking impromptu speeches.  It’ll be a fun way to get to know your students when school starts back up. Test them out on your friends or family one afternoon while you’re lounging around the pool or take your questions with you on a road trip. 

Collaboration:  Find a professional community online of other teachers who teach the same subjects or have similar interests and concerns as you.  Join a Facebook group, follow some Twitter feeds, or read some blogs.  Having others with whom to share ideas, solve problems, or brainstorm will enhance your effectiveness as a teacher and may even help you through some rough spots.  

Organization:  Evaluate the efficiency and effectiveness of your classroom routines. How do you manage materials?  Collect assignments?  Deal with discipline, requests for restroom breaks, absences, make-ups, and late work?  Do you communicate with students and parents in effective ways?  Sometimes our best ideas come when we identify an area for improvement and then give ourselves time to ruminate on a solution.  Identifying the problem areas early in the summer and jotting them down somewhere will start your brain thinking about how you’ll do it better in the fall.   

Reading:  Take home one professional development book from school and actually read it.  And then read a bunch of stuff for fun.  Write down the names of things you enjoyed and share them with your students or colleagues next year.  I recommend When Kids Can’t Read by Kylene Beers; Classroom Instruction that Works by Marzano, Pickering, and Pollock; What Great Teachers Do Differently by Todd Whitaker; The Gift of Failure by Jessica Lahey; and Overcoming the Achievement Gap Trap by Anthony Muhammad. For non-professional reading, I suggest Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng, The Storied Life of A.J. Fickry by Gabrielle Zevin, The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins, Better Nate Than Ever byTim Federle, the I Hunt Killers series by Barry Lyga, Far Far Away by Tom McNeal, and We Are Called to Rise by Laura McBride .

Of course, this homework is completely optional and will not be graded in the fall.  It might, though, help you be more prepared for what you’ll be facing when you return to school in August. I hope you have a restful and relaxing summer and come back refreshed and ready for a great school year.  

It's Never Too Early

It’s Never Too Early

or

What to Think About While You Are Actively Monitoring

It’s likely that at some point in the next few days or weeks you will have several hours during which you are contractually obligated to monitor students while they are undergoing their state-mandated testing. You’re not permitted to be on the computer or your phone; to read; to grade papers; to look at the students’ tests; to write anything; to talk; to listen to music on your headphones; to eat a noisy, stinky, or nut-laden snack; to stand still; to sit for long periods of time; to sneeze; to sigh audibly; to laugh (maniacally or otherwise); to hover over a student long enough to make him or her nervous, to sing; to hum; to line dance; to juggle; to yodel; to take the test yourself; to snap photos; to work a jigsaw puzzle; or to arrange flowers. You get to walk around and think silently and unobtrusively for four or more hours.

What will fill your thoughts during this time? Some of my friends like to complete math problems in their heads. A few compile statistics about their test takers, mentally calculating the percentages by gender, hair style, clothing choice, handedness, etc. Others spend time memorizing the names and ID numbers of the students testing in their rooms. Still others fantasize about what they’d do if they had to opportunity to meet the person who created this standardized test or the legislator who mandated that it be taken.

I have another suggestion.

It’s never too early to start thinking about beginning the next school year. In fact, right now--during this second horrible round of standardized testing--is the perfect time to fill your idle mind with visionary thoughts about what next August can look like.

As you are actively monitoring, think about how you feel about the year-in-progress. What has gone well? What could improve? What is driving you crazy?

Perhaps there’s a new initiative you’d like to try out and have been waiting for the perfect time to do so. Want to redo the way you’ve been starting or ending class? Have you recently become intrigued by the concept of Interactive Notebooks? Maybe you’re an English teacher who wants to launch a full-scale Reader’s or Writer’s Workshop. Or you’ve wanted to be more intentional about incorporating AVID WICOR strategies to engage your students.

By this time in the year, you can clearly see what your beginning-of-school preparations have spawned. Ideally, your students are still enthusiastic, engaged, on-task, risk-taking, controllable, and eager to learn (with just a touch of unavoidable “summeritis”). You might, unfortunately, struggle daily with students who are cantankerous, unruly, discouraged, distracted, and disengaged.       

One of the great things about teaching is that most teachers get a “do over” each year. You greet a new set of students who enter your classroom (and maybe your school) for the first time. The students are full of excitement and apprehension, and you have the opportunity to set precedents, to let them know how things run in your classroom, and to clarify your expectations. Students are malleable and trainable at the beginning of the year. Effective training, like most complex tasks, requires careful prior planning. That’s why it’s never too early to get started.  

Don’t wait until the last days before school starts to try to remember what you wanted to do differently this time around. Spend some time now making your to-do list for beginning next year. Please don’t spend your entire summer vacation planning and plotting for next year; you need and deserve plenty of downtime. But having the pre-made list at the ready will allow your mind to focus quickly on the ideas when August hits and it’s time to ramp up for another school year.

Right now, when you’ve got nothing to do but monitor your students, is the best time I can think of to start composing your mental list. You may even have the time to troubleshoot a few of the problems and work out the kinks in advance.

If you don’t want to think about next year, you can always start thinking about what to buy me for my birthday. It’s only 140 days away, and I’m allegedly difficult to shop for. It’s never too early to start planning.