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.  

Two Ideas to Let Steep During Your Summer Break

One of the joys of summer during my childhood was sun tea. There was something especially wonderful about filling a big jar with water, dropping in a few tea bags, and letting the tea steep in a sunny spot in the backyard for the afternoon. A tall glass of sun tea with a sprig of mint snipped from the garden and a squeeze of fresh lemon surpassed the quality of traditional boiling-water-brewed tea and, not surprisingly, the instant Nestea or Lipton varieties. Perhaps the difference was merely in my brain, but I’d like to think that allowing the tea to brew slowly over a long period of time produced something superior.

Ideas are a lot like that. The ones we let steep for a long time are often better than the ones we cook up in a jiffy. When I have a problem to solve, I often find it’s useful to let it marinade over time rather than try to solve it in an afternoon. The summer is the perfect time to passively ponder over something that you can put into place at the beginning of the new school year.

If you don’t already have a burning question you hope to ruminate over during your vacation, I have two suggestions of topics that, because of their complexity, might not present easy answers at first but could transform your teaching practices in the fall if you had an opportunity to think about them in depth:  the state of your gradebook and your classroom expectations.

The State of Your Gradebook       

Grading has been a hot topic in recent years, and, if the chatter I see in my Twitter newsfeed is any indication, it’s not going away anytime soon. There’s a call for change in schools because people have realized that our long-held practices about grading don’t accomplish what grading is supposed to.

Your gradebook should do more than just provide a numerical proclamation of a student’s performance in your class. The numbers are meaningless unless your gradebook provides worthwhile, usable information about a student’s progress toward mastery of objectives in your class. This means that every entry— major or minor— communicates to students and parents what a student does or does not know or know how to do. This also means that things such as “completion” grades and “participation” grades need to go. Teachers embracing gradebook reform have to rethink what their gradebook looks like, what constitutes a meaningful grade, how many grades need to be taken, when and how students can redo an assignment to reach mastery, how this intersects with the district’s curriculum, and what this looks like in a teaming situation with multiple teachers teaching the same class on a campus. Such change will certainly necessitate discussion among teachers and administrators and some re-education of students and parents.

Wrapping my head around this boggles my brain because it’s hard to unlearn something that was a part of my upbringing in the school system as well as my accepted practice for decades of classroom teaching. I’m convinced, though, that it’s time for a change, and this is something I might need a summer to ponder to figure out for myself.  

Clarifying Classroom Expectations

A second thorny topic has to do with classroom management. Once upon a time, I’d spend hours over the summer devising a new set of rules and consequences to be unveiled on the first day of school to a new crop of future offenders. What behaviors are unacceptable? How many times should a student be allowed to leave the room and for how long? How many warnings occur before something terrible happens? How will I display my rules and consequences so my students will know what dreaded fate awaits them if they violate my policies? Should I underline the word “not” each time it appears on my list of rules, put it in boldface, italicize it, or do all three?

The reading I’ve been doing lately on the subject of classroom management says that punishment it out and expectations are in.

Effective teachers teach students the behavioral expectations for each activity that occurs in their classroom: how to enter and leave the room, what to do when the tardy bell rings, what reading time looks and sounds like, what happens during group work, what to do when you finish an assignment early, and what to do if you have a question or need assistance. At the beginning of school, teachers communicate, practice, and model these expectations, and then they hold their students accountable for them consistently throughout the year, reteaching as necessary and reinforcing the desired behaviors as they observe them.

What this means is that I need to spend some time clarifying my expectations for myself. What situations are likely to occur in my room, what do I want the students to be doing in each instance, and how can I communicate those most clearly to my students at the beginning of school? Setting up clear procedures at the outset is the best way to have a classroom that functions smoothly throughout the year, and that requires clarity in the mind of the teacher. I’d let that one brew over the summer so I have a clear picture in my mind when it’s time to go back to school in August.

Sun tea doesn’t take a lot of work or effort to make, but the result is worth the wait time. Similarly, having an idea in your head— one of the ones I suggested or one you’ve dreamed up yourself— gives you something to ponder in a low-stress environment, the kind where the best ideas develop slowly over time without a lot of conscious work on your part. Maybe you’ll have some inspiration and clarity in a moment of unconscious reflection that will pay off for you in the fall.  

I just read on the internet that sun tea might harbor deadly bacteria because the water doesn’t get hot enough to kill the bad microbes in your tea. So don’t get so gung-ho about the nostalgia that you poison your family and friends. Maybe you could enjoy a snowcone instead. The metaphor isn’t as good, but at least it won’t kill you.

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.