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.
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