Cause for Celebration

We’ve reached the point where you can count the days remaining in the school year on the average person’s fingers. Exhaustion, fatigue, and perhaps delirium have set in. You and the students are racing one another out the door each day. Congratulations on making it through another year.

Before you roll down the windows and blast “School’s Out for Summer” on your stereo, take a moment to think back to August, when you first encountered this year’s crop of students. Think about what they were like back then. You looked at them and thought to yourself, “These kids will never be able to [insert name of thing you were supposed to teach them to do].” Now think about them today, about all the skills, abilities, knowledge, and competencies they have now that they didn’t possess at the beginning of the school year. You’ve got a lot to celebrate.

Don’t keep your celebration to yourself, though. Make sure your students know how far they’ve come. As students creep through the school year day-by-day, they may not realize all they’ve learned during that time. It’s like dieting (so I’m told); if you weigh yourself every day, you may not notice much change, but when someone sees you after being away for a while and comments on how much weight you’ve lost, it feels really good.

In the same way, students need us to point out to them how much they’ve grown during the time they’ve spent in our classes. Or at least they need us to prompt some reflection on their own progress. Maybe you’ve kept a beginning-of-the-year writing sample that they can compare to their current work. Perhaps you can show them a “hard” test from the first of school that they now find ridiculously simple. Making a list of all the new learning from throughout the year can bring about a satisfying sense of accomplishment.

Celebrating successes, big and small, ought to be happening all year long; it’s a key to motivation. At the end of the year, though, celebrating growth can plant a seed that will lead to continued growth and curiosity in your subject area. Leave students feeling successful, and they will hunger for future success.

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.