Your Best School Year Ever IS Possible!
How will you use your blank slate?
I love the start of the school year because it provides a truly blank slate for us to transform our practice and chart a new direction with our students.
It’s easy to get stuck in replicating “what’s been done before” because it “worked.”
But I would challenge you to lean into the space of possibility that a new year provides.
You may see many articles at this time of year espousing “best practices.” These often claim that a universal set of principles will create uniform results. These “tips” are really concerned with perpetuating the status quo of traditional education.
But if you’re reading this post, chances are you’re committed to disrupting, innovating, and putting students in the drivers seat of their education.
You’re not looking to make your teaching look like everyone else’s, you’re working to develop skills and habits to deepen your own unique practice.
To that end, there are seven key habits which, in my practice, have been critical levers to transform my pedagogy, meet the needs of all my students, and disrupt the traditional status quo.
Do the work you assign of your students
This was a revolutionary suggestion in the early days of my career.
I was giving assignments which mirrored the ones I had been given in my traditional high school and wondered why I was getting such low engagement. It wasn’t until I wrote the essay I assigned that I realized that the work I was asking students to do was boring, did not meaningfully challenge them, and did not meet their developmental needs.
It radically changed the way I teach. If you’re curious about this transformation, I wrote about it in a previous post!
Engage in regular student listening sessions
I continue to be amazed that if you ask students what they’re thinking and feeling, they will tell you!
As educators, we sometimes get into the mindset of saying “my students said X, but I know what they really want/need.”
We must move away from this thinking and recognize that in a system of education that is designed to foster human development, the student is the one who knows themselves the best.
We must listen deeply to students if we want to make our schools more humanizing.
I hold regular student listening sessions to discuss anything and everything pertaining to their experiences at school. Shane Safir and Jamila Dugan go into this in detail in their incredible book, Street Data: A Next-Generation Model for Equity, Pedagogy, and School Transformation.
Holding student listening sessions doesn’t mean that we need to implement everything students ask for, because that may not always be feasible. But if we create forums where we are willing to truly listen and improve our work as adults, then our students will develop relationships with us based on trust and mutual respect.
Utilize METIC: Mid-Term Effort To Improve Class
This is a technique I learned at the Exeter Humanities Institute at Phillips Exeter Academy. It is incredibly simple in its implementation and transformative in its application.
I ask students to write silently for a few minutes on the following three questions
How are we doing in building an interdependent community of learning? Cite specific examples
What can Andrew do to make the class better?
What can you do, individually, to make the class better?
Once every student has something written I leave the room and allow the students to have a discussion about the questions. They are responsible for synthesizing their thoughts as a collective and reporting their ideas back to me, so no student will be singled out for their feedback.
Skeptical colleagues have worried about this approach in the past.
“What if they don’t have the conversation and just joke around while you’re not in class?”
“What if it turns into a criticism session and the feedback isn’t meaningful?”
I’ve never run into these problems because students know that not only is this a serious topic of discussion, they also know that I take their feedback seriously and work to implement it.
When working with a new group of students, the first METIC may be a bit light on suggestions.
But once students see that I actually take their suggestions and meaningfully implement them, METIC’s become much more productive, because students know I’m invested in their learning and aren’t afraid to ask for what they need.
The purpose of a METIC is also for the class to consider their role in creating an interdependent learning community.
Sometimes these can be difficult conversations where we discuss why some students aren’t meaningfully participating. In these conversations, it’s not me who is trying to compel each student to engage; it’s their peers who are saying: we need you in order to make this class the best it could be!
Hold high expectations for all (including the adults)
I’ve been in many faculty meetings where someone launches into a “kids these days” conversation. Often, it’s around cell phone usage.
I am not going to argue that we shouldn’t be concerned with technology use in our schools. But nearly every time I hear the “kids these days” trope, there is almost always an adult doing the exact thing that we are reprimanding young people about.
There are many times that I’ve seen an adult get frustrated at a student for their phone use in school while the adult uses their phone in school regularly.
We need to hold high expectations of citizenship and civility for our young people. But we also need to be honest with ourselves about whether (or not) we are meeting the same standards.
Give grace for all (including the adults)
A community with high expectations is critical. While we all aspire to meet high expectations, we won’t always meet them.
Psychologist Ross Greene is famous for his phrase “kids do well when they can.” If there’s a reason that a young person is not meeting the standards of the community, it’s not because the student is lazy, unmotivated or (insert negative adjective here).
It’s because they have an unmet need or an undeveloped skill to meet a challenge in their life. We must hold our young people with the grace to know that we will help them back up when they stumble.
We need to do the same with adults. We cannot fully demonstrate grace with our young people unless we show grace to ourselves.
A human-centered school means we need to hold the whole humanity of the adults too!
Read!
Find the practitioners, visionaries, and authors who will push your work to the next level and take in as much of their work as you can. This has been the single most important factor in my development as an educator.
For internet publications, I recommend checking out The Human Restoration Project, Nomadic Notes, Stimpunks, and Breaking the Paradigm.
For books, these are some of my favorites:
Street Data: A Next Generation Model for Equity, Pedagogy, and School Transformation by Shane Safir and Jamila Dugan
Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life by Peter Gray
The Best Class You Never Taught by Alexis Wiggins
Rethinking Rubrics in Writing Assessment by Maja Wilson
Trust Kids! Stories on Youth Autonomy and Confronting Adult Supremacy edited by carla bergman
Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead) edited by Susan Blum
Don’t forget to laugh!
We are in the business of supporting positive human development.
This is daunting, serious work. We will strive to get it right as best we can.
But sometimes, we will get it wrong.
We cannot be afraid to break the wall of seriousness that often surrounds academic and laugh with our students.
When I used to teach middle school, my secret was that the things which would make other teachers get angry would make me laugh.
My students and I would laugh it off and then get back to work. These moments are the gifts we give ourselves and our students in the relational, messy work of supporting human development.
It’s a new year- how will you transform your practice?
These are just the start of habits which have transformed my practice. What are you going to implement this year to change your learning environments for the better?
How will you make this the best school year ever?
Join The Enlightened Educator Project!
The Enlightened Educator Project is on a mission to to develop mindful, reflective, and resilient educators to make education more humanizing and sustainable for all.
If this resonates with you, we are looking for schools and individuals to join our cohort of educators who are building community and resilience together. Cohorts start in the Fall and Winter.
Check out our website at www.EnlightenedEducatorProject.org and learn more about our school cohort model here!
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1lE1Z3lQFkiZ9YZtPlvkSutdverMrBcz_/view?usp=sharing
