Opening Video, 2019-2020

Start of the School Year

The 2019-2020 school year is right around the corner.  In just over two weeks, you will be standing in front of your students for the first time making the first impression that hopefully lasts the semester.  My hope is that you can use the information in this post to help shape your instruction and activities in the first three days of school. 

Over the course of the last two school years, we've done a lot of work studying trauma informed care and using proper techniques to help reset students to get them back on track.  One of the biggest things that we've learned is that it's not always about us.  With that knowledge, we need to prepare for those first days planning on modeling excitement for being here, while knowing we may not get that same excitement back.  For many students, the first day of school marks the return to routine, which can be a significantly difficult transition.  Keeping that in mind, we have to plan for how to overcome those obstacles.  Please take in to consideration some of the following tips on starting the school year off right and setting the tone you want in your classroom and we want at Lincoln Park High School.

No Rules

Instead of going over rules for your classroom on the first day, consider presenting them as tips to be successful.  Explain and model what quality group work looks like in your classroom.  Show them what being prepared for a lecture, or an assignment looks like.  How does small group instruction in your classroom look?  Make sure all of this is clear, but don't present it as a set of rules in the classroom

Physical Space

What in your classroom expresses your enthusiasm to be here and helps students to feel comfortable?  How do students know, from the layout of your room, that they are safe there?  Consider creating a space for students to go when they need a break.  Provide them with fidgets, a comfortable seat, some way to express their feelings and set guidelines early for why and how students should use this space. 

Consider Your Tone

We know that what we do and say can effect each student in different ways because of their past experiences.  Be conscientious of your tone and try to lower the volume and pace of your talk (I need to work on this!).  Give the proper wait time and opportunities to respond and ask their own questions. 

Help Students Feel Seen

Greet students at the door with a handshake and a smile and welcome them to your classroom.  Plan an activity that is going to help students feel like you wanted to get to know them by the end of the period.  When students leave your classroom on Wednesday, what feeling will they have about how you feel about them?  What opportunity have you given students to share about themselves?  Students stay in school and are successful when they have connections to an adult.  What can you do to make that connection early?

No Assessments

We only have one opportunity to set the tone of excitement and learning in the classroom and we don't want to ruin that by giving students often meaningless pre-assessments that require them to sit quietly, have no bearing on anything, and makes kids feel behind.  Don't give any assessments in the first three days of the school year.  Testing for growth purposes only sends the wrong message at the beginning of the year.  We are going to have some more changes for how we are calculating growth in another post, but for now, stay away from these tests the first week of school. 

Mindset

Finally, pay extra attention to your mindset as we begin the school year, especially when considering student behavior.  I'd like to challenge you to consider the difference between the following two statements;

* Kids act out because they want attention. 
* Kids act out because they need attention.

The first statement tells us that a student is making a choice regarding their behavior.  It makes their actions about us, our mindset tells us that they are doing something intentionally to disrupt or hurt us.  With this mindset, we fall back on the desire to have this student removed, sending the message to the student that someone else needs to solve their problems and we can't. 

In the second statement, our mindset helps us to recognize that a student's behavior is a way of communicating a need.  With that mindset, we can work together as professionals to meet the needs of the students so that their behavior can change as their needs do.  Students can see us working to help solve their problems and as being an invested party in their well being. 

Think about those perspectives and what message you want to send as you start the school year and develop the routines for your classroom.  Is your classroom somewhere where students can work through barriers with the support of their classmates and teachers, or one where they have to avoid them until they get somewhere else?  We have made great strides here in and many of you have made sacrifices in order to get your students where they need to be.  Let's keep working together to make sure that's the case in every classroom and every other space in our building.