Do you have your first day's lesson planned, full of content and complete with homework? Do you have the first few weeks of lessons ready, through at least the first unit of instruction? If you answered yes to either of these questions, I am going to ask you for a favor. On behalf of your students, I respectfully request you reconsider.
The message we send when we dive right into the content on the first day of school and give students homework to support the lesson is: Content is more important than you are. If we agree that Instructional Design is ineffective unless we know our kids, why would we communicate the message that content matters more than kids? Yes, all the minutes matter. Yes, we are responsible for ensuring all of our students master far too many content standards. Yes, we are under tremendous pressure to ensure our students perform well on accreditation assessments. And, as James Comer told us, "No significant learning can occur without a significant relationship." How do we reconcile this dichotomy and balance pressure & support, accountability & compassion, and expertise & relationships? To begin finding this balance, consider how you construct and design the first week of school. Recently, our school division (@vbschools) hosted its annual administrators' conference. This year's conference was titled #VBAmazing. One of the AMAZING messages conveyed by our superintendent, Dr. Aaron Spence* (@BeachSupe), was "Know Your Kids." The purpose of this post is to provide you with ideas on how you can make the First Week of school the most important learning you (and your students) will do all year. *That's him in the pic. Building Relationships and Community In Visible Learning (2009), John Hattie showed us the importance of Teacher-Student relationships (effect size of .72). During the first week of school, I encourage you to build relationships and classroom community by creating an environment where you get to know students, students get to know you, and students get to know each other. I would contend that the first step in building relationships with your students is to learn their names. There are a few techniques to use here. One, which is definitely next-level, is to use the previous year's yearbook to memorize your students' names and faces. I learned this from a colleague who I hold in high esteem. Although I never used this method with my own students, I did use it with teachers when I started as an administrator in my current assignment*. Instead, I used games I learned from Kema Geroux (@KemaGeroux). These games were part of The Challenge Works program that she used at the Ropes Course, Adventure Park, and the partnership opportunities we shared throughout the past 10 years. I was unable to locate the resources and directions to these games to link for your reference, but here are two places you can start (Place One and Place Two). If you are interested in using what I used, send me an email, and we can work through them ([email protected]). I recommend practicing a Fire Drill, and then staying outside to play your ice breakers, name-learning games, and high-energy community-builders. *When I was able to call teachers by their names when they came back for in-service week, it left a tremendous impression. Taking the time to learn and remember a person's name goes a long way. Just think of how it feels to you when someone you don't expect to know your name, does. Setting Expectations and Classroom Norms After getting to know the students and building community through these activities, set the expectations for the class. This is a good time to go over your Class Expectations forms. John Hattie showed us that Teacher Expectations has an effect size of .43 (Visible Learning, 2009). Then, an important and critical dialogue needs to occur. After going over class expectations, ask the students to work in small groups on the following:
Establishing and Practicing Routines and Procedures An often over-looked and important aspect of the learning environment is how we do things within the classroom community. In Visible Learning (2009), John Hattie showed us the effect size for Classroom Management (.52), and our routines and procedures are foundational to engage students in an effort to minimize the need to manage behaviors. As a recommendation, spend the first week practicing how you expect students to perform the following (just as a start):
Establishing Lines of Communication Be the first to contact your students' parents and make your first communication welcoming, positive, optimistic, and inviting of future communication. It is vitally important for your parents to know you love their children. Parents' children represent their hopes and dreams, and parents need to feel safe knowing that they send their children to a place where kids are loved, cared for, and challenged. Parental involvement has an effect size of .51 (Hattie, 2009), and the residual effects of engaging your parents, especially during the first week will contribute to a greater relationship between you and the students and parents. I encourage you to send a mass email to the parents of each student to introduce yourself, open the lines of communication, and invite them to your school's Open House. Using a Contact Group in the mass email will allow you to use consistent communication throughout the year, almost like a newsletter. I also recommend calling each of your student's parents during the first week of school to follow up that initial email with a personal touch. Time consuming? Yes. Rewarding? Absolutely. Creating a Learner Profile for Each Student Your view into a student's mind will be framed by how they express to you they learn best. Learning from a student about their experiences, their interests, their dreams, what works for them and what does not, and what they want you to know about them will guide how you interact with them, how you design instruction to meet their needs, how you engage them, and how you inspire them. As a way to build student voice and agency, use a small group of students to develop some of the questions on your profile inventory survey. If you want to know what students want you to know, just ask them. Administering a Pre-Assessment I would be re-miss if I did not include the most important content information to include in the first day/week of school: Pre-Assessment. You have to know what skills the students are coming to the class with, where they are in relation to pre-requisite knowledge, and what they might already know about the upcoming learning objectives. This must be administered before you design your first "content" lesson. Why? It is the final piece you need to plan for learning that puts kids first. This also provides you with baseline data you will use to set your own goals to reach for the year. As a parting shot, I strongly encourage you to not think of this work as an investment. Don't spend your first week of school building, setting, establishing, practicing, creating, and administering because you want to invest the time so that you are more efficient later or because you want to get the most out of your students' performance. Don't do this work because your superintendent told you to or because John Hattie told us the effect sizes for each of these. Instead, pour your heart into this work because you love kids and you care deeply about them. The outcomes you desire will follow, but it won't be because you "invested" in them; they will come because you started from a place of love. You only get one First Day and one First Week per school year. Make it count!
2 Comments
DBJudge
8/10/2017 12:34:06 pm
Chris,
Reply
Chris
8/11/2017 02:48:39 pm
Thanks, Dave! I appreciate your feedback and support, and I am happy you made a connection to your work!
Reply
Leave a Reply. |