The start of each school year is a very special time. I always feel that it is a better, fresher, newer start than January 1. On New Year’s Eve, we toast best wishes and make personal promises to be better people. We make resolutions about new beginnings–like starting and using a gym membership or eating healthfully.

Similarly, on the eve of the first day of school, we wish ourselves and our colleagues best wishes on a successful year and make promises to be better teachers. Often these resolutions involve helping all students succeed and maintaining our sanity.

I find two practices particularly helpful to start the school year with a better track record than I had with my last resolution (staying in shape)–it was just too cold last winter to go the gym!

REFLECTING

As I look forward to a new school year, I know that it is a new beginning and a chance to try again. I am a little more experienced and hopefully wiser. And though I’m looking forward to a new year, I have to begin by looking back. I have to reflect. Reflection on past units, past teaching, past behaviors and past outcomes is my first recommendation for a successful year. Here are a few ways that I reflect:

•Look at my past planning book: I like to remind myself of school meetings and testing dates, as well as the timing of lessons and units.
•Review notes I made on units: Throughout the year, I make notes to myself about the things that need updating on lessons including note sheets, mentor texts, and timing.
•Revisit relevant texts including professional literature: Often during the school year, I’ll read professional texts and place post-its at parts I like or want to re-read. At the beginning of the year, I revisit these sections because I can implement new strategies better at the beginning of the year.
•Enjoy keepsakes from past students: It has become a habit of mine to keep thank you notes from students in my writer’s notebook.

While much of my reflection at this point in the year is personal and based mainly on my teaching practice around lessons, I’ve realized that I can plan as much as I want to for my classroom, just as I planned to go the gym; however, plans cannot be carried out without modeling.

MODELING

Modeling expectations is another way important way to begin the year.  For example, a workout buddy could have helped me get to the gym–modeling is inspiring. Likewise, a lesson on expectations for notebook setup can show students the habit of daily work in their writer’s notebook. In the first weeks of school, I model all expected behaviors. I will not hesitate to tell you that I model everything from what entering our classroom looks like to what good readers do while reading.

But I didn’t always model expectations. One particularly poignant example of this failure happened mid-year after I attended a writing workshop. I left the workshop excited and armed with great teaching language like, “Write what needs to be written.” In class the next day, I told the kids, “take some time to write what needs to be written.” I also added that I would write while they wrote. Sitting down to write, I realized I had twenty-five students staring at me. One hesitantly raised his hand and asked, “What should we write about?” With a bit more explanation, they wrote, but the outcome was stilted and weak. Little writing was produced, and it had little value in terms of genre and topic. I realized that I needed to model what this work could look like in our classroom.

Now, I start the year with these explicit lessons:

•Notebook setup – pages, labels, table of contents, etc.
•Writing strategies (Interludes and Strategies for Generating Notebook Entries)
•Writing choices
•Reading strategies (choosing books, reading expectations, thinking work)
•Reading choices

These lessons help my students to see expectations, achieve excellence, and consider opportunities. They also begin to build a framework for later work in my classroom. Early in the year, students’ work will generally resemble mine in length, topic, and form, but with more practice and more modeling, their work becomes individual, useful, unique, and skilled. They quickly realize that not everyone’s work looks the same. Modeling classroom expectations has helped my students become more successful and independent.

Considering how I use modeling and reflection in my classroom, I want to transfer this success to my gym resolution with the start of this new year. I am going to go to the gym when there are scheduled classes. My reflection on my past attendance shows me that I do well when things are planned and part of a routine. I do better with these classes because an instructor models a good workout. With continued practice this year, my teaching and my resolutions will be more successful. I also realize that the nice thing about these recommendations is that it’s never too late to start. Reflect today and model tomorrow.

Amy Gurney is an 8th grade Language Arts teacher for Bloomfield Hills School District. She was a facilitator for the release of the MAISA units of study. She has studied, researched, and practiced reading and writing workshop through Oakland Schools, The Teacher’s College, and action research projects. She earned a Bachelor of Science in Education at Central Michigan University and a Master’s in Educational Administration at Michigan State University.

photo by Joe Gall

The 2014-2015 school year came in like a flood…literally.  My school’s entire first floor was flooded as the surrounding communities were during the great summer storm.  My room is located on the 2nd floor, but because the gutters were so overwhelmed, the windows leaked and my room flooded too.  Needless to say, I needed a new floor and was not able to get into my classroom for set up until Labor Day with the students coming the next day!  Talk about stress and anxiety about going back to work.  I was in a panic about my room, about my new kids, and even about my new principal.  Once I tired myself out from all the worry, I realized that as much as I wanted to be the “in control of all things Mrs. Kraiza,” that is not always possible. And that is okay.

I took a step back to remind myself that cultivating student relationships is just as important, if not more important than sitting at my desk lesson planning curriculum.  Here are some small, simple ways that I connect with my students all year long:

• Hall duty: I greet my students at the door every day and every hour.
• I have students sit at tables so I can easily wander the room and check in with them at various points in the lesson.
• I do not spend first days of school going over rules and expectations;  we deal with each issue as it comes up by holding a class meeting and using students as models for what is expected.  Students also model what not to do as well!
• We do icebreakers in class, such as line-up, two truths and a lie and anything else I can think of to get students talking and connecting with me and each other.  There are hundreds of icebreakers to be found on the web, especially on places like Pinterest.
• When they write, I write.  When they share their writing, I share my writing.
• I take pictures of the things we do in class and of the students.  I also take the occassional selfies with students too!  The good stuff, I post on my classroom website for kids to look at, as well as use them in video presentations to share with students, staff, and parents.
• I ask students questions about their day, their likes, their weekend, their mood, and anything else that seems important to them.
• I give hugs, high fives, and fist bumps.
• I am not afraid to make myself look silly or old-fashioned for the sake of connecting with my students.  This is especially true when referring to cultural references and the newest “thing” the kids are into.

These relationship builders are everlasting, and the students remember the effort that I make to connect.  It makes being with the students in my classroom fun and lively.  This human connection makes both me and my students more committed to being at school.  I don’t think we can survive the year without this crucial component.

The floor of my classroom was finally put in, the furniture arranged, and the posters put up.  When the first day of school came and the kids entered my room, I saw that they looked to me, not the decorations in the room to set the tone for the year.  We are in it to win it, and I will continue to build upon those oh-so-important relationships.  Of course, I am frazzled playing catch up with planning, data teams, starting a classroom website, and a new sponsorship, etc. But I remind myself that I just need to let the new year flow over me as the rain waters flowed in and out of our building.  It will all come together, but my relationship with my students will always come first.

Lisa Kraiza teachers eighth grade English Language Arts at Oak Park Preparatory Academy.  She is also a member of the Core Leadership Team of the Oakland Writing Project.

I am in a play. It’s an Avondale Schools staff and alumni production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town.  My role is Doc Gibbs.  I have never acted or been part of theater company, but I was asked by a colleague to take a risk and show my students I wasn’t afraid to step outside the usual role of teacher. I was intrigued. I accepted the invitation.

Yes, teaching can be a kind of theater, but not like this. I walk on stage and say things that someone else wrote. I move in ways meant to suggest this character is me. The director is gently nudging my performance in ways that help me communicate who this character is–what he feels when he doesn’t say what he feels. The director is giving me things to do with my hands so I won’t keep touching my face, telling me where to look and how to stand so the audience can see what I’m doing. It feels odd…unnatural.

Writing is also an unnatural act. Human beings have a voice box that evolution has designed to create speech. It’s unique to us. We have no such organ designed for writing. Speech is natural; writing is not. I encountered this idea in a piece by Dylan B. Dryer, a professor at the University of Maine. He contends that when measured against the naturalness and ease of speech, writers tend to judge their efforts harshly. This idea was banging around in my head when I took up the script of Our Town to learn my lines.

In Act One, my character, Doc Gibbs, has two scenes with boys. He teases the paperboy in one and later leads his son George to feel guilty that a chore he should be doing is being done by his long suffering mother. In real life, I am the father of two boys, so this scene should feel natural. I’ve both teased and guilted my boys. But, as I rehearsed the lines and blocked out the scene, it felt awkward. A natural conversation becomes unnatural when spelled out and scripted. Shouldn’t acting be easier? Am I being too hard on myself here?

For years I approached teaching writing as though it were natural, as natural as speaking. I exposed students to “good writing,” provided models and rubric, and gave instruction. But the idea at the core was that the ability to write well was buried somewhere inside of my students and by my efforts, it would be awakened–this dormant, but natural, ability. After all, they can speak in sentences and that skill developed because they were spoken to, or were near other speakers. They learned by osmosis or proximity. The same should hold for the written word. I thought good writing would rub off on my students the way good or bad habits of speech do. I considered writing a natural act, and I taught it that way. To be fair, this is how I was taught. Some of my students did become good writers, but most didn’t. They didn’t simply move from speaking to writing with a bumpy transition period. It was frustrating for them and for me.

I wanted to be a better teacher, so I started working through different approaches and models. I pieced things together, tried, and failed and attempted to learn from my efforts. Gradually, I got better, but when I encountered the idea of writing as unnatural it crystallized for me. Of course my early efforts were misguided. My expectations were based on a false premise. Writing habits aren’t something my students could naturally adopt because writing is unnatural. Before I came to this idea, I looked at writing the way I might’ve looked at something natural, say walking. My students needed needed help standing: so I gave them a framework to lean on, the 5 paragraph essay, until they got steady. They leaned on these complicated rubrics and paragraph models that looked like a set of Ikea instructions. But their writing was mechanical and clumsy and bore no resemblance to the writing we read and they liked.

When children first begin walking, their motion is graceless and jerky.  But at some point it becomes natural and fluid. They don’t think about it. The gait is natural and no one can say when this happens. I was waiting for that same natural transition in my students’ writing, but it rarely came. Most of them continued to lean on the frameworks I’d given them, and as a result, their writing was mechanical, clumsy, and lacking voice. When I stripped those crutches away, expecting the transition from mechanical to fluid, they fell and got frustrated. Writing isn’t like walking or speaking. I needed to think of it as unnatural, like dancing or singing, where the moves and techniques are broken down and rehearsed until they become, not natural but second nature.

Realizing that writing is not natural changed the way I approach teaching it. It isn’t an ability to be awakened any more than a father’s ability to talk to his son. It is a habit that is developed.  With this in mind, I find it easier and more natural that we should have to work so hard at writing and teaching writing. My students and I participate in the unnatural act of writing together. I keep a writer’s’ notebook and write with them, sharing my own frustrations with this unnatural activity. Unnatural activities have to be made less uncomfortable and that can happen by simply acknowledging the difficulty, not from without as a “teacher” of writing, but as member of the struggling writing community. It involves taking risks by making our thoughts and habits public. In this way, acting and writing feel oddly similar. I didn’t know I touched my face when I was nervous until I had to communicate a character to an audience from the stage, and I didn’t notice my love of alliterative language until a reader of my writing pointed it out to me. Turns out, both habits are distracting.

It’s my job as a teacher to take this act of writing and help my students see the small moves inside of it. Writing doesn’t have to be a big frightening act. It can be a series of small decisions about what word to choose or where to break a line or the choice to hint at something rather than say it outright. It isn’t easy. It isn’t natural, but as we uncover ways to break down the discomfort and pursue goals with our writing, it gradually becomes a habit.

Rick Kreinbring teaches English at Avondale High School in Auburn Hills, Michigan. His current assignments include AP Language and Composition and AP Literature and Composition. He is a member of a statewide research project at Michigan State University concentrated on improving writing and peer feedback and has presented at the national Advanced Placement convention and the National Council of Teachers of English convention. He is in his twenty-third year of teaching and makes his home in Huntington Woods.