It's the beginning of a new school year. You're excited about your incoming class and have all kinds of plans for starting the year off right. Just one thing stands in the way: a few weeks in, standardized testing looms.
Sarah was under the classroom work table again. "Sarah, now is the time for writing. You need to come out and start your work in your writing folder." I used my best teacher language, even though it hadn't worked with Sarah so far. She often shut down while the rest of her classmates transitioned to a new activity, and coaxing her to join the group rarely helped.
How much of the stuff that’s cluttering your classroom could be gone before school starts up again? Teachers keep all kinds of stuff we never use. Why do we keep these things? Lots of reasons: Scarcity of resources can turn us into hoarders. Or we engage in “someday” thinking, as in “Someday I’ll use those tissue squares for an art project.” Or people give us things (like a stack of egg cartons, or a pile of old magazines), and we feel bad about getting rid of them because they were gifts.
Early in my career as a school leader, I learned a great lesson: that as a principal, I needed to help children learn the skills that would enable the behavior their teachers and I wanted to see. As a teacher, I'd used myriad proactive and reactive approaches to handle classroom situations. But once in the principal's office, I was less certain about how to be supportive when a teacher and a struggling student needed my help. Like many novice principals, at first I saw myself primarily as an imposer of consequences.
During my thirty-nine-year teaching career, I’ve walked school hallways in five states and taught many students in public, private, and parochial settings. Over all those years, I’ve seen the power of group gatherings, whether daily, weekly, or monthly. In schools where those gatherings are purposeful, fun, and tied closely to the curriculum, I’ve seen the social-emotional and academic learning that’s happening in classrooms concentrate in the gatherings and then ripple throughout the school.
A: Showcasing students' learning and celebrating the community you've built together should be the focus at the end of the year. It's a prime time for doing deeply engaging work, such as a culminating project, that pulls together lots of skills and allows students to demonstrate their competence.
It's April. It's tempting to think that by now students understand our expectations and know how to behave, so we can all just coast to the end of the year. But, in most classrooms, that's probably not true. In this season, children are filled with spring fever, facing mixed emotions about the end of the school year, and they may be undergoing developmental changes as well. As a result, many students forget rules and expectations at this time of year, and "homestretch" behavior challenges are not uncommon.
