We can’t deny it, summer is rapidly coming to an end, and the start of a new school year is just around the corner. This realization typically stimulates reflection about how you can ensure this school year will be the best ever. Here is the third post in a series that offers some tips on how to make this happen. Please feel free to post additional tips and hints in the comments section!

Today’s tip is about making connections with others. Studies have shown that the two most important aspects to success in teaching is pedagogy and relationships. For this reason, making connections with others, particularly students, should be one of your top priorities this year.

Studies show that when we do a better job of forming connections with our students and their families, we are more effective at meeting their needs. And when we do a better job of forming connections with our colleagues, we can collaborate with them more effectively, and teachers can also gain personal and professional support for themselves. So, when you get back to school, take a look around. Who would you like to get to know better? Reach out to the shy, quiet child who might otherwise fall between the cracks. Literally walk to the back of the classroom where the kids that like to hide are hanging out, and engage them in conversation. In the teachers’ lounge, plop yourself next to the new hire. Find a way to spend some time with each new person you have decided to approach. Ask questions that encourage conversation. This will help you to learn about who they are, what their interests and passions and commitments are, and what you may have in common. And then just sit back and listen.

We all know that teaching is a profession that depends on interpersonal interaction. You’ll have a better year if you spend as much time making connections with others as you do on lesson planning.

So enjoy making connections, and have a great year!

Yesterday’s post was a reminder that summer is rapidly coming to an end, and the start of a new school year is just around the corner. This realization typically stimulates reflection about how you can ensure this school year will be the best ever. Here is a second post that offers some tips on how to make this happen. Please feel free to post additional tips and hints in the comments section!

To have a really great year, it’s important to keep expectations realistic. Every teacher knows what it feels like to knock yourself out to do a great job on a particular lesson, only to have this overwhelming feeling that it isn’t working. It’s hard not to get discouraged when you feel like you’re floundering.

Don’t expect each lesson to be perfect the first time you execute it. Doing anything new requires practice in order to reach mastery. Making mistakes is part of the learning process. The important thing is to spend time reflecting on what aspects of the lesson you would like to be better, and then come up with a plan to make that happen. In fact, teaching should be a continuous cycle of planning, executing, reflecting, revising, and repeating. Just try to do a little better each time you do the lesson. Remember that you are a learner, too. You and your students are a learning community, and you are all working together to increase your understanding and improve your skills. Achieving success is a process, and a group process at that!

Think about this, too. The longer you’ve been teaching, the easier it will be to diagnose and prescribe solutions for improvement. In some cases, though, it might be better to stop the lesson and move on to something else for awhile. Later, when you’ve got the time and space for productive reflection, you can do a better job of analyzing.

Remember to take time to remind yourself that you are doing your very best. When a lesson does go the way you want it to, be sure to give yourself a well-earned pat on the back.

Well, teachers, it’s time to admit that summer is rapidly coming to a close, and the start of a new school year is just around the corner. This realization typically stimulates reflection about how you can ensure this year will be the best ever. For the next few days I’ll offer some suggestions. Please feel free to post additional tips and hints in the comments section!

First, let’s discuss a really simple strategy for ensuring success: Recognizing the significant roles played by the school’s support staff. It’s really important to get to know the school’s support staff, and to appreciate them whole-heartedly. School librarians, secretaries, textbook clerks, custodians, security guards, cafeteria workers, groundskeepers, technology support personnel, and bus drivers all make important contributions to the success you and your students will experience in the classroom this year. It might seem like a lot of extra work to cultivate these relationships, and sometimes it’s hard to remember to be appreciative when you’re feeling short on time, overworked, or stressed out, but every day in a hundred little ways that you may never even know about, these folks will be doing their utmost to support your professional efforts. Time and again you’ll be depending on them to make your job a little easier. Be sure to take the time to recognize their areas of expertise and to acknowledge their contributions!

Here are some easy things you can do. When you pass by a support staff member in the hallway, greet them with a smile and a cheerful hello. Leave a little note of appreciation on your whiteboard for the custodian to find when he or she comes to clean your room. A thank you note is always welcome if someone has done something above and beyond, and letting the principal know about those good deeds is always a good idea. When making out your holiday cards, include a few members of the support staff that have been particularly helpful to you. Above all, be sure to model your appreciation and respect for support staff for your students. Remember that a little bit of effort goes a long way to establishing and nurturing your relationships with support staff.

Have a great year, and tune in tomorrow for another great tip!

At the school where I taught before I retired, every teacher was assigned a Homeroom class. In Homeroom, the teacher strives to connect with each individual student, fosters team-building among the students in the group, and nurtures those relationships from the first day of their freshman year until the day they graduate. Today, I am going to share with you a strategy I used with my own Homeroom class. It’s a scrapbooking idea, and if you like it, you can adapt it to fit your own class needs, whatever they may be.

The first year I created a memory book for my Homeroom class, I used a paper scrapbook format. To do this, you will need a photo album or a large three-ring binder, 8 1/2″ by 11″ scrapbook pages, some page protectors, and some colored papers. I recommend you use acid-free pages and papers available at your local scrapbooking store. You could also invest in at least one acid-free journaling pen. If you’re into decorating stickers and such, you can buy some ready-made, but personally I prefer a rather simpler-looking page. Today, many tech-savvy teachers may prefer to create their scrapbook in a digital format, or as a website with a link that can be shared with students and parents.

At the beginning of each year I ask a colleague to take a photograph of me and my class, and then I print or upload a copy of the roster from the attendance program. These items go into the class memory book. Throughout the year, I add photos of students engaged in our weekly Homeroom activities. If the lesson calls for a written response, I collect a few representative examples. Depending on the format, you can either place them in the scrapbook or photograph them and add the pictures to the digital format. If I attend their extra-curricular activities, I take pictures and include those. I try to make sure that there is a visual record of some kind for each and every student in the class. At least once a year, I invite the students to create their own personal page to add to the scrapbook or digital memory book.

Since we had the same Homeroom group for all four years they attended high school, I am able to add to the memory book every year until their graduation. The memory book becomes a sort of yearbook for just this one class, and it shows how they have physically and socially grown over their high school years. At the end of their senior year, if you have a digital format, you can simply add some final flourishes and make sure everyone has the link or other kind of access. If you have a paper format, you could  make color photocopies of the pages in the book and then have the pages spiral bound. Printing and binding costs, which total approximately $10 per copy, can get expensive, though, so you might want to ask for donations from parents to cover that. You can also place the names of every student in the class in a bowl, withdraw one name, and give the original scrapbook to the winner. Or you could keep the original as a memento for yourself, if you would like. By the time your students graduate, you’ve probably bonded pretty closely with the kids and would like to keep the memory book to remember them by. Or you can use it as an example for the next group.

I like to put the memory book on display during Open House and Back-to-School Night. Parents love to thumb through the pages and look at the photos and writings of their own kids. Or you can share the digital version projected onto a screen or rolling on a classroom computer on a continuous loop.

Your memory book can be very useful when going through the accreditation process. It is a visual record of the kinds of things we are doing in Homeroom, and it substantiated our claims that in Homeroom we are forming important relationships with our students.

I have gotten a lot of positive feedback to the memory book idea throughout the years. Feel free to create a memory book for your own class. Your students—and their parents—will love it!

An earnest young student once said to me, “Some day I’m gonna be somebody!” It’s the kind of statement that tugs at the heartstrings of a compassionate teacher. She wanted to graduate from high school the first in her family, and then enroll in college. Her ultimate goal was to be a registered nurse. The thing is, the student rarely brought her book to class, almost never did her homework, and spent more time hiding her cell phone use under her desk than actually participating in class. She was not actively involved in her own education. “It’s great to have lofty goals,” I advised her, “but you have to couple those goals with a practical plan and some robust action.”

Even as an adult and a professional, I sometimes get a jolting reminder that talk, even if it is confident and optimistic, doesn’t really accomplish much that’s tangible. And if the talk sounds like whining and complaining, you can even severely sabotage the progress of your venture. We all face challenges and frustrations in our work, no matter what profession we are engaged in, but it’s important to avoid becoming the bellyacher in the teachers’ lounge that spends more energy describing the obstacles in minute detail than on coming up with some constructive and creative solutions.

To actually achieve your lofty goals, follow up your confident and optimistic talk by developing a feasible plan of action and then getting down to work. If you can do that, you will be a chalkboard champion, and you will have a great school year!