Welcome to the Teachers Need Teachers Podcasts, the podcast for teachers who don't want
to just survive teaching but actually thrive. So I am going back to school
tomorrow, as in the third week of July tomorrow, and that's because they
work at a year round school. But that's a conversation for Instagram or TikTok.
If you're a newer teacher with your first job lined up, or maybe
you're a veteran teacher who's just kind of burnt out and over it and not
really looking forward to the school year, there's a good chance of the way
that you're planning for back to school could actually hinder rather than help you.
So in this episode, I'm covering five typical but outdated back to school activities
that you need to ditch or just not even start if you want to set
the right tone and kickoff an amazing school year. So the first outdated activity
that pretty much everyone and their mom does our icebreaker games. You know,
these are the ones that are like scavenger hunts, find someone whose name begins
with a bee, find someone who's visited outside the US, things like that,
And especially if you teach secondary there's probably at least five or six other
teachers that are doing a very similar game. And I know that you want
to do this to lighten the moon, because you know that students are nervous,
especially in the first couple days of school. But fewer things are more
painful than watching your socially awkward students try to navigate this. A lot of
times they're just hanging back and they're mortified because maybe they don't know anyone in
the class. Maybe they came from another school district or another state so they
don't know anyone in the school at all, and maybe talking to strangers gives
them anxiety, things like that. And so if you've done this before,
I'm sure you've seen this dynamic play out where you have your more gregarious and
outgoing students that just go after it because they just want to talk to whomever.
And then you have your really shy, awkward students who just have their
head down, walking in circles or hanging back around a group of students that
are frantically filling out pieces of paper. And for me, I can totally
relate to this. My heart goes out to them, and it's just really
uncomfortable to watch. Also, only the truly motivated actually finished that sheet.
After about five maybe seven minutes. A lot of students are over it and
they're just kind of dragging their feet, walking up to someone saying something like
do any of these apply to you? Things like that, So it doesn't
necessarily have the effect in terms of breaking the ice that you thought it would.
I really hate doing these activities as an adult as well, you know
what I mean. They make us do that maybe at conferences or at back
to school when the teachers have to get together for the first time and there
are new teachers, or if they just want to get everyone up and talking,
anything that's forced like that. It's just really awkward in general for a
lot of people. So what can you do instead? Activities like breakout rooms
are awesome because there is a sense of purpose and people will naturally work together
in a way that is comfortable with their personality. You could also do typical
team building activities, and again, the people who are more likely to participate
will and the ones who are just kind of like awkward and don't want to
jump into the fray, they will hang back. But it also gives you
an opportunity to take a look at how they interact with other people. And
what's great is that you're not forcing them to do something that they're not comfortable
with. So this could be anything like trying to stack cups with rubber bands.
I don't know if you've seen an activity like that before, or build
something together and then they have to maybe compete against other teams. The activity
that I personally do is have them solve a puzzle. It's called the luncher
a murder, and I know that's a little dark, but students have to
work with their neighbors to try to figure out what happened and also talk about
the reasoning behind that. And it's just something that's not your typical first day
of school activity, but it does get them talking and for the kids who
are just typically quiet, at least they're thinking about something and they're not just
sitting there being afraid that someone's going to make them talk out loud. The
next overuse and overrated activity is going over your classroom rules and procedures. Now.
I know this is a little controversial because so many beginning teacher programs and
classroom management books tell you that you need to set the tone from day one
and go over your rules and procedures, but that's not actually going to set
the right kind of tone. And a lot of times there's just so many
things for students to remember that it can be overwhelming and make your classroom feel
negative and make you seem negative. I remember one year with a particular principle.
They came in breeding us as usual, but then they started talking about
the things that went wrong the previous year that they thought that we should fix
for the coming school year. That just really set a negative tone and just
really left a bad taste in our mouth as a staff, because we were
already talking about bad things that had happened before. And so if you set
the tone, we're talking about things that students can't do, or things that
students did that you thought was unacceptable in the past, and how you don't
want that to happen this year. Not only are you telling them about possible
shenanigans it can get up to, then you're also making it seem like you're
assuming that they're going to do bad things. And so even if you have
rules that are worded in a positive way instead of saying things that they shouldn't
do, it's still best to sprinkle them throughout the week, and it especially
helps to go over a particular rule or procedure as something is happening. So,
for example, one of the first rules that you can go over is
how to raise your hand when you want to talk or answer, and also
what you need to do when you go to the bathroom, because that's something
that happens fairly quickly. But then some other procedures, like how to turn
in work or things like that, you can actually go over that as it's
happening. So maybe after your first assignment that you give to them, then
you can go over how they're going to turn it in, which bin is
there is if it's a paper assignment or if they're doing an online assignment,
then you go over how they're going to turn that in during the first assignment.
But I wouldn't spend your first couple days of school going over all of
that because they're also not going to remember any of it. If you do
want to set some expectations right off the bat, then you can discuss the
basic principles of a welcoming classroom that's a good learning environment, such as respect,
responsibility, and empathy, and then you can frame behaviors based on whether
or not it's showing respect, whether or not it shows a student being responsible
or having empathy for others. Something that I like to do is to have
students model and then discuss if it does fall within respect, responsibility, and
empathy. So, for example, I would ask for a volunteer, and
a lot of times you're going to get a volunteer who wants some model a
behavior, and I would whisper into the student's ear something like I want you
to walk across the room to throw something away, but I want you to
be disruptive. And so then the student will do that, and the class
will have a discussion about whether or not that student was showing respect, being
responsible, and having empathy for others and their learning. And then that makes
it a little more sticky for the students in terms of remembering the classroom rules.
But it doesn't feel like a rule. A lot of times when we
frame things as rules, it feels like something that some students are attempted to
break. Similarly, the third activity that is definitely overused and overrated is spending
time going over your syllabus. Now, a lot of teachers they just love
their syllabus. They spend a lot of time putting all of their policies,
especially grading policies, and they might make it pretty. I know that I
have spent time trying to make my syllabus look visually appealing in hopes that students
will actually want to read it or hold onto it. But nobody cares.
Nobody cares about your syllabus. Nobody. And when you go over it in
class, it's so boring. It's so boring to go over a syllabus.
And just imagine again, especially if you teach secondary. However, many classes
the kids have, let's say they have six classes, there are six teachers,
each of them going over their syllabus. Can you imagine what school feels
like that first week for students in your school in the beginning of the year,
there are teacher preparation days, and we have these mandatory trainings and its
trainings like health and safety and mandated reporter trainings, and they're so boring it.
Dread them every year and they just make us want to cry because we're
literally bored to tears. You guys, that's you reading your syllabus to your
students. That's how they feel. I mean, think about it. In
the beginning of the year, your students in that time, they don't care.
The parents might read it, they might or skim it, but they're
not going to commit anything to memory. So, especially when we come back
later on in the school year when a parent is demanding extra time on an
assignment, or a parent is demanding a redo on an assignment and you don't
allow revisions or anything like that, and you bust out the whole it was
on my syllabus, you just need to know that they're probably not reading it,
and yes, it's their fault for not reading it, but they're probably
also not going to remember it if they did. And sometimes we just have
to be flexible the first time because nobody really cares about it. What's more
effective is just giving them the syllabus, telling them to store it somewhere in
their binder or folder, show it to their parents, just have it as
a reference. But whatever is in your syllabus, you need to go over
it when it comes up in class. So, for example, when it's
time to turn in that first assignment, that's when you go over your late
policy, or when it's a first big assignment that's worth a lot of points,
that's when you go over your policy. For revisions or after the first
test. That's when you go over your policy for retakes. But going over
your syllabus in the beginning of the that's just going to set your students off
on the wrong foot. The next outdated and overt activity is over and under
planning. I am so guilty of this. So in the beginning of the
year, multiple years, I've actually underplanned in terms of enough activities, and
there's been that dreaded ten to fifteen minutes at the end of class when I
don't have anything for the students to do. I've had to pivot by coming
up with an activity or having students talk to each other about what they did
over the summer, which isn't always a great activity to do, because there
are students who did nothing and they feel kind of shameful that they didn't get
to travel, or they didn't get to visit relatives or do something really cool.
But there's definitely been years when I just haven't planned enough for that first
week of school. Maybe the students finished my dreaded scavenger hunt activity early,
or I saw that they were getting out of hand, so I had to
end it early. Also, I have gone over the syllabus before and I
actually hardy through it because the kids looked absolutely bored. So again that left
me with a bunch of time with nothing planned to do. So the key
to planning for that first week of school is to have a balance of activities
that the students are doing together, but also some that they're doing on their
own. So, for example, if you teach math, you can have
them do some kind of puzzle or solve something together, but then also have
a fun activity, maybe something that you found on teachers, pay teachers or
online that involves math that they should know at your grade level, and they
can do that by themselves. So some activities that students find really fun,
or things like coloring or gami or just something that not only are they doing
with other people but also by themselves, and it gives you an opportunity to
see how they work. Now in terms of overplanning, in the past,
I've planned too many things for that first month of school and I didn't have
any flexibility or I didn't plan for unknowns. So what I would do is
I would make these files of copies of different activities that I just knew we
were going to get to. But I did plan for the fact that maybe
students they died background information to complete that activity, or I didn't plan for
the fact that maybe the school had some kind of assembly or something in the
calendar that I didn't bother to look at, and so then we were out
of time to do an activity, or maybe students took too long on one
activity, so I had to decide where we going to finish this project that
you were supposed to present and then put on the wall and then get behind
on our actual academic material. Or were we just going to stop where they
were at so that I could stay on pace. So have a plan,
but also have a plan that you can be flexible with. Have a stopping
point if you plan to have them do a project, so that they do
have to end it before they're finished, that you can stay on track.
It's going to be okay. Don't tell students that they're going to present these
if maybe you're going to run out of time to present them. And finally,
the last outdated activity that I've talked about several times on this channel is
really focusing too much on classroom decorations. I get it, especially if you're
a new teacher. You just want your classroom to look amazing. You want
all of the posters and the calendar and maybe a word wall or all the
reference posters and everything that you want up there that you've seen maybe on Instagram
or on Pinterest or in other classrooms. You want it all, and you
want it all on there now. But sometimes you're just spending all this time
and energy and especially money on things that aren't actually going to make your classroom
a better learning environment. First of all, and I've said this many times,
if you're a new teacher, I don't think that you should be spending
a lot of money decorating your classroom right off the bat. Spending all that
money when you don't really know what your students need because you're just starting out,
just really is a mistake. You also want to strike a balance between
practicality and esthetics. So sometimes you like to put things on our walls that
we think students are going to mean but they don't. Or maybe we want
certain parts of our walls to look really pretty, or we don't like it
when a wall looks too blank, and so we just add stuff to fill
in the space. But the thing is is that if you have students with
IEPs which you probably will a lot of times. It can be really distracting
for them, and you'll see them looking around because they can't focus on you
because you have too many things on your walls and maybe even hanging from your
ceiling. Also, maybe later on you decide that you need to put something
on your wall that is going to help them, but you don't have space
for it, and there isn't really a good thing that you can take down
because you've filled everything up. You're like, oh, it's going to mess
up the theme of this particular corner. So just leaving room for also flexibility
is really going to help as you go through your year and you get to
know your students, just remember that if you have too many things on the
walls that are distracting, students won't know what the important things are to look
at. So, for example, I used to have all kinds of things
for English that talked about parts of speech and genres, and I had a
poster with synonyms for simple words that kids use. I just had all kinds
of resources, but nobody looked at them. I asked my students, I
did a poll, and no one ever referred to them. The only poster
that anyone really looked at aside from the calendar, was a poster on commas
comma usage. That's what the students wanted to know about. Maybe for you
and you teach math, than a poster with basic formulas that they need to
memorize. Or for science, maybe you know the periodic table, things like
that. Think about things that your students would actually use, not what you
hope they would use. Something that I really like to do is to go
into other teachers classrooms and see what they have in their walls to get ideas,
and then I'm going to ask myself, Okay, is this going to
help my students? Do I think that they're actually going to look at it?
If you have a poster with really small writing, very few students are
going to refer to it. I have never had a student walk up to
a poster to look at what's on there when it has really small and right
ever, they might look at it as they're lined up ready to go,
but they just never refer to it and it's just taking up space. So
I know that some of these are controversial. I'm not telling you to not
do these things. I'm just asking you to rethink your approach to it,
especially if you've gotten ideas from other people and you've never taught before, ask
yourself, put yourself in that situation if there was an adult version, a
teacher version of that activity happening with the staff. Would you enjoy doing that?
Would you enjoy having someone read over slides to you at a teacher meeting,
at a faculty meeting? Would you enjoy someone going over rules of procedures
with you? Maybe not. Are you someone who would enjoy icebreaker activities or
you dread them because you're more introverted like I am. And as much as
you want in your classroom to be something that you feel comfortable in and that
you're proud of, remember that this is the learning environment for your students,
so what's best for them. If you're a new teacher, I definitely suggest
going back to episode one twenty seven because that's going to help you figure out
six essential questions that you need to ask when you're starting at a new school.
So this is really important because a lot of time we don't even know
where to start in terms of finding out information, and we start to school
here with a lot of gaps in our knowledge. So I really suggest that
you guys check out that episode. Thanks for hanging out with me today and
I will see you next time.