Summer is always the perfect time for teachers to reflect back on their past experiences, evaluate personal and professional growth, and set some goals for the upcoming year.  As I reflect back on my first few years of teaching, one of the things that comes to mind immediately is my first few “first days” of school.

My first year of teaching, I taught 7^th grade math and science.  Since my class periods were only 50 minutes long, it was not difficult to decide what to do on the first day of school: introduce myself, teach class rules and expectations, give an overview of what we would be learning this year, and if time allowed do some kind of an icebreaker.

After teaching seventh grade for one year, I was fortunate to find a position in the grade that I had had my heart set on since making the decision to become a teacher: fifth grade.  As the new school year approached, I was excited to be teaching the age group and curriculum I felt were best suited to me given my strengths as a teacher.  But as the first day of school approached, a new thought occurred to me: What am I going to do with these kids all day long on the first day of school? I knew jumping into curriculum immediately was not wise.  I knew that I needed to establish some ground rules, set expectations, and begin teaching procedures.  I knew I needed to spend significant time getting to know the students, letting them get to know me, and letting them get to know each other.  But what would this look like?  Hadn’t I done it all the year before in only 50 minutes?  What was I going to do with a full day’s worth of time? Continue reading →

How many minutes per year do you suppose you spend looking for something you know you had only days, hours or even minutes before?  Students and teachers are both notorious for misplacing papers.  Students lose their papers in disheveled desks and backpacks and teachers lose the copied math worksheets they made during prep period just as quickly.

A great strategy for managing those pesky papers is to follow what is known as the “OHIO Principle.”  Ohio stands for Only Handle It Once.   This principle recognizes that papers are often lost when the recipient receives them and places them somewhere (in a disorganized folder, on the desk amidst a sea of other papers), thinking that he’ll put them in the proper place later when he has more time. Under the OHIO principle, upon receipt of the paper (whether it be students receiving handouts or teachers receiving completed work), the recipient will “only handle it once” by immediately placing the paper(s) in the proper place. Continue reading →

My first year of teaching took place in a socio-economically disadvantaged middle school.  I was a young, naïve, somewhat privileged middle-class white girl in a diverse school where it was not unheard of to return to your classroom after lunch and open the door only to find that two students were being arrested in your classroom for drug possession. (Yes, this actually happened to me.)

I was entirely unprepared for classroom management in this kind of school environment.  Naturally, I asked veteran teachers for their advice.  One of the most common things I was told was “not to smile ‘til Christmas” because you’ve got to “mean business.”  At the time I thought perhaps this was good advice because I certainly did want to show my students that I “meant business,” however amorphous that phrase seemed.  But after years of teaching, I’ve determined that a good teacher must certainly smile before Christmas!  She should smile from the moment she lets her students enter the classroom on the very first day of school.

My rejection of this popular teacher adage is not meant to deemphasize the importance of having clear expectations and reinforcing them with consequences for poor decision-making; it is simply meant to add that kindness and grace are also important parts of good classroom management.  In fact, classroom management experts state that teachers who manage their classroom best are relaxed and emotionally warm (Jones)*.  Smiles are common in these classrooms.  Students respect good teachers, but they also like and connect with these teachers.

So go ahead, crack that smile.  It might make the classroom a little sunnier as we head toward winter.

*Jones, Fred. Tools for Teaching. Fredric H. Jones and Associates, Inc., 2000.