This post is the first in a series that will discuss how you can start your school year creating a place students want to come back to.
As summer draws to a close and schools begin again, students all over are having mixed feelings about reentering the classroom, including my own children. Groans of “do we have to go back to school” become more and more frequent in our house as the first day draws nearer. This is why I want to offer an alternative way to start the school year, a way that gets students engaged and excited about the school year ahead, making the transition back as smooth and as meaningful as possible.
Give me a countdown. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1… up the bottle goes, nearly 20 meters in fact. Your job over the coming days is to work in a team to modify a soda bottle, so that it flies higher than the bottle that I just launched. What changes could you make? What could you add to the bottle to improve the result?
This is an example of how the school year began for 48 grade 4 students just a few days ago. We started with a clear objective and then asked students to spend the next two and a half days developing solutions, testing their ideas and getting feedback to try and accomplish this goal. By the end of final launches on Friday afternoon, the students and teachers agreed that all groups successfully accomplished the goal, while also experiencing and demonstrating much much more.
Creating an engaging and exciting learning experience from day 1 isn’t just a gimmick to keep students content as you start the year. It’s a chance to let them know what’s in store for the year ahead, to get them excited about learning, excited about their peers, excited about their teacher and most importantly excited about coming back to school on Days 2, 3, 4 and beyond. While there is no magic formula for how to accomplish this goal, it is important to consider what your goals for the year are and how the first days of school can support these goals. Listed below is the formula that I have developed to help ensure that each and every day has a clear purpose, particularly as we start the school year.
- Engage students in real learning on Day 1
- Develop a mini, multi-day inquiry that starts on the first day and continues as the week continues (we start with a three day week, so my current design is for three days). Part 2 of this series will present and breakdown the mini-inquiry I described at the beginning of this piece.
- Embed your core educational values into everything you create (for me its independence, creativity, collaboration and reflection). This values sort activity from The Good Project is an interesting way to consider some of your values as an educator.
- Understand and reveal who you are as an educator/caretaker to your students from the beginning. Let them know what life in your classroom is going to be like and how you will support them.
- Reveal yourself as a learner
- Be part of the learning rather than leading the learning. Think alongside your students and let them know you don’t have all the answers.
- Communicate expectations through your design while inviting student opinions and agency.
- Have students help to set expectations as you begin your inquiry and share their experiences throughout the process.
- For this I love inviting a discussion about what makes a team successful and hearing what they have to say. From this we develop team expectations that we then reflect on through abstract art once we have finished the different phases of the inquiry.
Launching rockets is only a portion of this inquiry, more the means to an end. The real goal is to see how they approach problems, how do they work together, how do they deal with failure, how do they respond to feedback, how does the community respond towards others and who are they as individual and communal learners. Yet, the mini-inquiry packs the learning into an exciting, kid-friendly package that allows them the chance to get excited about learning, which is exactly the right mindset for students to have as they enter school whether it be Day 1 or Day 175. Check back here next Monday for a detailed description of how to design a mini-inquiry to start your school year.
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