English 2.0: Improvements for a New Year

As my colleagues and I prepare for a new school year, I find myself reflecting on what routines and procedures worked and did not work in my 7th and 8th grade classroom. In this post, you will find classic first year blunders; now that I've learned from these, I will share with you my new strategies for this year.

My first mistake occurred at the beginning of several class periods. My school requires bellwork, as suggested in Harry Wong and Rosemary Wong's book The First Days of School. I began the year by writing journal prompts for each of my classes. (Luckily I was able to type them!) This became a significant amount of time for me. Not only did I prepare these every morning, but students began to expect me to grade ALL of them. If they felt like they weren't graded, many would simply not complete them. When I was grading them, I collected them weekly, and this was a huge headache!

Did absent students need to make up journal prompts? Crap...where did I save it? What days was Elaine* gone? And Jared*? What about the students who have lost their journal prompts? Yikes! It was a nightmare.

At the beginning of second quarter, I introduced weekly vocabulary words. They defined these once a week as their bellwork on our alternative block days. This worked great! They came in on either Tuesdays or Wednesdays knowing exactly what to do while I took attendance. This has inspired my new bellwork strategy for the upcoming year.

Each day of the week will have different bellwork, but will remain consistent from week to week. With the exception of their planners, the materials will be given to students in a packet for either half of the quarter or a full quarter to keep in their binders until complete.

Monday: Fill out planners with this week's lessons and assignments. Please complete in pencil to accommodate changes. After attendance, I will present spelling words. (There will be an activity sheet related to spelling as early-finisher work.)

Tuesday/Wednesday (block days): Complete this week's vocabulary word with the corresponding prefix/suffix.

Thursday: Edit the following paragraph using the editing marks used in class.

Friday: Free write about the lessons and activities this week. What have you learned? What topics are still confusing? (This will then be a short discussion for me.) Then we can take our spelling test.

My other "big" mistake was not having a behavior plan on the first day of school. Maybe I thought the school had one or I needed to see how my students acted. Either way, plan on being over prepared with a plan. 

I began looking through my materials for an idea of a behavior plan. Lo and behold! I had created resources back at the beginning of August and completely forgot to include them in my syllabus and class introduction. Well, guess I didn't need to make new materials.

My behavior plan is also taken from The First Days of School. I use a ticket system. 

In class, my students know what these tickets mean. If a student is off-task, I can slide a ticket on his/her desk without disrupting the class. The student then takes control of their behavior by recognizing what the behavior is and making a decision to either change it or continue the behavior. If the behavior does continue, I hand him/her both a second ticket and a Behavior and Action Plan. The students then go to a quiet area of the room to complete the reflection sheet before returning to the class. This helps me to know what may be causing the behavior, such as a seating chart or hunger. If a student still continues the behavior that disrupts the rest of the class, I direct them to visit with either the principal or the dean of students.

When implementing a behavior plan, make sure that you're following school expectations. It is easier for students if the policies are consistent in all classrooms. If there isn't a school-wide procedure, make sure you share your behavior plan with your administrators. If you'd like the behavior tickets and the My Behavior and Action Plan, use the links to make a copy for you.

The next big change I'm making in my classroom is the use of reading logs and reading days. The high school teachers in my district implement reading days where the students spend the hour reading and completing reading journals. I thought I would implement the same expectation in my classroom. Nope. Turns out the attention span of 7th and 8th graders requires them to build the ability to sustain their attention for that long. After fifteen minutes, few of my students remained reading. Hopefully they would complete their reading logs with the title, author, pages read, time, and a summary. Nope. 

These reading logs were lost, shredded between science textbooks, left at home. I've heard almost every excuse. By the fourth quarter, I completely gave up on reading logs and given grades on reaching their one hundred minute goal each week.

This year, I think I am much more prepared! Rather than reading days, we will spend the last ten to fifteen minutes reading in class. These should be student choice books for a majority of their free-reading time. As students are able to sustain their reading, we can change to longer periods of reading on a fewer days of the week.

Reading logs, well, they've changed quite a bit. Rather than having students hang on to sheets or bookmarks that never return, I've designed a bulletin board. The envelopes are similar to those placed in library books (for those old enough to know) for the check out cards.

Inside these, the students will have their own index card with their name and reading goal. Each Friday, students will be expected to write down the name of their book, the author, and the page they are on. At the end of the quarter, students will reflect on whether they were able to obtain their goals. 

Hopefully these changes will help the school year run more smoothly. What changes have you made in your classrooms that make a big difference?


*Student names have been changed.*