Three Good Things to Start the Year

By Stephanie Farley

The first six weeks of school are like starting a 1000 piece puzzle: figuring out each student’s interests, talents, and proclivities is like identifying the edge pieces, while seeing students’ varied outputs and thereby constructing an understanding of them is akin to building up the puzzle edges. In both scenarios, one feels the excitement of the new commingled with the apprehension of the unknown.

I’ve long claimed that it takes until about November for students to truly start feeling comfortable and confident in a new school year. By this time, they’ve typically established friendships, experienced both wins and losses in academics and other realms, and successfully navigated around at least a few obstacles. By November students know what I mean when I say, “add more details”; they understand the evaluation system (which is necessary, because I have them grade themselves); and they accept that rewrites are a fact of life in English class.

But it’s not November. It’s September, and each class we walk into (How many periods do you teach out of how many periods per day? Just wondering!) is its own 1000 piece puzzle, and we haven’t identified the edge pieces yet. I know we’ll get there, but in the meantime, to cheer myself up, I wrote a list of three good things I’m thinking about.

Three Good Things

1. Kids want to learn, despite technology.

After two years of working primarily with adults, I’m back in a classroom of my own this year (it’s just one class) and it’s wonderful. I feel so lucky. I was nervous that maybe I’d lost my touch or that somehow kids were so significantly transformed by the pandemic that I wouldn’t recognize them. I envisioned myself flopping about in class, waving my arms or doing burpees to capture students’ attention. Happily, this hasn’t been the case.

While technology continues to be the challenge it’s always been (it’s easier for most students to type than handwrite in my English class, yet laptops also allow one to text, check websites, and play video games), I’ve found that my students are eager to learn new things and are bursting to talk about their ideas. They are curious and enthusiastic and, most days, patient with me and their peers.

If anything, they enjoy some tasks so much that they are reluctant to switch to another, even as I have 5 more activities planned and wish to hustle everyone along. There is grace in allowing learning to unfold on the kids’ schedule versus mine; indeed, it’s a meditation on humility that I very much appreciate.

2. We (mostly) know what works.

A vast body of educational research contains the code for effective teaching. Our international peers – in Finland, Singapore, and Australia – have spent the past 25 years implementing these practices, and we can turn to their examples to understand how to enable more success in our own schools.

What do we know that works? First, choice! Kids benefit from having some agency in what they learn, how they learn it, and how they demonstrate their knowledge. Second, challenge. Students like to be challenged at the right level. It takes a minute to figure this out, but once we do, our students really appreciate challenges that neither bore nor discourage. Third, play. Humans, like other mammals, learn through play, and it’s a wonderful method of engagement.

There’s nothing more dear to me than watching younger children engage in imaginary play, and I marvel at how much they learn from each other as they do so! Adolescents enjoy play, too, though their games need to be more intellectual.

And in terms of assessment, we know that a well-written rubric – one that narrows and clearly defines the progression of learning – allows students to understand the expectations so they can meet them. Throw some agency into the assessment mix, like student self-evaluation, and you’ll have students who are far more invested in the learning/evaluation cycle.

Again, our international peers have been doing all of this for years. We can adopt these strategies quickly and see improvements within weeks. On a more personal note, I can re-attest that positive-emotion-laden framing activities are super effective, as I’ve been using them since school started in August! I’ve written a few articles about that, linked here and here.

Young adults want to be teachers.

I’ve met so many young adults lately who want to be teachers. I find it heartening! When I ask them what drew them to teaching, they all say it’s because they had a teacher who believed in them, inspired them, or encouraged them. Even though they may have encountered emotional, social, or academic challenges while in school, a teacher made enough of a difference that they themselves long to have a similar impact.

Wow. When you really reflect on that, it’s awe-inspiring…circle of life kind of stuff! At its core, the fact that young adults want to be teachers means that school works. There are so many improvements that can and should be made, but if 20 year-olds yearn to be teachers, we can infer that some aspect of their education went right. This is an undeniable good, and I’m over the moon about it.

… … …

I am confident that, eventually – hopefully by November! – I’ll put my own 1000 piece puzzle together, and then my class will have riz (did I spell that correctly?). Until then, I look for the small, good things that happen each day: a student who excitedly shares a novel idea with me; another student who smiles when I praise their incredible description skills; and a teacher whose eyes light up when they show me the rubric they just finished. All of these good things make my time in school absolutely worthwhile.

Please share your three good things in the comments!

Stephanie Farley has been an English teacher and independent school administrator in southern California for 28 years. Formerly Director of Teaching and Learning at a school for gifted, neurodiverse students, in fall 2024 she is working with grades 4-12 teachers and teaching ninth grade English. Stephanie, who is interested in instructional design, assessment, feedback, and grading, has served as a Mastery Transcript Consortium Site Director and has been on a number of California Association of Independent Schools accreditation committees.

Stephanie’s first book is Joyful Learning: Tools to Infuse Your 6-12 Classroom with Meaning, Relevance, and Fun (Routledge/Eye On Education, 2023). She has created professional development for schools around reading and curriculum and has coached teachers in instruction, lesson planning, feedback, and assessment. Visit her website Joyful Learning and find her other MiddleWeb articles here.