Starting day one and on every day of school thereafter, you have two primary goals.  First, to make it crystal clear to students that you love having each one of them in your classroom and care about their individual learning and development.  Second, make it similarly clear that the academic content in your class is the most interesting, fascinating, and important stuff students could possibly be learning.  

I’m a firm believer in City et. al.’s conceptual theory of the Instructional Core.  The Instructional Core basically asserts that the student, teacher, and academic content comprise the basic variables that set the limits and possibilities to the quality and quantity of learning that can happen in a classroom.  Raise the level of teacher skill, student engagement, or curriculum quality, and you raise the possibilites for cognitive demand and critical thinking.  As classroom teachers soon learn, however, the three independent actors of students, teachers, and content really only exist in relationship to one another.  In other words, the possibilities for learning are completely mediated by the relationships in the classroom setting between students, teachers, and the content they are engaging together.  Relationships are not just a nice idea.  They are at the core of our practice as professional educators.  

So, with that little theoretical detour, it should be clear that taking time to build strong relationships with your students is at the heart of your work, as is initating students into a fascination and love for the stuff you are trying to teach about.  You should never, ever, ever, take those relationships for granted.  If you lean hard on the fact that students don’t have a choice but be in your classroom (either due to compusive education laws or graduation requirements), then you are undermining your ability to leverage two of the three essential relationships of the instructional core: student/teacher relationships and student/content relationships.  You might be okay in the third realm of the core, and sustain a healthy appreciation for the content you teach, but in my view that is the least important variable of the core.  We assume teachers know something about the subjects they teach.  

We simply know too much about how young people learn to continue with the belief that relationship building is extraneous or a waste of time.  Similarly, professional educators have to embrace the pedagogical work of integrating relationship-building instructional practices into their classrooms.  This is true even and especially for those classroom teachers who expect that students enter the classroom pre-wired with the social emotional skills necessary to decode the expectations of the teacher and willingly embrace the educational complex as a mechanism for furthering their personal interests.   Students come to school with a wide range of attitudes and expectations based on developmental differences and past experiences.  All of them have a right to learn in our classroom.  Part of being a reflective educator – a term the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards plasters all over it’s certification process – is being reflective enough to acknowledge our duty to proactively foster quality relationships with every student. 

That’s why all of those activities you do at the beginning of the year to get to know students and build relationships are not just a great way to start the school year, but can and should be extended throughout the year.  Of course at the beginning of the year, it is easy to be enthusiastic about instructional practices that strengthen relationships.  The novelty of the new school year can be a powerful ally to take advantage of the natural opportunity to connect with your students, and connect them to the content.  But then, throughout the year, find ways to loop back to those beginning of the year relationship-building practices.  

Yesterday morning, I had the absolute pleasure of welcoming our new teachers to school.  You simply can’t duplicate the excitement, nervousness, and genuine curiosity that accompanies starting a new job in a new organization.  For many of our new staff members, they are also new to Costa Rica, which adds another layer of excitement and adventure to the mix.  As a person who truly loves new places and new challenges, it is a lot of fun to interact with our new staff who are similarly embarking on a new adventure in their life.  I love hearing about their past experiences, and what has motivated them to make a big change in their lives.  

Aside from the opportunity to interact with new and interesting people, new teacher orientation is one of my favorite moments for the school is an organization.  When we see ourselves through the lens of a new staff member, it allows us to be a little more objective about who we are and how we are approaching the work.  It’s kind of like that first date, when you are trying to get a sense for who the person is sitting across from you.  Of course it’s a little harder to run away screaming if you don’t like what you see when it comes to your first day at a new job, but the stakes are no less high just because you don’t have an easy out.  

On a big picture level, one of the primary goals of new teacher orientation in a school has to be to convey the values of the organization.  By the end of day one (ok, in my opinion, by the end of their first interview prior to taking the job), your new staff should have absolute clarity about what you values are and have some examples of what those values look like in action.  Of course they will soon discover whether your espoused values match the day to day cultural reality of the school.  Yet even if the lived experience doesn’t yet match what you envision in terms of organizational values, you are already behind if you aren’t at least putting your vision out there.  

In addition to sharing the organization’s core values, I think there is nothing better on day one than to immerse new teaching staff in the instructional vision and core practices of the school.  After all, teaching and student learning are the reason those new teachers are there in the first place.  So I like the idea of going right in the front door and talking about instructional practice on day one.  There will be time (hopefully) for the more mundane, yet necessary, aspects of orientation.  Yes, how we take attendance, or call in a sick day are important details, but not nearly as important as how we lead a killer Socratic Seminar or Think Pair Share.  

One of the hardest parts of the pandemic year was missing out on some of these orientation opportunities.  We hosted virtual sessions and tried to create spaces for online interaction, but there is absolutely no substitute for meeting our new staff together as a group on day one in person.  Our sessions together, including the opportunity to eat lunch together and have some of the small talk that eluded us last year, were an absolute joy for me this year.  Our time together with our new staff left me more excited than ever about launching the new school year.  

One of my hallmark routines as a classroom teacher was leaving work each day, with my classroom ready for the following day’s lessons and learning.  The goal was to be able to, if necessary, walk into the room, flip on the light switch, and be ready to teach.  Part of that motivation was born out of a potentially silly worry that something would come up in the morning that would keep me from being prepared for class.  Maybe that is a common stress and worry that teachers live with (especially since many teachers, like me, were likely conscientious students who similarly wanted to be ready for class as students).  Even with years of experience and a demonstrated ability to wing it if necessary, I never got accustomed to the feeling of starting a class without adequate preparation.  

The second reason I developed this daily habit was perhaps even more important.  It allowed me to use my morning time before class much more strategically.  I could use the time in the morning to work on future lesson and unit planning, connect with students (especially students who might be struggling in class), collaborate and connect with my teacher colleagues, and attend to the countless logistical and administrative tasks that teachers have to work through on a daily basis.  

I also have never been a person who liked to take work home.  For whatever reason, I like to do work at work and try to protect my time at home (of course, that preference has been totally disrupted this past year during virtual and hybrid learning, and admittedly I really enjoyed my opportunity to experience working from home).  The ending of the regular school day set into motion my secondary work day.  Immediately following classes I would typically offer either office hours for students seeking (or requiring) additional support, or sponsor student clubs.  Occassionally I would also have professional meetings as a department chair, or part of the school IB or AVID leadership teams.  Rare were the days that I didn’t have some formal responsibility immediately after the school day.  

Once my formal after-school responsibilities were concluded, I would settle into my grading and assessment work.  Of all of my professional duties, grading student work was my least favorite.  Mostly, this was due to my belief that student assessment feedback is best delivered as part of the instructional practice of the school day, as opposed to teachers assessing work offline to be returned to students at a later time.  I’m a big advocate of Assessment for Learning, as opposed to the more traditional approach to assessment of learning.  Despite my deliberate efforts to minimize the grading work that had to occur with students not present, there were assessment tasks that could not be avoided.  I tried very hard to complete any grading the same day that it was turned in.  

Grading completed, my last task of the day would be reviewing and prepping for the following day of instruction.  This meant reviewing my lesson and unit plans, updating my boards (daily agenda, Do Now, daily objectives, etc.), preparing any materials, and leaving everything ready to go for the following day.  Only then did I feel like I was ready to call it a day.