First day - Goal: Talk Less

The time has come for the start of the school year!

It took a while but my classroom is ready!

For my first day plans, I had the amazing opportunity to decide how much time I spend team building in all of my classes.  Going with the "go slow to go fast" strategy, we are starting slow.  In all of my classes I wanted to make sure students were acting how I wanted them to act for the whole year.  This included

• Being present - No cell phone use unless permission was granted
• Listen when others are talking - I wasn't going to yell over them
• Communicate and collaborate with one another

For myself, I decided to challenge myself to learn all student names by the end of the week.  This is actually a pretty big challenge for me but after reading Rick Wormeli, I decided to make it a priority.  Today I felt like everything came together to help me accomplish all of these goals.

First of all, I used Sara VanDerWerf's Name Tent idea.  I love it!  It gave me a way to look at names instantaneously.  I just wrote comments on all students tents too - it took like an hour, but I think it was WELL worth my time.  Now I have information about these students that I can match to a name/face AND I got feedback.

Then I got 100 piece puzzles from the dollar store.  Students were told to put together the puzzle as fast as possible.  They were automatically disqualified if they ripped the box... I have learned from watching grown adults stab the box and tear it open.  All students were engaged and I walked around and did 2 things:

1. I wrote down things students said that demonstrated the collaboration and persistence I was hoping they would - things like "I wonder what would happen if we flipped the puzzle around" "I need the grey pieces over here", "Good Job", "What are you working on over there?" - this is what students should be doing when they are working on problems!  Encouraging each other, developing strategies, etc!
2. I was working on names.  I could look at the names and the faces and get tons of practice in during that 15 minutes!  Students were fully engaged AND I was learning their names!  A 2-for-1 deal!

From there we talked about WHY they were doing the puzzle (to work collaboratively to solve a problem) and they were asked "What behaviors helped you be successful in this task?" I needed to clarify that I was looking for bigger-picture behaviors rather than puzzle-specific behaviors.  For example "we started with the edges" is not helpful, but "encouraging one another" or "considering others' perspective" is helpful.  We shared out as a class and then I collected their ideas on post-it notes.  I am going to re-read through these and summarize them tonight and bring the summary back to review tomorrow. 

Next we did a Talking Points routine with "talking about talking" topics which I learned about at TMC16.  It was a bit out there for a first day activity, but I explained to students that we will ALL try new things this year - and this was an example of ME trying new things - taking a risk, if you will.  

I needed to explain the routine a bit better, but once students understood the idea that they were going to talk about each point 3 times the conversations got better.  Some students still resisted the routine but overall, the conversations students had about talking and listening were really fascinating.  Everyone was engaged AND... I got MORE time to practice names. 

Finally, I spent 10 minutes talking about what the the course is, what they will need for class, and taking questions that they had.

Today felt great!  Students did a ton of talking and interacting with each other, we started to establish norms, we learned how to do transitions between activities, I have never felt THIS great about a start of the year.  Maybe it is naive, but I think it will be a good year with students.  I will be spending 3 more days getting students used to these norms, but so far, I am feeling pretty good about it!