As we as teachers get ready to head back to school for another school year, I find myself reflecting on what worked and what didn’t work in the previous school year. These last couple of weeks of summer break is a time that I use to think about what processes, procedures or practices. This is especially true for classroom policies that are hard or unable to be changed midway through a semester. These are why I try to plan changes for the beginning of the school year. Typically these are minor changes that I found I needed from the processes of last year.
Thinking About What to Change:
As I review what worked and didn’t work, I am mostly looking through my notes that I have made to myself throughout the year. This process is designed to help keep track of thoughts that I have during the day to day chaos of classes. It a practice that I picked up early on my teaching career from another teacher at one of my first schools. It allows me to have reliable information to make decision on, I look for multiple instances of a problem versus isolated issues that arise from students not completing processes or technology changing. These problems fall into a different type of change that I will discuss. These more large scale problems I prefer to tackle first as they are usually harder to change during the school, these are topics such as curriculum/lesson holes, parent communication or project rewrites; that need to be addressed when I have larger amounts of time to work with them. These are the types of topics that get worked on over the summer when I can think about them a bit deeper and give them more time to determine the best overall solutions to implement. Having said this, many teachers would argue that you shouldn’t be working over them summer because you aren’t being paid for this time and/or that it is outside of your contractual work time. This is true, but I personally believe that putting in some time over the summer makes my school year time a lot less stressful and much more productive. I think of it as investing time to make my school year more successful and easier to manage.
Determining How to Improve:
I like to use a design process to improve a given process or procedure that I have identified needs improvement. This begins with choosing a process or task that I am going to work on. I then write out what I want the intended outcome of the process to look like. This is done so that I can have a target or end goal in mind when start. I then go through and break the process/procedure down into specific tasks or components that need to be completed, which often helps me to identify problems or places where I can reduce steps making the process easier for myself or for the students to accomplish. If I need to during this portion I also ask myself if the process or procedure needs to be totally rewritten and there are some cases where I have had to scrape completely what I was doing and take it in a totally different direction or path. This can be the hardest part, because of the dramatic change. Once I have flushed out changes to a process, I like to run it by another teacher or two that I have a good relationship with. Since it isn’t there classroom, they don’t know the previous way of doing and don’t have any biases, this can help me to determine failure points. I will usually have answer questions from them about the process, this helps to give them background information (the why, the how, etc.) for why the change is happening.
Implementing the Change:
Personally, for me the easiest step of making a change is the implementation process. This can be updating my syllabus, creating a new video, adding to lesson/unit plans. I find this portion of the process very gratifying because I get to see the end result of the work coming to fruition. For many this can be the hardest part as they get stuck on things being “perfect”. I used to get stuck in a pattern of perfectionism and this lead to a lack of forward progress. I know try to think of implementation, especially for new processes or procedures as the first draft, it doesn’t have to be perfect, but it has to a significant step forward. I can then make minor tweaks and changes without disruptions to the overall workings of my classes that will throw students and parents off.