First Day of School 2015

As a new teacher, every person you talk to stresses how important the first day of school is in setting the tone for the rest of the year.  As a theater major, I always framed the first day of school as the curtain rising on opening night for a performance that would last for the next nine months.

Previously, I had developed a fairly structured routine for the first day of school, including me talking for the majority of the time about the rules and the room and inevitably losing my voice from talking far more than I had for the entire summer.  With time permitting, the students would do a getting to know you activity for the final 20 minutes or so of class and the first day would be over and done with fairly quickly.

This year I took the plunge into blended learning.  I wanted my students to know from the start that they were in control of their own learning and that the classroom was their space to inhabit.   This overall change was necessitated by the fact that my classroom was now the STEM Lab, formerly the school library.  This is a rather large room with high ceilings and lots of tables and chairs.  Because of the lack of soft items, the room is incredibly noisy and allows any sound to echo throughout the space.  The maintenance crew put sound dampening panels on the ceiling and tennis balls on the chair legs but still the room was noisy.  This led me to the conclusion that trying to regularly lecture in this space would be futile and a waste of time for my students.  As a result, this year began as No Talk Whole Class #notalkWC.  My goal for the year was to go as long as possible without addressing the entire class en masse.

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My plans for this first day of school were quite a departure from usual.  I greeted students at the door, had them put down their things and begin a scavenger hunt in the room.  Each of the 6 tables in the room had different information/instructions that they needed to read and find the answers to questions on their scavenger hunt sheet.  Students were not assigned seats and were able to move freely around the room for the duration of class.  This part more than anything seemed to throw them off.  The idea of not sitting in a desk and being told the rules on the first day was quite a change that almost seemed to make them uneasy.  While they were completing the scavenger hunt, I circulated and encouraged them to keep moving around and visiting the other tables.  I could immediately tell which students could handle the freedom and which ones could not manage their time and were losing focus.

For accountability, I had the students bring me their completed pages and gave them a stamp of completion.  This page that they created became their rule sheet for the class, rather than a standard typed out letter.  Overall they kept their voice levels reasonable and I was able to talk to a group directly if they were getting too loud or unruly.  Seeing that I was able to control the class without being the dictator was quite a relief to me.  I will say that I missed being able to say my corny jokes to them, but this was the trade-off of putting the students in control.

This whole beginning activity went quite swimmingly, with the exception that the students finished WAY too quickly.  The majority did complete the scavenger hunt thoroughly and met all requirements, leaving at least 45 minutes left of the class period with nothing to do.  This was my first exposure to the fact that talking to the whole group takes a lot of time and students are capable of getting work done in a timely manner.  I ended up pulling out bins of pipe cleaners and beads and let them do a makerspace or solve toothpick puzzles.  I would definitely consider this wasted academic time but it ended up being a major learning time for me.

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In the final 10 minutes of class, students wrote a letter introducing themselves to me.  To transition from the makerspace to this writing activity, I walked quietly to each table and redirected them.  The students took the cues from each other and soon the loud room became quiet with students writing away.  I have always had students do some sort of introduction at the start of the year so this initial reflection journal was their version of it.

So overall this was definitely a day of success and of learning.  The students quickly figured out that this class would be different from any they had had before.  I learned that I had underestimated my students and that I held a great deal of power over students without being authoritarian.  And this meeting lay the foundation for the rest of the year.

Resources

First Day Student Scavenger Hunt Handout

First Day Table Documents