Why We Start Class Well

Dear colleague,

I've spent this month riffing on the idea of the Value of an education. Even in a world where robots make podcasts, bad arguments abound, “anything I need to know is on my phone,” and writing is way more work than prompting ChatGPT, I'm more confident than ever that classes filled with knowledge-building, argumentative practice, reading, writing, and speaking/listening are more important than ever. And this is why, as I'm guiding my students to learn in these ways, I'm also taking care to mini-sermonize the Value of this kind of work.

But what about classroom management stuff? Should we teach and mini-sermonize that stuff as well?

Yes — we should. Here's how I've been moving my students toward mastering the start of class and Valuing that mastery.

What's a strong start to class?

Here's what I mean by a strong start to class:

• The bell is our boss — when it rings, we self-govern ourselves from passing-time mode to class mode. We come together as a unit. We dial ourselves in to the frequency of this classroom. We begin the work of today's learning. We do this quickly and automatically, without needing the teacher or another student to rein in our energies.
• We get to the work at hand — I don't want my students to quiet down and listen to me; I want my students to quiet down and begin their learning journey for the day. They look at the projector, see the warm-up, and get started. We've begun our enjoyable and productive class period — the teacher hasn't started this, we each have as self-governing individuals.
• When we're finished with the warm-up, our minds and souls have established forward momentum. Now we can go over the work we just did, or share it, or check for understanding, or connect, or segue into the lesson proper.

During this school year, these are the kinds of things I'm after with the first 10 minutes or so of each of my lessons.

But all that being said, you may have some questions:

• What about hard-to-manage classes?
• What work are students doing for the warm-up?
• How do you get students to “buy in” (Value) to self-governing in this way?

Let's dig in to the principles that help me.

Keep the warm-up simple, clear, and consistent.

For the first five weeks of this school year, my general-level students began the day with an article. (This was my “Article of the Day” experiment, which I explain in this video). Every single day, students:

• Picked up the article up front
• Previewed it for unfamiliar vocabulary words, circling them as they found them
  • We annotated the articles to define these words before reading each day
• Read it
• Paraphrased it
• Asked a question of it

Doing the same thing for five weeks straight seems crazy, right? Too much of the same, too boring, too much work for me finding all these articles. (I agree on that last one!)

But I was sending a message:

• In this classroom, we will get good at things. For the first few articles, students struggled with basic things like picking words and paraphrasing. When I finally ended the AOD experiment, students of all ability levels were doing the entire process on their own.
• As we practice, we'll learn things about the world, and as we learn things about the world, subsequent learning will get easier. Knowledge begets knowledge — I was speaking to this, sure, but more importantly I was proving it.

Once I was tired of AOD and sensed that we had plateaued, I shifted us into a quickwrite warm-up. (Here are some example slides of our writing prompts.) Here again, students had to work through a consistent progression each day:

• Understand the prompt(s)
• Select a prompt to start with
• Get the ideas going
• Keep them going
• Focus on quantity of words produced and push toward your personal best

In both the article of the day and quickwriting warm-ups, we're doing the same thing day after day, which allows for ample Woodenization and a gradually internalized definition of success.

On the article of the day, you're successful when you've:

• Learned some new words
• Read and paraphrased the article
• Asked a question

On the quickwrites, you're successful when you've:

• Written at least 100 words
• Pushed yourself to write for the full 10 minutes
• Over time, improved your personal record of words written in 10 minutes

But at the same time that we're doing these, I'm also mini-sermonizing the Value of what we're doing.

Mini-sermonize the why.

With both of these warm-up types, I've got to cast a multicolored vision of the Value of the work.

• Why do we read these articles? To build knowledge about the world. Why is that valuable? Here are some reasons from a recent article.
• Why do we do this writing? Because writing is unmatched in its ability to deepen and broaden our power and our experience. Here's a deeper dive on why we write.

There is a lot (a LOT) of craft that goes into effective mini-sermons. (For some pro tips I picked up recently through a partnership with Kenowa Hills Public Schools, see this video.)

Finally, try timing the transition.

At about the six-week mark, I decided to start timing how well my students self-governed themselves into beginning the warm-up. It was a super simple teaching move, but it allowed me to start mini-sermonizing the value of being our own bosses and self-governing our own transitions from the passing period to the class period. I made a brief video about this, which you can find below.

In all of these principles, I hope you'll see two things:

• I'm focused on doing just a few things, playing with just a few variables, and doing so repeatedly so that my students and I have time to improve.
• I'm remaining curious and confident in our ability to get better over time.

Of all of my classes, the one I'm proudest of in this area of starting class well is fifth hour. It's right after lunch, it's mostly freshmen, it's late in the day, and the group is a smorgasbord of strengths, weaknesses, histories, and difficulties. It took a lot of faith to believe they could improve when we were in Week 2. But now that we're in Week 9, this is one of my favorite classes of the day because of how much they've improved and how good it clearly feels to them.

So much of teaching is just being confident that simple practices, done with increasing excellence, can produce positive results over time.

Teaching right beside you,

DSJR