Beyond Icebreakers: Setting the Stage for a Successful School Year
The start of the school year is about more than getting to know your students; it's also about building a foundation for success.
It’s that time of year when much of social media is brimming with icebreaker ideas… and with hot takes about icebreakers themselves.
I’ll set aside the debate about how much start-of-school professional development time, if any, should be spent on icebreakers. I’m also not going to write about whether or not you should use icebreakers with your students. Instead, I want to talk about what you do after the icebreakers. I want to talk about the first days of school.
I should make clear that my expertise is middle school, and so the way I start my school year is very much geared toward a middle school setting. However, the ideas behind it can translate into any setting.
I like to spend the better part of the first two weeks teaching students the norms and expectations of my class. Instead of delving right into Social Studies content, I spend the first eight to 10 days focused on a few, more fundamental, objectives:
Students will know what to expect in my class.
Students will understand the structure and format of my units.
Students will be able to explain how and when they will be assessed.
Students will know how to advocate for themselves and demonstrate mastery in a way that matches their learning styles.
Students will be able to summarize how standards-based grading works and how their grades will translate to high school.
The ‘Why’
I began using this start-of-year routine at my last school. There, we not only used standards-based grading, but we also used an innovative personalized learning structure that gave students choice in their daily schedules. There was a lot to teach and review in order to ensure the system ran smoothly.
When I moved to my new school, I kept the same structure, because even though students did not need to learn a scheduling platform, they still needed to learn how to be a student in my class. My school gives teachers a fair amount of freedom to teach in ways that feel authentic to them. I want students to understand how I run my classroom, especially insofar as it is different from other teachers. I also want students to understand my approach to teaching history, and the reasons why studying history is important. Lastly, I want students to feel a strong sense of agency. In a standards-based instruction system, it can be hard for students to know where they stand and what they need to do to demonstrate the next level of proficiency. I want to make all of that crystal clear at the start of the school year.
The ‘How’
Like most teachers, I still start with get-to-know-me and get-to-know-you activities. This usually takes two days since we typically have shortened periods on the first day of school. I do this for the same reasons every teacher does it; I want students to feel comfortable in the classroom.
After that, I take students through an Onboarding Module. The module is structured exactly how my core units (which I call modules) are structured. Here’s a simplified outline:
Introduction: We discuss the big idea for the module, introduce vocabulary, take a formative assessment, and introduce core ideas.
Lessons: These are all designed to teach class procedures and structure. For instance, I have a self-paced civics unit and a year-long team-based Social Studies competition. Students learn about those class components in these lessons. After each lesson is a checkpoint assignment to ensure they understand the material.
Vocabulary Quiz: In this case, they are assessed on key grade-level academic vocabulary, and a few terms that have classroom-specific meanings.
Classroom Procedures Test: All students have to pass a test demonstrating that they have a clear knowledge of classroom procedures.
Mastery Project and Reflection: Their (very small) “project” involves coming up with a personal learning goal for the year, and then reflecting on which skills and competencies they developed during the module.
As you can see, this is a significant amount of work. And if you think of the Onboarding Module merely as a glorified icebreaker, it might seem like an excessive delay between the start of the school year and the start of our first official unit.
However, I want students to know not just what we are learning, but why we are learning it. And I want them to know why I teach the way I teach. Taking the time to carefully onboard students enables them to have a clear understanding of me and my class, and also empowers them for success in the first official unit, rather than simply “learning on the job.”
Lots of really helpful advice in here :-)