Harry Wong? Try Harry Wrong

​​Confession: A well-intentioned educator I greatly admire handed me Harry Wong’s The First Days of School just a few weeks before I stepped into the classroom as a first year teacher and I read it and applied it to my classroom. This text, long heralded as a teacher’s manual for creating a successful classroom, has likely passed through the hands of nearly all new teachers or at the very least referenced in new teacher orientation programs and the like. At first glance, it seems reasonable. Set up routines and procedures so that the teacher can focus on the learning throughout the school year. But looking a little deeper into the recommendations and examples, we can quickly uncover that Harry Wong is HarryWrong regarding using the critical first days of school to set up a classroom for success.

Confession: When I received my copy of The First Days of School, after entering an alternative certification program, I was psyched to implement all of Wong’s procedures. I pretty much followed the advice given, thinking it was going to transform the way my classroom operated. Over a decade later I have come to the realization that the type of classroom I had set up might have been comparable to a prison setting. When a prisoner enters the clink (Google “What to Expect on Your First Prison Sentence”) the first thing she experiences is the major culture shock that comes from being so out of control of what happens to you (cleaning, food, visits, telephone calls, getting toiletries, how to make a shank…) Prison culture doesn’t tend to focus on the issues that led you to land in prison in the first place just as the first days of school in many classrooms, especially with teachers who practice what they learned from Wong’s book, don’t focus for the reasons students belong in schools. When students enter the classroom on the first days of school, they are bombarded with rules like how to “clip up or down” the color coded behavior chart or how to raise their hands any time they wish to contribute or ask a question.

We recently spent a half day learning with Alan November in a workshop he coined “First 5 Days of School.” In our time together, he challenged us to really uncover what essential classroom understandings our students must have in order to create the foundation for a successful year of learning. These essential understandings, not surprisingly, have nothing to do with routines for sharpening pencils or how to ask to throw trash away. Though he made no reference to Wong, we couldn’t help but think how most teachers spend their first days of school doing Wong-like exercises rather than really focusing on the students.

This discussion reminds us of an image our beloved George Couros often uses in his keynotes — pushing his audience to prevent the often rapid transformation of students from having zest for school to disdain for school. It’s no wonder they quickly turn into the Day 2 student above if they’ve anticipated the excitement of school and learning all summer only to be hit with Wong routines on Day 1.

Alan November compels teachers to spend time thinking about what skills we could focus on in the first five days that allow students to take responsibility for their learning. During the workshop he asked us to consider this in a very beautiful and simple way through questioning: “What single skill would you teach your kids on the first day of school?” If your immediate answer is something Wong-esque like “How to line up for transitions” or “How to enter the classroom” we urge you to think long and hard about what our true roles as educators are and what students deep down really need to know. For the record, our answers were love and exploration. How much more excited about school would our students be if the first day centered around love and exploration rather than how to line up to go to lunch, recess, and the bathroom?

We acknowledge that rules and mutual understandings regarding things like pencils, trash, restroom use and the like make a classroom run more seamlessly, allowing the focus to be on the learning. The problem is that spending the critical first days of school in an industrial assembly-line like environment is damaging. The message it sends is that students’ individuality is not valued, that they cannot be trusted to independently make a good decision, and that they have no voice in the classroom. We believe that instead a teacher should take the first few days of school as an opportunity to begin the year with a message of mutual respect between students and teachers, appreciation for questioning and alternative ideas, and many other 21st century skills we all say that we value. When these ideals are understood in all members of the classroom, the procedures will fall into place.

How have you spent the first days of school with your students? Do you feel compelled to change and explore other ways to start the school year?

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