Reflections on the First Week of School

Maxwell Bigman
Aug 28, 2017 · 6 min read

Wham! The first week of school hits you like a pile of bricks. There’s no way around it. I don’t have the luxury of rolling out a curriculum that I have used before — even the class that I have used the material before has changed the content so that I need to relearn it. The first weeks are full of so much promise. There is so much possibility in the unknown. This year I am trying to be very purposeful about a few things: 1) learning goals 2) assessment and 3) procedures + expectations.

1) Over the summer I immersed myself in the idea of backward design so that I can teach with the end goals in mind. It’s a great activity in problem solving and design thinking. What do you want the end goal(s) to be? What steps do you need to get there? What is the user’s (i.e. student’s) experience like? How will the students demonstrate their learning?

Backward design has really pushed me to think macro instead of micro. I am a big picture person — I always have lofty goals for the year, but I end up getting bogged down in the daily lesson plans and suddenly it’s Thanksgiving and I have lost sight of what I was aiming to do at the beginning of the year. This year that design was what I spent my summer focusing on. As a new teacher, I felt like I was only ever a day ahead of the students (if that). Honestly, that’s a miserable way to teach. Not only is the stress factor extremely high (with pressure to get tomorrow’s lesson plan done), but there is no real way to gauge how students are doing against your goals because you are not framing success around those goals. This year, my focus is on the “Why?” — why does this matter? What goal is this working towards? What are students doing to demonstrate their learning? When those questions are answered, then I can plan a lesson.

The greatest challenge of backward design is the advance planning. It’s an adjustment to have the Unit 1 assessment done before the lesson plans are finished. It’s a major change in what the day-to-day looks like, and it feels counterintuitive to start at the end instead of what’s on tap for tomorrow. However, after getting over initial hesitation I have found that this strategy has greatly helped my lesson planning because each day has so much more purpose. It makes new curriculum design exciting because there are lots of opportunities for students to demonstrate specific learning goals/targets. I am looking forward to seeing how the arc of the year differs with vs without backward designed lesson planning.

2) I personally struggle with grading. First of all, I had a profound experience in college where I finally came to understand that there is a clear distinction between learning and grades. However, it took a year of college where I didn’t receive any grades to come to this realization. And to be completely honest, grades were still very important to me throughout my academic career. As a student, I knew in theory that grades are supposed to reflect my learning, but they still felt like a reflection of me as a person. So I get what it feels like to be in my students’ shoes. You can tell them all you want that it’s about the learning and not the grades, but unless you show them that this is indeed the case, they won’t buy in. Even when you do show them, they still might not buy in. As a result, I am trying to make my class learner-centered to promote genuine learning. (Side note: I have spent a lot of time thinking about personalized learning and student-centered classrooms. This is something that is very important to me: the class should work for the student — I don’t want my students to conform to what they think the ideal student in my class should look like).

Second, I don’t like grades. I never liked receiving grades and I don’t like giving grades. Feedback is what I care about. For me, feedback is the name of the game. Unfortunately, I work at a college prep school. There is no way that I can not give grades. In an ideal world I would have a fully mastery-based grade book. However, I have not spent the time to put that together, and there is not that much room in my school for a true mastery- or standards-based grading system. As a result, I have built structures into my grading system to promote frequent feedback towards the goal of mastery/proficiency of my learning goals. I give weekly quizzes (which take a variety of forms) that are self-assessed; each test can be retaken; there are scheduled one-on-one meetings to discuss progress and to get feedback; if you score higher on your test than your quizzes, I will replace the quiz scores with that test score. These are a few strategies that I hope will promote genuine learning, and help to develop a growth mindset in my students.

To that extent, I have built in systems that reward the process rather than the product. Lab work is about effort, effective collaboration and trying different ways of approaching problems. If you want the “correct” solution, I post it to the class webpage and set aside time for small group meetings to ask your questions. This puts a lot of emphasis on the students to admit when they need help and take ownership of their learning. If you need help, I am always available to meet with you, but it is up to the learner to ask for it. Sometimes grades help to give that push that gets a student to admit they need that help.

3) In previous years, I have viewed going over the expectations in the syllabus as a necessary evil, something that has to happen in each class. I have to admit that I hadn’t given it much thought. This year, partially as a result of my backward design, I made the expectations very clear to the students the first few days of school, and have come back to repeat them and model them throughout the first few classes. I want to cultivate an atmosphere of problem solving and innovation — that takes tremendous personal responsibility and involves a certain self image. Accordingly, the beginning of the year is about getting the administrative pieces taken care of so that we can focus on character development. I see my role in two parts: 1) I am the lead learner and lead teacher in a classroom of learners and teachers, and 2) I am a coach that students can trust. I want them to believe in what we are doing, to trust me and to trust one another. Without the foundational layer of trust, reaching a deeper level of learning is very challenging. Thus, the beginning of the year involves a lot of getting to know one another, and getting to know me and what I am all about. This balance has been tricky, but I would rather the students see me as a genuine human being than some robotic authority figure that they are trying to earn a grade from. I make it clear that we are all a team. Teams work together to pick each other up and create something that is greater than the sum of its parts. I think that this social support aspect might be the piece that is most often overlooked in classrooms, and it is something that I have been hesitant to show in past years as a young teacher in the classroom. However, if my students cannot see me as a someone who has genuine emotions, who faces challenges and makes mistakes, then why would they be willing to be learners who do those same things?

These are just a few things that have been at the forefront of my mind as this school year takes off. I am also diving deeply into design thinking and the design thinking process; I am thinking about what problem solving means; I am seeking to create more real world connections and I am thinking about what collaboration looks like in the classroom and beyond. My goal is to write a weekly reflection to put these thoughts out into the world in hopes that someone can learn from my experiences, and (more importantly) so that I might find a network of educators and learners that can help me grow. These brain dumps are by no means my best writing, but putting my thoughts out into the world is something that pushes me out of my comfort zone and hopefully fosters connection. That seems like something we could all use more of in our lives.

If you have thoughts, please reach out! I look forward to hearing from you.

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Maxwell Bigman

Written by

CS Teacher | Innovator — Challenging the notion of what is possible in (K-12) education

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