Last year, I was at a big disadvantage by coming in during the middle of the year as a blank slate with no time to set rules and expectations. Half of August has been dedicated to helpful and necessary PD's that I participated in for the first time along with our new staff. We have also done an immense amount of planning. There is simply no substitute for the large amount of planning that we have all been doing. After August, it was clear to me that given the circumstances, I did the best I could.
September 4, 2014 will be my own first "first day" of school as a teacher! I have never gotten a chance to start the year fresh with students until now. Trying to build a community (or do anything rather) from the ground up is extremely difficult work. I have shifted some of my focus to getting the new students on board with VSC values. I have also aligned the procedures of my classroom along with the VSC values. This is a fancy way of saying I want to get the students to recognize the specific ways VSC values apply to my class. If they can understand why responsibility, effort and collaboration are important to achieve our goals and build a positive classroom culture/community, then we have taken an important step in building a productive work environment.
I want to act out plenty of scenarios along with the students so we can see why certain behaviors do not help us achieve our goals or build our community. We will go over the questions on Building Our Community after acting out some scenarios that correspond to each question. Students can share what they will be doing to help build our lovely environment. Day one homework consists of a student survey with questions that I will use to create groups. Day 2 is a review of day 1, getting to know all about the students and having them learn about each other, plus laptop procedures. Hoping that this will suffice.
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