Back-to-School Rounds

It’s funny how back to school anxiety never goes away. From kindergarten through my fourth year of teaching, I still find myself staring at the ceiling late at night in the days before school starts. My coworkers and I joke about it. We all have the Back-to-School Nightmares: the out-of-control classroom, the lost lesson plan, the forgotten ability to teach.

But this year, we decided to play offense, instead of defense, with our anxieties about teaching.

On our third day of school, our instructional coach, Dr. Barb Chapman, led us in an interesting discussion about what Redefined Professionalism looks like, echoing our schoolwide sentiment to make it a major focus this year. We had already agreed to videotape our lessons and share with each other, but we were waiting to get back into the swing of things before we started that process.

After the meeting, several of us were chatting about the beginning of the year. “I’m worried I’m not reaching my AIG kids,” “I’m trying Cornell Notes for the first time,” “I’m worried about student engagement,” and “I don’t know if my class is rigorous enough” were all concerns we threw around. And that’s when we realized that the only way we can fix any of these problems (or even identify if there were any problems) was to actually see each others’ classes.

So, three of us (Bo Rounds, Mallory Nickel and I) decided that we would do rounds — the classroom instruction version of medical rounds — the very next day. We agreed that we would each come in for about 20 minutes, make notes of what the students were doing, and email a list of positives and suggestions for improvement.

I needed someone to examine student engagement, so Bo and Mallory came into my English classroom and took minute-by-minute notes on what the students were doing. The feedback I received was excellent; they allayed my fears about engagement by listing what I was doing correctly. But, more importantly, they provided me with suggestions for improvement, the most helpful of which was about my directions. I put all of my lesson information online, and Mallory suggested that I decide whether I want the students listening to me or digging through my website looking for the directions — good advice, and an excellent way to make sure everyone in my class gets the right directions the first time around.

When I sat in on Bo’s and Mallory’s classrooms, I was able to see some practices I wanted to bring back to my own room, and I was also able to provide suggestions to improve engagement in their rooms too. And one of the suggestions I was able to provide came from advice I had received during rounds last year.

Too often teachers are embarrassed about critical feedback; after all, teaching is partially about performance, and no performer ever wants a bad review. In my first year of teaching I hated having visitors in my classroom; administrators, other teachers, it didn’t matter-they all made me too nervous to teach. But once I realized that our common goal is to educate students in the most effective and efficient way possible, I realized that I didn’t need to be nervous anymore. Not only do I no longer feel anxious about having people in my classroom, I’m using rounds and observations to combat and alleviate other anxieties about teaching. They have become one of my greatest tools.

Starting rounds during the first week back to school has helped us set the tone for the school year: we are always striving to be better teachers.