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The Difference a Year Makes

My grandson Hollis told me about his class play this week.

He was excited and little nervous because he had a speaking part. I asked if I could come and he looked at me like I had missed the point entirely. 

“Oh no. It is just what we do in our class.”

In that moment I felt something I recognized immediately. Admiration for his teacher. For making something so woven into the life of that classroom that an eight year old describes a performance as simply what they do. It’s part of the rhythm of his days. Not a big deal. Not an event. Just what happens in his room.

I thought about what it takes to make something like that feel ordinary to a child. The months of building trust. The routines that taught students how to listen to each other, how to practice, how to show up. The quiet expectation, held all year, that every child in that room has something worth sharing.

So many little moments building all year long and by May it just looks like how things are. Your teaching looks effortless because you have made it so. The craft shows up in how the room runs because you have so thoroughly learned it, refined it, and woven it into the days.

I found myself back in my own first grade classroom. Puppet shows. Days of preparation. Children reading and rereading, not because I told them to practice fluency, but because they knew what was expected and how to be accountable for it. The pride on their faces when they performed. The pride I still feel when I think of them.

That feeling does not go away. I felt it again when Hollis told me about his play.

This time of year the evidence of your teaching is everywhere in your classroom. It is in the student who finishes one book and immediately reaches for another. In the class meeting where students compliment each other without being told to. In the way students move through the day, knowing exactly what to do and where to go. In the conversations students are having with each other right now.

Take a moment this week to see it. Look at what your students know now. What they can do. What they say to each other. How they move through the day.

This is what a year of teaching looks like.

Gail

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