How to Maintain Your Focus During the School Year

As someone currently active in the teaching year, I want to first acknowledge and celebrate the highly active work of teaching, while also reminding colleagues to be “smart in their hard work.” Much is made of the beginning of the year and end of the year, but this in-between time is precious for all of us as we navigate holiday seasons and seek to enrich our instructional time.

Here, I point out some of the elements of teaching that keep me balanced and focused, especially at those moments when I feel like my work is losing some direction.

Reinvention Is not Necessary

In the early days of my teaching career, I would literally scrap everything and start over again each year. While this work of remaking might sound like a noble quest for reinvention, I’m not so sure that it wasn’t simply a response to boredom or a mark of insecurity. I sometimes felt that when the lesson came together well, this was a stroke of luck.

The time spent planning for both the materials and the humans in the room is careful and critical work. All of the steps in a lesson, and all materials, don’t need to be constantly remade. Part of the artistic craft of what we teachers do is finding what strategies (I’ll call them tactics, but this is all about intention) will work across time with the students who are part of our classroom.

When a time-tested strategy fails to launch in a given year, I urge you not to throw it out completely but to look for subtle ways to tweak what has worked. Is it the inclusion of technology? Is it the encouragement to use real materials? For example, when I found that my students began engaging less with drawing and illustrating vocabulary, I began encouraging them to use digital media to represent words they were learning. When I found that students were less engaged in a class-wide novel study, I opted for a more small-groups approach. These are decisions and changes that can happen each day in the classroom.

As Dr. Raúl Mora recently shared in an interview I did with him, sometimes it’s about finding the next step to change instead of rebuilding the entire structure. 

Breaking Down Parts of the Whole

It might seem obvious, but our work is complicated enough without leaning into overcomplication. This doesn’t mean that we don’t challenge students, but it also means that we are succinctly clear. As a rule of thumb, I don’t ask my students to engage in any kind of writing or creating that I would not/have not done myself.  

The classic I do, you do, we do approach of the Gradual Release of Responsibility model still works with older students. Strangely, it’s sometimes absent from secondary education programs or only hinted at. Breaking tasks down, assessing understanding, and finding the next manageable bite can make the work of learning meaningful and accessible.

This doesn’t mean that we must weary ourselves with breaking down every single standard for all students, unless we’re working with children who need this level of support. It does mean that we have critical conversations about data, target areas that need improvement (thinking tactic again here), and then break those tasks down into manageable steps to practice and build on.

Our professional conversations can demystify so much of the process for our students, and we can even co-teach with one another to talk through these elements if we are in spaces that allow for this level of collaboration.

Create Spaces of Inquiry, Not Perfection

I remember the first time I uttered the “D word” in class. It’s the one that comes before “know” and after “I”—“I don’t know.” It’s OK not to know everything. In today’s society, encyclopedic knowledge is perhaps not nearly as important as knowing how to manage and critically consider information.

Teaching can be stressful enough without the constant fear of a mistake. The same reality is true for our students. If we’re working in a content area that a student feels reluctant about, they may be in survival mode each day, hoping we do not call on them, notice them, or embarrass them. 

In our classrooms, it helps to normalize asking questions, seeking answers, and learning more as a classroom community. As the adult in the room with the degree on the wall, I feel that my task is to model this first. Even though I have studied, I have more yet to learn—and always will.

May our classrooms be places where, of course, we are prepared and do our best to anticipate questions, but also spaces where we recognize that sometimes the best moments in a lesson happen when exploring a finding from a student who is pointing out an on-topic truth—thereby giving us another tactic to use to build intentional work.

Build an AFFIRMING Community

At present, many schools in my community are dealing with the aftermath of Hurricane Helene. I recognize that not only have I done some focused work with my students in the past month, but also we’ve built some community with one another.

Keep at it—and keep the human first. That’s true for both the student and the teacher. For the new and seasoned teacher, there is always work to do. I’m reminding myself to be intentional in this complicated process of teaching, and I’m taking moments to find joy and success whenever I can—like when a student says, “I’ve never had a teacher give me this option before” when finishing a novel, or joy like when a student reaches out by Remind message to check on you because they know you live in an area where there is increased flooding.

This is truly treasured work that we do. Tactic is never more central than tact—or, even more so, a focused sense of compassion that is part of our intentionality as teachers.