Last time on year 1, Jenna's much anticipated first day as a teacher just came and went. And while it didn't go exactly as she had planned, she knows it's a marathon, not a sprint.
Jenna:I underestimated how long everything was going to take. I got through 3 out of the 12 things that I planned. That was one of the hard things was because then I was like, I'm behind. Like, I'm doing something wrong. And it's like, no, you're not.
Jenna:It's just taking more time than you anticipated. And the 1st week of school anyway, you're not teaching any content nor should you be. It's just teaching routine and getting to know everybody.
Kanika:On this episode, Jenna learns that she has to have so much more prepared than simply an effective teaching routine. This is year 1 from Carnegie Learning, a podcast that chronicles all the ups and downs of 1 teacher's 1st year in the classroom. I am your host, Kanika Chadagupta. Jenna is now in the 1st couple of weeks of her 1st year as a 3rd grade teacher, and she is rapidly making new discoveries about the amount of preparation required to run her classroom.
Jenna:The first day of school, I was expecting it to be chaotic. 2nd day of school, I was expecting it to be chaotic. But when it started to become a routine of chaos was when I was like, holy cow. I need to learn how to do this better.
Kanika:Every day, students have to follow daily routines that allow them to flow in, stay focused, and flow out of the classroom with consistency and accountability. Having these routines is baseline so teachers can move on to the many lessons of the day.
Maggie:Procedures. Procedures. Procedures.
Kanika:This is a new voice you haven't heard yet. Her name is Maggie. She's a Midwestern teacher with 15 years of experience in the classroom, and we reached out to her for this season for a couple of reasons. One, she has a very different perspective on some of the challenges that 1st year teachers face and how they have shifted over the years. She also has experience working in a district that is lower on the socioeconomic scale.
Kanika:You'll hear her a little bit throughout the episodes as we give more context and color to some of the other situations.
Maggie:If there are no procedures, if there's no structure, you can't teach and you can't assess and you can't do all these other things that you're wanting to do with kids. So that's why it's really important. And when I say procedures, I'm talking about how do we line up to go to the hallway? How do we walk in the hallway? How do we use the restroom?
Maggie:How do we sit in circle time? How do we raise our hand to get the teacher's attention? How do we line up from the cafeteria to walk back to the classroom? How do you get to recess? And once you get those procedures in place, you have to have clear expectations with kids and follow through.
Maggie:So it's a lot of communication with kids. It it's a lot of patience on the teacher's end.
Kanika:At the start of the school year, these expectations, routines, and rules need to be taught. And Jenna is finding it less straightforward than student teaching a prepared lesson plan.
Jenna:So many people said their advice was to set the routines and set the expectations from day 1, but no one gives you a list of everything that you're gonna have to do or say. Like, that would be the longest book ever written in history if it was every rule of what you are not allowed to do in my classroom, you know, because they will come up with some pretty crazy things.
Kanika:Every day, Jenna is learning to adjust and implement new strategies to help students follow these procedures.
Jenna:There are so many things that I already want to change and I already want to do. I think I literally changed the seats in my classroom, like, not only where the kids were sitting, but how my physical seats were set up in my room on, like, the 2nd week of school because I was already learning, oh, this is not gonna work or, oh, this works, I need to keep it. This is not working, but it's too late to fix that because I already taught it to them that way. Very, very early on, I had that realization where I'm like, okay. We're learning as we go, and we have to be flexible.
Kanika:Part of the daily routine at Jenna School is helping our students understand and follow the school's mission statement.
Jenna:Our school mission statement is number 1, I take care of myself. Number 2, I take care of others. Number 3, I take care of this place. So that's, like, the big thing that they break it down to for the elementary schoolers.
Kanika:Getting her young students to regularly follow the school's mission is easier said than done. Fortunately, Jenna's school has created a clever incentive program that helps keep students motivated to follow these principles.
Jenna:As, incentive to follow those expectations in that mission, we actually have little tickets, we call them. It's just a sheet of paper that you write your name on as a teacher, and you make a bazillion copies of them and you cut them out, and they look like little like money almost. And on there, little checkbox that says I take care of myself, I take care of others, I take care of this place. And then throughout the day, if I see people taking care of themselves or each other or this place, then I give out tickets. It's a big thing for hallway behavior.
Jenna:I'll bring, like, 5 or 6 in my pocket and be like, I'm looking for 5 or 6 people to get a ticket. So then you check off what they're doing and give it to them. Some students are super super motivated by it. Like, if they get a ticket, it's amazing. And some students think it's the dumbest thing
Kanika:in the
Jenna:world. So, you know, there's a balance of it. At the end of each week, you take all the tickets that were turned into you in your classroom. You dump them into a giant laundry basket. There's 1 laundry basket per grade, and it's right in, like, our main hallway of the school so everyone can see how full it is.
Jenna:And at the end of every week, they pick, I think, 3 winners from each grade. So they'll pick out a ticket. They'll read the name on the back to see who it was. They'll read it over the announcements on Friday morning, and those kids can go get a prize from the office. And then on top of that, what's super nice is that if a student in your classroom wins, then you also get a prize.
Jenna:So they'll walk around with, like, a little snack cart for the teachers with, like, soda and snacks and candy and stuff. And then my kids have won yet, but one day one day, they'll all I'll get that benefit from having them win.
Kanika:Using incentives like these can be highly effective with younger students because they have increasingly shorter and shorter attention spans. Researchers estimate the average attention span has dropped by a whopping 25% in the past 20 years. According to a study from the University of Denmark, the rate of that drop is accelerating every year and much of it can be attributed to the rapid increase in screen time usage. Simply put, creating a place for effective learning has become more difficult than ever.
Jenna:I feel like I have a different management incentive for every single thing. Like, I have one for kindness. I have one for transitions. I have one for blurting. I have one for being on task while they're working.
Jenna:Like, I'm juggling, like, 16 different management strategies because for my kids, I haven't found one that's all encompassing, and I'm still trying to search for 1. I tried out one that I saw on TikTok that was basically just an anchor chart, and it had, like, a bunch of different things on it that would be expected of the kids. Like, different routines and expectations that they would need to be reminded of how to do once they got back from school. So it would be, like, entering the room and then, like, call and response or lining up or, like, level 0 in the hallway or packing up at the end of the day. And then there were a bunch of check boxes next to it.
Jenna:And, like, as the 1st week of school went on after break, when you saw that they were doing those things and they remembered those routines and expectations, you would give a check mark. So I did that, and it worked out super well. They were super motivated by it. We filled it up within, like, the first week and a half. So then I actually asked my kids when we filled it up.
Jenna:One of them was like, can we do one of these again? And I was like, oh, okay. If you're motivated by it, absolutely.
Kanika:And that's not the only incentive that's worked well.
Jenna:I have this thing called sign in to win as well where if I do an attention getter because I noticed that I would do an attention getter, like, the clap repeats or, you know, saying back and forth to get their attention, and they just wouldn't listen. They would just keep talking. They would not stop what they were doing. So I made this incentive specifically for that where if a student like, after I do a call and response or I stop to try to get their attention, I pick 1 student who stopped what they were doing, put their eyes directly on me, and I tell them to go sign in to win. And then once the sheet is full, at the end of whatever day it gets full on, I will spin a wheel, and then whoever's name is in that box gets
Kanika:to pick a prize from, like, my little candy drawer. While some attempts at incentivizing her students have gone well, others have shown her it's a learning curve.
Jenna:We were doing a math lesson, and I was having the kids take turns come up coming up to the board and, like, switching places with me and, like, pretending to be the teacher and me pretending to be the student so they could teach me, quote unquote, how to do, like, 3 digit addition or 3 digit subtraction because, like, they should know that. So it was a review sort of thing. So I would let them come up to the board 1, like, 1 by 1 and teach me how to do it in front of the whole class. But then some people would come up to the board and start to make fun of it or start to say, you know, like, inappropriate things at the board to get everybody else's attention or draw something they weren't supposed to on the board and that sort of stuff. It got out of control.
Jenna:People were getting out of their seats. So I I had to turn into mean teacher for everyone in that moment because there was chaos happening. Like, honestly, it was a safety hazard. So I was like, everyone in their seats, lights off, heads down until lunch. So, like, they had to sit with their heads down for, like, 7 minutes until lunch because I was like, you don't get fun teacher.
Jenna:You don't get interactive lessons like this if you behave this way.
Kanika:I wanna take a second to mention that using incentives as a technique doesn't necessarily work for every classroom. In fact, some teachers avoid using them because they can fail to be effective long term as Jenna is finding out.
Jenna:Some kids, what works for them one day or one week, they will have no interest in in the future. If they are super, super motivated by something for 1 week and then they come back the next Monday and you're like, alright. Here's this again. Let's get going for week number 2. They're like, I don't care about that anymore.
Jenna:I'm I'm trying to come up with things and catch them when I can, but it's hard when they lose interest very quickly. So I I either haven't found the right thing yet or I haven't implemented the right thing, or my kids are just crazy and want something different all the time. So it's a work in progress.
Kanika:In addition to not always being effective long term, incentive systems can also potentially make things less equitable in the classroom, especially for students needing special accommodations. Take a student with ADHD for example, they might not receive as much positive reinforcement if the reward is for good behavior. Exploring other techniques like setting clear expectations, employing non verbal cues, modeling desired behavior or teaching conflict resolution can also be effective. The point being, there isn't a one size fits all approach. Each teacher has to find their own way, learning as they go and leaning in to what works best for them.
Kanika:Here's Maggie again with her take on the situation.
Maggie:The 1st year is always the hardest because you don't have that experience. When you're actually put into a classroom and you're in charge of, you know, anywhere from 20 to 25 students, and you gotta keep it running for 6, 6 and a half hours, it's a whole another ballgame. And that's something that you gain as you work every year. And I tell kids all the time, I said, you just make me a better teacher every year because there's not one student that's exactly alike.
Kanika:In other words, 1st year teachers like Jenna are having to face the same unprecedented challenges as veteran teachers, only with fewer tools in their tool belt.
Jenna:It's exhausting. And as a teacher, you are making decisions and answering questions all day long. Like you your brain does not get to turn off once. So I'm really proud of how how I've been handling that and how even even with the ups and downs in there, there have already been plenty of downs that I've experienced with my class that, like, you just have to get back up and you have to be that mentor and you have to keep going no matter what. I still have had my down in the dumps moments where I'm like, what am I doing wrong?
Jenna:Why are my kids doing this? Like, you know, throwing a little pity party for myself every now and then. But I'm proud of myself for not giving up. I know that I'm I'm capable and I have to just keep pushing through because it's only gonna get better from here.
Kanika:This is year 1, an exploration of 1 teacher's 1st year in the classroom, brought to you by Carnegie Learning. Join us for the rest of the series as we follow Jenna through every moment and be sure to follow miss dotmcnulty on Instagram and TikTok to keep up with Jenna. For exclusive additional content, free teaching resources, and more, visit yearonepodcast dotcom. That's year0nepodcast.com. Next time on year 1, the challenges are just beginning.
Kanika:Jenna encounters some new behavioral issues that force her to seek help outside the classroom.
Jenna:Pretty swiftly, we ended up having, like, a whole meeting with me, the vice principal, principal, his resource teacher, and our behavioral specialist at the school. We've tried so many different things, and it's just not working.