More Than Four Walls

My new classroom has a long history. It's the former classroom of a long-time math department legend. The former teacher started teaching in this classroom in 1997 (correct me if I am wrong but I believe that's what he said). His classroom fit him. Fit his style. It was comfortable for him. 

I started thinking about how I could take a space that had been so distinctly his and slowly make it mine. He had worked tirelessly for weeks to get his belongings of almost 3 decades out of there so that I could have time over the summer to move in. I am really grateful for his time and effort. Lots to say about him and all the incredible things I learned from him over the years, but let's focus on the room. 

Here is how I found it in May: 

You may notice the chalkboards. The former teacher loved the chalkboards and felt comfortable using them regularly to deliver instruction. The feeling of chalk on my hands makes me squirm in discomfort so I knew those had to go. I am so grateful that my administrators and custodial team went to work to hang new whiteboards for me. 

I also wasn't in love with the vibrant green and yellow walls. While on brand for our school, they felt too intense for me. So again, our custodial team went to work to paint them white. And yes, I totally know how fortunate I am to have such incredible people on my side, especially our math department chair who advocated for all this work to get done. Grateful doesn't even begin to capture how I feel about her.

My kids and I popped in over the summer a few times, bringing some things out of storage and checking in on the progress of the room. They LOVE going to my school so it's not to convince them to load up in the car for a trip to the school and ultimately the neighboring Chick-fil-A. They also think all the custodians are the coolest people ever and enjoy getting high fives from everyone.

It is overwhelming to set up a room. I am not talking about cute decorations or personal touches. I am talking about the physical set up and structure of what furniture, where it should go, and how classroom supplies should be displayed and organized. I am a huge believer that the setup of the room is an integral part of the classroom management and behavior prevention. In fact, after 4 years in other teacher's rooms, this is the hill I will die on forever. Your classroom has to make sense. 

A well-designed room answers, without much explanation:

• How and where will students funnel in when they first enter? Will that space create a bottle neck? Is there space for students to physically arrive if many arrive at once?
• Where do they get the days required materials? Is there a table by the door?
  Where do they put their cell phones? Is it fairly private and safe, or too accessible by others?
• Where do they turn things in? Does it make sense to be by the door or in another place where students can drop things off on their way out?
• What happens when they need a pencil? A marker? A calculator? Can they get to that area quickly?
• Where do absent students find work? Is it by the turn in area or a different area?
• How do students create groupings of desks? Is it something that can quickly turn back into rows if needed?
• How much traffic moves through the instructional space? Are they crossing or entering the front of the room on their way to get supplies every time? 
• Which areas need teacher supervision? How can the location and accessibility of the teacher desk support that?
• How many desks does a student have to walk past to accomplish a daily routine?
• What happens when 5 students need the same thing at once? Is there space for that to occur?
• Is there an area where I can quickly and easily work one on one with students or in small groups? Do I want that to happen near my teacher desk or at a different table? 
• When students are taking an assessment, where will I be? Is my desk in a good spot to keep eyes on the room?

These are the questions that matter most to me, and the answers can be challenging to pin down in a new space. Learning where the outlets are, where the internet cables run, and all of the other little logistical details play an important part in determining where things can and can’t go.

The other piece that can be a real hurdle is the furniture itself. I got rid of a lot when I left the classroom. Some things were gifted to others, some were borrowed and some returned, and some I genuinely have no idea where they ended up. So, for the rest of the summer, you can find me on Facebook Marketplace and at Goodwill, frantically trying not to spend my own money while also recognizing that my sanity hinges on having what I need where I need it to make teaching feel calm.

If you’d like to check out my classroom wish list and are feeling generous to help me set up my new space with a few needed items, you can find it here.

I’ve always felt that my classroom is an extension of my home. Not because it needs to be perfectly decorated or filled with matching, beautiful things, but because it needs to feel comfortable. It needs to feel cared for. It needs to feel like a place where students belong.

Bare walls, broken or worn-out furniture, and an empty supply cart don’t exactly say, “Welcome to school. This is your space, too, kids!” The little things we put into a classroom help create that feeling of belonging and they also make the day run a whole lot more smoothly. One of the biggest blessings my very first year of teaching in 2012 was a gift card from my principal to the teacher supply store to get things exactly like this. She understood that creating a space for children takes time and money, and while she had a very limited budget, she saw a brand-new baby teacher in need of a head start. I will never forget that.

So, this time of year when you see teachers sharing classroom supply lists or wish lists, this is part of the reason. Most of us aren't trying to create a picture-perfect classroom (although with Canva and a laminator we can get really close haha). We're trying to build a space that feels functional and ready to welcome students who will spend so much of their time there.

Stay tuned for the final room! 

What Coaching Taught Me About Teaching

“What the heck is a learning coach?”

That was, without a doubt, my first thought when I saw the job posting in the spring of 2022. The title sounded a little made up, and honestly, I wasn’t totally sure what the job even was. But I applied anyway.

Four years later, I can say it changed me completely.

As I prepare to head back into the classroom next year, I find myself carrying an overwhelming amount of gratitude for everything this role taught me, the people it brought into my life, and the ways it reshaped how I think about teaching and learning.

Here are a few things swirling around in my brain as I wrap up this journey and prepare to be back in the game. 

1. Students need a ridiculous amount of grace for their dead Chromebooks. Seriously. Those things barely hold a charge, there aren’t enough outlets, and there’s never enough time between classes to get them plugged in. I don’t think I’ve made it to lunch once this year without my own teacher Chromebook dying. I will never get frustrated with a student over a dead Chromebook again. That battle is real. 

For me? I am so ready to ditch them all together. More human interactions. More paper. More whiteboards. More books. More talking. More laughing. 

2. Routine, structure, and predictability are the secret sauce of classroom management. The teachers whose classrooms run like a well-oiled machine are not getting that kind of success by accident. Every single thing has a flow and a system behind it. How papers are handed out. How phones are managed. How students move into groups. How transitions happen. What group work sounds like. What students do when they finish early. The more I observed great teachers, the more I realized that strong classroom management is less about “controlling the behavior kids” and more about removing uncertainty for all kids. Behaviors escalate when students don’t know what to do, how to do it, or what’s expected of them. The best classrooms feel calm because the routines carry so much of the cognitive load for students.

3. Time spent anchoring students into your classroom and helping bring their minds and bodies to attention at the start of class is time well spent. School feels frantic, and I had forgotten that. Students are rushing from class to class, conversation to conversation, carrying stress, distractions, social drama, exhaustion, and a million other things with them. Honestly, even as a learning coach, moving from room to room all day felt overwhelming at times. And if I had to squeeze in a bathroom break between classes? Forget it. Walking into the next classroom and immediately being fully present was hard. 

That experience changed how I think about the start of class. Opening routines, bell work, transition time, and moments to mentally prepare to learn are not wasted time. They are essential. If students are not sitting down immediately ready to work, it doesn’t always mean they are unmotivated or disrespectful. Sometimes they just need help arriving in your space. The best teachers in our building don’t just expect students to show up ready. They help students prepare to learn. 

4. A few years ago, before I stepped into this role, a colleague once told me they were “an educator, not an entertainer.” I think it was meant to be a little passive aggressive because I have never exactly hidden my entertainer tendencies in the classroom. I like to have fun, ok? And to be fair, I understand the point they were trying to make. Teaching is obviously much deeper than putting on a show. But this job has changed my thinking on that phrase.

Some of the most admired, impactful teachers in our building absolutely are entertainers in their own way. Not because they are doing a constant dog-and-pony show or trying to be funny every second of the day, but because they are captivating. They are passionate. They still genuinely love what they teach, and students can feel it. Watching someone teach content they care deeply about is magnetic. You can’t help but pay attention to people who are fully alive in what they are teaching. Ya'll... passion is contagious. Watching Mrs. Rue talk about gerrymandering or Mr. Schisel go off about trophic pyramids is the definition of watching someone IN THEIR ELEMENT. When we lose our love of what we teach, we lose the room.

5. Grading is so spicy. Like, ghost pepper spicy. 

6. The best professional development exists within our own buildings. There is no training, no book, no external resource or researcher more powerful than the collective knowledge and experience already sitting in a staff. The expertise is already there and constantly being refined in real classrooms with real students every single dang day. I have never been more in awe and inspired than I feel at the end of four years with my staff. At the secondary level we can become so isolated in our hallways and buildings and departments, that we forget there is an entire staff with knowledge and wisdom to share. I love that our adopted structure for student centered coaching was never about me teaching teachers, but always about me asking questions and brainstorming alongside teachers to capitalize on the knowledge and experience that already existed. 

We rarely have enough time or space to truly learn from one another. We talk a lot about collaboration, but meaningful collaboration takes more than a quick meeting or a packed agenda that we frantically try to rush through once a week. It takes time to listen, time to watch each other teach, and time to think together about what actually works for students. What we really need, more than anything, is increased access to each other.

And finally... Public schools matter. This job reminds me of that over and over again. There is something incredibly powerful about all kinds of kids learning alongside one another every single day. Different backgrounds, beliefs, abilities, cultures, personalities, and life experiences all sharing the same space, learning how to exist in a community together. That matters big time.

And even if public school is not the path someone chooses for their own child, we should all still be invested in the success of public education because, eventually, all of our kids enter the same world together. Your homeschooled child will work alongside, work for, hire, supervise, vote next to, and be cared for by students who came through public schools. Public school students, private school students, and homeschool students will become nurses, mechanics, teachers, business owners, engineers, and elected officials. They will all shape the communities we live in. The future any of us want for our own children depends, in part, on the education and opportunities available to everyone else’s children too. 

Public education is not just about individual kids. It is about the kind of society we are building together and on a small scale I see a micro version of that society existing at my high school every day. It humbles you. It inspires you. And it changes you. I genuinely feel sad for people who never get the chance to see the beauty of that up close. I wish everyone could spend a week inside a public school and witness it for themselves. Because despite all its flaws and challenges, there is still something deeply hopeful about what happens inside these walls every day. 

I could not be more excited to step back into the classroom next year, bringing a renewed sense of purpose and passion to this profession. 

Everyone Loves Buried Treasure

I just love when this role as learning coach gives me a full circle moment. I am in a coaching cycle with the Precalculus teacher at my school, who was also my student teacher in 2020! Getting to work with her again and nerd out about precalculus together fills my bucket in a BIG way. She is full of excitement and energy and brings so much light and enthusiasm to the Pre-Calculus content. 

She reached out about the polar coordinate unit and wanted a thinking partner to find new and engaging ways to spice things up this unit.

For our first standard, students need to understand how to graph in the polar coordinate system and convert between polar and rectangular coordinates. Graphing the actual polar coordinate is just a fairly quick, 1-2 day topic so we thought we would kick off the unit with a little fun and play a pirate themed version of battleship. 

Students created their game board by placing a total of 32 treasures and traps on their blank polar coordinate plane:

Their game boards should look something like this:

Students didn't have to draw the symbols but just used colored pencils to color code where their treasures and traps were located. To practice writing the polar coordinates, students completed their "Captain's Chart".

Once the treasures and traps were placed and documented the game essentially functions like Battleship. Students partner up, guess a coordinate, and ask their parter if anything is positioned at that location. They keep track of their wins and loses along the way. 

We mixed things up partway through the game by announcing a new rule:

• Only guesses with negative r-values and/or negative θ-values may be used! Listen for directions!
• This means you must think carefully about your guesses and adjust your strategy!

This game could easily be adapted for the coordinate plan as well. The goal is to have students practice writing the coordinates from a point and then practicing finding that location after being given a set of coordinates. They are getting practice in both directions, working with a partner, and finding a little fun while getting in that repetitive practice that we know is so crucial in mathematics. 

I often think about what this would look like as a worksheet. Here's a point. Graph it. Here's a graph. What's the point? It's the same thing. But there's something about the fear of a Kraken that hooks students in and makes the monotonous act of graphing polar coordinates a little more engaging.