Is it special? Of course.

Should you over-stress about it? For sure not.

99% of the power of your first day of school comes down to how well you execute on it for the remainder of the school year.

• Should you establish some rules of the road? Absolutely.
• Get students doing the kind of work you'll expect of them all year? Yessir. (For me, that's writing.)
• Give 'em a taste of who you are and what brought you to this classroom today? Yes, please. (Just keep the autobiography brief because our classes aren't about us!)

So plan some of those kinds of things, and then, if you're going to put stress on yourself to do something, just focus on getting good at teaching. Not too much stress, but yeah — some. Because that's what we're trying to do this year. Get better, get good.

The first day's just an experiment toward that.

Teaching right beside you,

DSJR

P.S. Digging Deeper Into the First Day(s) of School

What follows is a list of articles I've written on the first days of school.

• Everything You Need (and Nothing You Don’t) to Start the School Year Well
• Freaked Out About the First Day of School? Three Quick Things That Help
• The Power of the Humdrum: Why Your First Day of School Isn’t Going to Make or Break Your School Year
• Cures for First Day of School Overwhelm
• Simple Questions on the First Day of School That Teach Purpose
• A First Day of School Activity That Teaches Argument, Which Teaches Thinking (Updated)
• A Simple, Powerful Tweak on the First Day of School Index Card Activity
• First Days of School Writing Prompts
• 42 Prompts to Get Students Speaking or Writing at the Start of the School Year
• The Four Pillars: Defining Success at the Start of the Year (and Often Thereafter)

• Long-term flourishing is WHY we do what we do.
• Movement toward mastery is WHAT we do, day to day, in every lesson.

That is literally it.

Don't lose the forest for the trees. It'll drive ya nuts.

Teaching right beside you,

DSJR

P.S.

Oh — hi there! Remember me? I'm still alive over here.

I hope you enjoyed your summer.

In the weeks to come, I'll be keeping my articles short and focused, just like above. Instead of a normal DSJR cup of coffee, these'll be more like espresso shots.

And then beneath each of these little shots, I'll link to a Dig Deeper guide I've made on the topic.

Today's post is all about clarity of purpose, which is nonnegotiable if you and me have a shot at staying sane this year. To dig deeper into clarity of purpose, check out this article from the archives. And while I'm at it, let me share a few more:

• We Lack Clarity, Not Strategies
• The #1 Problem With New Years Life-Changey Stuff: Clarity of Purpose
• Video: My Five-Minute “Defining Everest” Ignite Talk (younger Dave in action!)
• A Collaborative Approach for Crafting Everest Statements With Your Students
• Everest Statements in Elementary School?
• How an 8th Grade Teacher Made an Everest Statement for Reading and Had Her Students Make One for Writing

P.P.S.

As this post hits the e-waves, I'll be taking the stage for an extended keynote to our colleagues in the Mitchell, SD, area on the topic of student motivation. If you'd like me to head to your school this school year, gimme a shout.

If you've been trying to access my website during the last 10 days or so, chances are it's been spotty. Sometimes folks ask me, “Dave, how do you do it all?” And my answer is always “Um, I don't.” I'm really good at a couple things, but average or below at most things.

One of those “most things” is the realm of managing the technology my website is built upon. So whether it's a band of AI raiders or aging plug-in infrastructure or whatever else, the short of it is that my site needs some love this summer and quite possibly a new, less-tech-knowhow-needed home. Thankfully, my summer vacation has begun, and I can start to attend to this.

So, that's the bad surprise. Doing website stuff was not on my summer bucket list. Please bear with me as I get after this so that you (and I!) can access the rich archives of ideas and encouragements you've helped me build over the past 14 (!) years of blogging.

BUT that's enough on the bad surprise spectrum. Let's end with a good surprise.

In the final few weeks of school, I saw a remarkable maturation in my students' Pop-Up Debates. On one particular day, I remember being blown away by third hour's debate — like near tears at the beauty and whimsy and grandeur — and then deeply frustrated by fourth hour's. But then the next day, fourth hour showed depth and wisdom, too. And it just reminded me that, 20 years into teaching, I can still be surprised by the things that happen on a given day of school. There are just so many factors at play in any moment in the classroom — all the past lessons, all the life lived by students in the moments we're not together — that you just can't accurately predict what's going to happen when you do something like open up the floor for a Pop-Up Debate.

Their PUD progress this year was more like a maze than a line. But by the time we got to Pop-Up Toasts, man…life on the other side of that maze had whiffs of the dancing trees of Narnia. And it's just nice to be surprised by this work and to leave for summer knowing that more surprises are in store.

Some of the surprises will be bad, yes. But even reminding myself of that can help me to be less surprised when it happens. It can be less, “OMG THE WORLD IS FALLING!” and more, “Yeah. That's all part of it.”

I know you, dear reading colleague, have had your share of ups and downs this year. Me too. But may we don’t let the downs keep us down.

Entering summer right beside you,

DSJR

I'm writing today to recommend the blog of UK-based educator Peps Mccrea. I've been reading his work for a year or two, and I find him to be the most efficient connection point between myself and the research on how learning works.

Here are some of my favorite Peps pieces from this past school year:

• Pushing For Mastery, in which Peps argues there is a small list of things effective teachers tend to emphasize, and one of the most important is that the pursuit of mastery is what our classes are for. (I've long been in love with the language of mastery for working with students, so obviously hearing a smart guy say that's a good thing = music to me.)
• Common Mis(Interventions), in which Peps shares a paper unpacking 10 commonly-used interventions in UK schools and what the evidence actually says. (I was surprised by the findings regarding universally delivered mindfulness curricula as having null effects overall and potentially harmful effects to the students most needing help.)
• Authoritative Schooling, in which Peps connects the research on the bad-sounding-but-actually-quite-lovely authoritative parenting to how the best kinds of schools look and feel.

I could keep digging back in his archives but c'mon — who has time at the end of a school year? (My students and I finish up next Thursday.)

Just wanted to share in case you might like to subscribe to Peps and enjoy exploring his work this summer.

Teaching and learning right beside you,

DSJR

P.S. I'll be keynoting at the SDCTE virtual conference on June 8, and SDCTE will also be using the keynote as a kickoff to a summer book study of The Will to Learn. You can find all the details here; attending my talk costs as little as $10. Special thanks to the amazing team of South Dakotan educators putting on this conference.

Dear colleague,

Last week, I shared Mandy from Brooklyn's adaptation of my work into her new setting, and some of you asked for more details on her “School: Why Bother?” mini-unit to start the school year. In the unit, her goals were:

• 1) To collaboratively construct Everest statements for each class period
• 2) To guide students in independently constructing their own Everest statements for the school year

Already when I read that, I'm pretty pumped. Though I've not done this exact kind of thing in my classroom, what Mandy's tapping into here is lots of Value, Efficacy, and Belonging juice.

• As students spend time thinking about and articulating their view of the peak, that's strong soil for Efficacy growth. Most of our students who struggle with Efficacy do so because success is a vague and unexplored idea. This is why “Define Success: Wisely, Early, and Often” is one of the 10 focal strategies in The Will to Learn.
• The entire mini-unit is essentially an exploration of the apologetics for school. Good apologetics start with a simple foundation: skepticism is a reasonable and respectable point of view. And as Mandy guides her students to come up with their Everest language, she's tapping into the power of the most underestimated strategy in my book: Valued Within.
• And finally, all this work quickly signals to students that their thinking and words and voices are important parts of the class they enter each day, which cultivates Belonging.

So, how did it go?

Here's what I heard from Mandy as the school year progressed:

Hi Dave! Thanks for checking in. I've been meaning to send you an update about my Mission Statement mini-unit.

I'm really glad I started the year this project. It set the tone for the class in surprising ways. I teach two sections of 10th grade English, and their different outcomes and levels of buy-in really became clear when we co-created our class mission statements, five days into the school year.

After all our readings, I took notes on the board while students engaged in a pop-up discussion about our driving questions.

Here's the idea board for my Period 1 class:

Here's their final mission statement (in the box on the right side of the board), on the poster I created:

This has become the class I most look forward to teaching every day – they are willing to wrestle with big ideas, to be vulnerable, and to take risks.

My 4th period class required a lot more prompting. Here is their idea board:

And here is the final poster:

I have found that this class is more guarded and less willing to take chances. They want to get their work done, but they're less interested in engaging with it.

I'm definitely going to keep incorporating this mini-unit into my beginning-of-year curriculum, and next year I think I will expand and combine it with a project I have done for the past two years and have students *also* co-create a class AI policy (or just class policies, period) at the same time.

Thanks for your work, Dave! It has really been meaningful for my practice.

Something to try next year?

Perhaps this is something more of us can try next year.

Teaching right beside you,

DSJR

It's that time of year when I share some special things that have come into my mailbox over the course of the school year. Last time, we looked at Mandy from Brooklyn's use of the Five Key Beliefs as a guide during a hard transition. This time, we'll look at Mr. Gordon Downs from Missouri's efforts to apply Tracking Moments of Genuine Connection (Strategy #1 in The Will to Learn) to student-to-student connections.

This is what I heard from Alicia Fessenden, who leads a school I've been partnered with this school year.

Here's Alicia:

Hi Dave,

I wanted to share what a teacher is doing in his classroom. Mr. Downs is one of our 7th grade social studies teachers and he is having students track MGCs with other students.

He started it out like ice breakers for students to get to know each other and is attempting for every student to have several MGCs with each student in their class.

I thought this was a cool way to help students understand the importance of valuing, respecting, and seeing their classmates.

And here is Mr. Downs elaborating on what he did:

I started having students interview classmates several years ago. I haven't been as consistent lately as I used to be. I give each student a class roster. Typically, I give my students a small break (around 2 minutes) in the middle of the class period. If I announce “Your Break”, they may talk about whatever, with whomever. If I announce “My Break”, they have to find someone that they have not interviewed yet and ask them “pre-determined” questions.

Some of my goals were:

• Learning to look someone in the eye (that you may or may not know) and have a conversation with them.
• Learning to really listen and not simply wait for your turn to speak
• That no student could go through the year without someone talking to them.
• That maybe, just maybe some of them might make new friends.

Some of the students are already “well polished” in the art of conversation, some need practice.

When I taught 6th grade, it usually followed a predictable pattern. Students would start with interviewing their friends. Then the boys would interview other boys that they didn't know very well and girls would do the same. Finally, boys would have to interview girls and vice versa. Those interviews were generally a little more awkward (and amusing) with the girls consistently taking the lead in the conversations while most boys would be looking down at their own feet.

And here is a tracker Mr. Downs has his students use:

My Two Favorite Things About This Colleague's Work

I have two favorite things about what Mr. Downs is doing:

1. That picture of a teacher saying “My break” and students knowing what to do and getting after knowing one another.
2. The fact that this is Mr. Downs' final year in education, as he will enter retirement this summer. What a wonderful example to all of us of finishing one's career with strength and purpose.

Sharing in case it helps someone else!

Teaching right beside you,

DSJR

Today's blog post is a little different, as it's almost entirely the content of a letter I received last fall from Mandy in Brooklyn. Though she wrote it at the start of this school year, I saved it for sharing until now because it's a great end-of-year piece on how the Five Key Beliefs methodology can shape our approach to teaching and give us a sense of autonomy and power even amidst difficulty and transition.

What I love about Mandy's piece is how she weaves it all together — the beliefs, Everest statements, AI, and so on. And I love that because it's how I use this work, too. While I share lots of tips and tactics on this blog, what I've always been trying to describe isn't just a toolset. It's a way of being, a way of inhabiting the role of teacher.

I hope you enjoy it. — DSJR

P.S. Stay tuned for more details on a cool chance to hear me speak on the Five Key Beliefs via the South Dakota Council of Teachers of English's upcoming virtual conference.

P.P.S. Only five more blog posts planned for this school year! Crazy.

Hi Dave!

Thank you for doing the work that you do. I've been reading your newsletter for years. In fact, I read The Will to Learn last summer in preparation to participate in the year-long group study. That quickly went by the wayside during the last school year, which was in many ways the most challenging I've had. I left a school I loved for a school MUCH closer to home. While I reduced my daily commute from 3 hours to 8 minutes, I had a hard time adjusting to other aspects of the transition: going from mostly teaching 8th grade at a 6-12 school to mostly teaching 10th grade at a high school; being the only new-to-the-school teacher on the faculty of mostly decade-plus veterans of the school; adjusting to a new student population that, while socioeconomically & racially similar to the kids I'd taught in the South Bronx for the past 7 years, were much tougher and more guarded. By the end of the year I was able to gain the respect, if not the reliable participation, of most of my students. I credit the Five Key Beliefs with giving me a lot of the philosophical foundation that I needed during this year to reach them. Credibility, Effort, Efficacy — I think I made some pretty successful improvements in these areas. The places where I struggled were Belonging, and especially Value.

So I was pleased to see today's newsletter declaring this the Year of Value. The most difficult part of the year for me was seeing really smart kids who had decided that there was no point in their bothering with school. They didn't see why they should pay attention, or do the reading, or come to class on time, or come to class without having vaped in the bathroom or stairwell first. Some of them felt that school didn't have anything to teach them that would help them in their lives. Others felt like school is not going to prepare them for the world they're going to graduate into. As you say in today's post, they are stuck in the red & orange sections on the Rainbow of Why. They see school as an obligation and their goal is to graduate and get out of there — so either they're focused on getting good grades so they can get a college scholarship, or they're focused on getting good-enough grades so they don't have to take this class again. Hua Hsu puts it this way in a recent New Yorker article about AI: “Until we're eighteen, we go to school because we have to, studying the Second World War and reducing fractions while undergoing a process of socialization. We're essentially learning how to follow rules.” While I think this is a little reductive (she's a college professor, naturally), the article contains an essential truth: a lot of students are using AI for everything because they are getting a sense that the rules are no longer relevant, and nobody seems to agree on what the new rules should be. They just aren't really sure why anything they're learning in school will matter.

I gave a lot of mini-sermons throughout the year about why I think school, or at least English, matters — how reading, writing and discussing can teach us to pay attention to things we might otherwise not notice, and how noticing can make life richer; how school can help us to think more clearly and keep from being taken advantage of; how it can make us more compassionate, help us understand people who would seem to be nothing like us, help us understand ourselves; how it can help us make ourselves understood. What we have the opportunity to do in school is so much bigger than just preparing to participate in the economy. We're preparing to participate in the world!
Extremely corny, I know, but it's entirely genuine!

I've been planning an opening unit for the first week-plus of school that addresses this directly, and that was inspired by your work. My goal is for students to spend time reading, thinking, talking, and writing about the question, “School: why bother?” (There must be a better way to say that!) My goal is to collaboratively construct an Everest statement as a whole class that can be posted in the classroom, and for students to independently construct their own Everest statements for the year, which will live on the first page of their notebooks. I've started collecting readings — Frederick Douglass on learning to read; some articles about AI use in school; an abridged, adapted version of Matthew L. Sanders' Becoming a Learner — and I'll use them for my beginning-of-year lessons on annotation routines, summarizing, writing a response to an open-ended prompt about a text, etc. (I'm thinking about writing out my own long-form mission statement, too — something that builds from all that stuff I wrote to you above — to share with them as one of our mentor texts. Hey, why not introduce myself to them as a writer and teacher by asking them to critique my writing?

This is all to say that I'm grateful to have found my way onto your subscriber list years ago, and that you are doing and sharing so much of the Big Work. I'm looking forward to reading this year's newsletters/blog! (blogletters?)

Warmly,
Mandy in Brooklyn, NY

It's that time of year when some of you have a line item in your PD budget that needs a home before the fiscal year closes. If that's you, I wanted to put my courses on your radar, not as some kind of sales pitch, but rather because these learning experiences are special creations of mine that have benefitted the hearts and minds of educators over the years. Below, I'll share some of the courses I've made over the years and what's special to me about each one. (For a full list, see this page.)

• The Student Motivation Course ($199 single user license): When I was writing These 6 Things in the 2010s, Chapter Two (regarding the Five Key Beliefs) quickly became a big old monster of a chapter. There were so many nerdy research stories and intervention strategies that I wanted to share, but before I knew it, the chapter started getting as big as all the other chapters combined. As a result, I had to cut a lot from that chapter, and the Student Motivation Course is where those treasures found their home. Another little gem is that creating the Student Motivation Course helped me generate the clarity I eventually brought to The Will to Learn, which I wrote in the early 2020s. Folks still take and learn from the Student Motivation Course today — it holds up.
• The Teaching with Articles Course ($199 single user license): Speaking of still holding up, this is my oldest online course, and it holds a special place in my heart. In it, you can see me working toward the clarity I would eventually bring to These 6 Things. Though some of the thinking models present in this course don't show up in my writing often, the abundance of classroom footage (me teaching with articles) makes this course special and reminds me that though the models I use have transformed over time, the basic teaching methodologies I use look largely the same. I still teach like this today.
• The Teacher Time Management Mini-Course ($99 single user license; group viewing licenses start at $499): What's cool about this one is that I've never written a book on the topic, so this is the closest you can get to seeing my take on time management. The key insight I had in creating this is that the world didn't need another perfectionistic time management system for teachers — at least, not one from my simple mind. Instead, in the course, I teach time management as something you get better at, kind of like a sport, via the use of 10 key practices and disciplines. Some DSJ-Land crowd favorite concepts get treated in this course, such as satisficing. Like all my mini-courses, this one works well for group viewing (10 core videos, about 10 minutes apiece, with engaging group discussion and application questions after).
• The ‘Why Do We Have to Do This!?' Mini-Course ($99 single user license; group viewing licenses starting at $499): At the start of this school year, I argued in an article that this is the year of Value. As I approach the end of the year, I would say that was a solid prediction. Students today deeply desire to value the work of learning, yet more and more of them simply don't have a grid for how to get there or what it feels like. This course introduces the fundamental set of moves and mindsets that I've gleaned from the research and my classroom practice.
• The Principles of Learning Course ($249 single user license): This is the largest course I've ever made, and someday I ought to make a book out of it. However, that day is far away. It still boggles my mind how underinformed I was as an early career teacher about the way learning works and how to bring that to bear on a classroom. This one is a deep dive for sure, but it contains my comprehensive take on applying cognitive science to real teaching.

Again, the full course list is here, but those above are special to me, and I wanted to share them today in case you've got that dangling funding available prior to summer.

Teaching right beside you,

DSJR

This is true for:

• Stretching your legs
• Increasing your free throw accuracy
• Improving your piano skills
• Studying for a test
• Writing an essay
• Practicing math problems

My students tend to need reminders like this rather often. The most common reasons I bring this kind of “If it doesn't feel like work…” message to my students are:

• When they are studying in mindless or repetitive ways (e.g., looking over their notes)
• When they are using AI to do work for them
• When they are settling into a groove in their public speaking versus pushing themselves to improve at something (e.g., PVLEGS)

It's basically me trying to point their minds toward the power of deliberate practice and intentional work.

Sharing in case it's helpful,

DSJR

P.S. I can't imagine teaching without a solid grasp of how learning works. It's so important to me, in fact, that I created an in-depth course about it called The Principles of Learning.

• Individual licenses are $199 and can be purchased here.
• Group license are available by request — just reach out.

P.P.S. I hosted a live session for school leaders on April 20 called “The Will to Teach.” It's about the Five Key Beliefs applied to teachers — and what leaders can do when the will to teach starts to erode. $29 for individuals or $99 for a team. [Details and registration here.]

A year or so ago, we decided the Stuart children needed a piece of core cultural knowledge known as Rocky (1976) in their lives. I hadn't seen the film since I was a kid, and I had to chuckle at a couple things I didn't remember from my first viewing decades ago:

1. Rocky is way less a boxing movie than a meandering (and beautiful, in its way) character study. Most of the run time is just Rocky walking around Philly doing stuff.
2. Fear of being a “bum” is the core demon of Rocky's life. He's obsessed with bum-ness. (One Redditor counted 57 uses of the word “bum” in the Rocky films, with the highest frequency occurring in the original Rocky at 17 uses.)

This all came to mind today as I was reading a little thank-you note from a student. Without invitation, a thought came to my mind: Dave, you're not a bum. The unwilled Rocky reference made me smile.

Perhaps I've got a little of Rocky's demon that pesters me, too.

And perhaps, lots of us teachers do.

So colleague, here's the deal: if you've attempted today to help your students grow in strength or knowledge or ability or wisdom — if you just took an honest and professional shot at this in your lessons — then you are, in fact, not a bum. We control process and effort, not outcomes. It's from a focus on the controllables that you can arrive at this simple conclusion.

You're not a bum.

Teaching right beside you,

DSJR