Month: August 2024

I’ve struggled to stay in touch with people for as long as I can remember. Much of this has to do with my upbringing. When I was young, we didn’t have many family friends or close relatives. My immediate family and I lived in a bubble. The bubble would expand every now and then but remained largely unchanged over the course of my childhood and adolescence.

My inherited tendency to not keep relationships alive has transferred to my life as a teacher. Through the years, I haven’t kept in touch with former students as much as I could have. So many outstanding kids have gotten lost to time. Considering how long I’ve been teaching, this is disheartening.

All of this became clear last school year when a couple of my former students made it a priority to keep in contact with me. They were still in the building (they hadn’t graduated), and I don’t think they did it on purpose, but we still managed to have ongoing relations in ways I never have before. We went beyond the casual hello in the hallway; we laughed and discussed everything and nothing at the same time. They kept me grounded and primed me to be the best teacher I could be.

To these students, staying in touch meant informal chats in a comfy classroom. To me, it meant much more. Through our check-ins, these students showed me the value of staying in touch. And since I don’t have much experience with it, they also showed me what it could look like.

A student-teacher relationship is sacred because of our frequent interactions, the space we co-inhabit each day, and the ongoing need to learn from one another. When a young person is no longer my student, our relationship loses the gravity that drew us together. Thanks to a few students, however, I realized that it doesn’t have to be this way. I now believe that meaningful relations can indeed exist after June.

As this school year unfolds, I know I can’t keep in touch with all my former students, but at least now I know it’s possible, how it feels, and what form it can take. This challenges my longtime inability to keep loved ones close, which feels like a personal and professional breakthrough.

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In teaching, there’s no denying the benefits of instructional routines. Every good teacher has them: the Turn and Talks, the Stop and Jots, the What do you Notice? What do you Wonder? These types of practices—and there are many, many more—are essential to any teacher’s toolbox. Discovering how they fit into our teaching and using them consistently can be challenging, but they are powerful (and necessary) vehicles for student learning.

Instructional routines are so powerful and carry such weight that they often overshadow the many non-instructional routines needed to produce a healthy, thriving classroom. In my experience, non-instructional routines, which usually never appear in a lesson plan, represent the glue that holds a classroom community together.

I can have all the shiny, research-based instructional approaches I want. Still, effective, holistic learning cannot take root in my class without a good amount of hearty, wholesome non-instructional practices. These routines work to connect us as humans and bridge a divide between us and the content. Students can learn without these routines, sure. But to what degree?

Non-instructional routines vary greatly from teacher to teacher and stem from the interests of the teachers and students in the room. I’ve written a lot about some of the routines I use in my classroom. Beverage Friday was the newest, which I invoked last spring. The set of routines constantly evolves and adapts to the students before me.

This year, my school has made it a goal to focus on routines that further learning. I love this idea. I just hope that, in addition to the heavy emphasis on outright instruction, we also hold space to discuss non-curricular and non-instructional routines that foster trust, community, and love. Our students need these, too.

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