Hear, hear, hear ye. Arise from thy summer slumber. Take thy teacher mug and slump back through thy doors. Immediately regret not doing more as a June version of yourself. Then remember who you actually were in June, and just how depleted you were. Immediately grant yourself grace. Prepare for the first CPD day back, where we all vow that this year will be different. New systems! New routines! New boundaries! New curriculum! Goodbye, 1999 and hello 2026. We start new diaries. We buy pens. Honestly, I love it all. My husband will buy me my bouquet of pencils (don’t cry, shopgirl) and we start the year anew. It’s my January.
Anyways, what’s on the agenda this year? Another year in the same class band and classroom for me, which is very comforting. It’s consolidation of a great first year back in the primary classroom after my stint in third level. This summer I’ve been ruminating a lot on the things I want to be conscious of across all of my work this year. I wouldn’t call them resolutions, because I have been alive long enough to know what happens to those, but principles. Things I want to keep coming back to when the diary has gone feral and the enthusiasm of the -ber months of Term 1 is a distant memory. That happens, by the way. Term 2 for me is always peak Bono/MacPhisto, go away and dream it all up again time. And you have to do that too! But for now, September. We go again.
Sit in. One, two, three, eyes on me, etc.
Explicit teaching is BACK. We are leading. We are guiding. We are teaching. We went too far to the other side, lads. Everything became discovery, facilitation, choice, inquiry and child-led learning. All good things. All absolutely part of the job. Things I do a lot of. But children also need adults who know things and teach them things. Tell them what you are doing. Show them how. Model it. Practice it. Repeat it. Explain. Model. Practice. Repeat. And then do it again. I am increasingly convinced that this applies to practically everything. How do you enter a room? How do you join a group? How do you disagree? How do you ask someone for something? How do you organise a page? How do you start something you don’t particularly want to do? How do you recover when you get something wrong? Don’t tell. Teach. We should never assume they know.
Teaching executive functioning is the gig. It might be the whole gig in September, in fact. We’re breaking the task down and showing them what starting actually looks like. “We gather the items we need for the task. Oooh, look how I’m laying them out so clearly!” you say. “How long do we think this might take?” “I guess…” Model, model, model. “Oh, I’m stuck. How can I fix this? Can I take a couple of tasks together?” We’re going to use low-barrier-entry tasks to set them up well. This generation needs that. They need to be room-ready before they can be learning-ready. We’re also going to get better at recognising and managing functional freeze. That child can do it. We know they can. But that child also can’t begin. The page staring. The child standing at my desk, at Sabrina Sharpenter (our mounted desk pencil sharpener, I know you stop it!) and refusing to move until they reach rubber tips. The task has simply become too big inside their head. We’re going to get better at recognising that and, more importantly, teaching children what to do when that happens.
This year, we focus on developing understanding, not compliance. What is the point of so-called good behaviour if learning isn’t happening concurrently? Classes are busy, messy spaces. Compliant classrooms are not a requirement for learning (thank heavens, or else we’d be at nothing). This year I want to know if they understand. Simply, can they actually do the thing independently when I am not hovering beside them? I roam a room until they must see themselves through the door. This happens, I believe, through emotional security. Buy-in. They have to feel like you’re locked into them. They also can’t be afraid. A perfectly behaved child who is terrified of getting something wrong is not the classroom success story we sometimes think they are. Rotten stuff. Learning built on fear is rocky underfoot. We need to be consistent in instruction. Mean what you say. Don’t say everything seventeen times. But equally, don’t confuse authority with intimidation. We can be extremely clear and extremely kind at the same time.
We are also going to work hard for the high performers. High performers are becoming a dying breed in primary classrooms. Attention naturally flows toward crisis. At best, we’re all guilty of teaching to the middle. I want to bring back a focus for the kid who is flying along. How will we do this? Complexity. Beautiful books. Big questions. Serious maths. Interesting language. Opportunities to fail at things because they have finally been given something difficult enough. Differentiation cannot always mean making something easier. Sometimes it means making something properly harder. We can do all of this quite easily, and once these children are set up, they will routinely have the independence to get stuck into tasks while we divert our attention elsewhere for a bit.
Just do the thing. Write the damn Aladdin message. Stop procrastinating on that yearly. Get it done! AAAAND, PRINT. Save. Next. The new planning guidelines allow for monthly note-making, and it now fits much more easily within a cuntas míosúil structure. There is plenty of real work involved in teaching, and we have no need to produce paperwork just to show that teaching has taken place. Let assessment planning lead this year, as we move into a new vista of learning, teaching and assessment being the three key pillars in the literature and circulars. If procedures are genuinely useful, keep them; if they help us think, plan, reflect, or advance learning, that’s excellent. But if we’re filling in a box merely because there is a box, I’m not too interested. We are ruthlessly efficient. Inbox in, inbox out. We have pupils to teach. And miles to go before I sleep, etc. Let’s use our time on that.
In our classrooms, reading is a status symbol. Reading is cool. Reading is elite. Reading is what interesting people do. I am going to keep working hard to create that atmosphere. Set up beautiful library spaces. Walk to the local library. Read to them. Read with them. Talk about books like they are cultural events. Have opinions. Tell them when something you read was brilliant. Invite an author in. Children need to see adults enjoy reading. Talk about media. Stories. Magazines. Newspapers. Comics. Weird facts. Biographies. Poetry. Instructions. Reviews. Words in our mouths, on pages, on walls. Words, words, words.
Whimsy is key. Children need whimsy. Be the weird teacher. The classroom is Broadway. Make events out of things. PERFORM. Have ridiculous traditions, chants and running jokes. Create moments that make the other children wish they were in on your classroom jokes. We’re a club. We share silly achievements. Make an entrance in the morning. Put music on. So much music! Share nonsense. Tell jokes. Make them laugh. They will make you laugh. Lean into characters. School should contain joy. There are enough places in life where everything is serious. We have to be memorable to be meaningful now. And shove your “don’t smile until Christmas” advice. Hollow, shallow, clinical and cold. Not for me.
A teacher should model the world and the behaviour they want to see. Do the thing in front of them. Show them how you speak politely to another adult, how you apologise, how you disagree, how you ask somebody’s opinion. Model curiosity. Model being informed. Be in the world with them. Talk about the news. Bring in the newspaper. Talk about something happening in sport, science, music, technology. Same with the learning. Write the paragraph badly first. Get the maths question wrong. Show them how you notice. Show them how you fix it. This is a shared space of accepting that we are all learning all the time; to make mistakes is to be human, but we also work every day to make sure we put out what we want to get back. Water your own garden, etc.
Connect with their passions. Pebbling. Info-dumping. Whatever version of interest a child offers you, notice it. Listen to how they talk about it. Absorb their passions. Get into their world. Their development is also happening in disguise, and in rooms and places you don’t access in the school day. On development, a child doing the same apparently pointless thing over and over may be working something through. This is so true for a younger child. Watch before you interfere. Curiosity before correction. So much information sits in what children choose to do when nobody is directing them. Watch. Learn. Be humble. They breadcrumb you with details all the time.
Less martyrdom, please. The art of success is continuing? Not always. There is no prize for crawling over the line destroyed. Who are you doing it for? Get yourself in order and stop doing it to yourself. You have a responsibility to take care of yourself. People don’t owe you anything. You owe yourself everything. We steadfastly protect our personal time. We maintain a sense of summer throughout term time, too. We live while working. Do all you can to stay healthy and draw a line when you’re in over your head. Say no, basically. You can do that, did you know?
I am asking my colleagues to realise that we are sociologists. We live within and work within communities. We observe these things: the family under strain, the child who has changed, poverty, social isolation, children who spend too much time online, children who are unable to cope, the fact that the services are not being provided, and the gaps in speech, language, behaviour, care, sleep, nutrition and connection. It does not follow that teachers can solve all these problems, but schools cannot act as if the child’s existence is limited to between school hours. We must notice these things and be aware of how politics is affecting both them and us, and vote and engage in society accordingly.
The difficult child gets a clean slate. A teacher tells you they found a child incredibly difficult last year. You nod. You listen. You thank them for sharing their experience. And then you start again. New team. New dressing room. You get to start anew. You can choose a different route. Every classroom has its own chemistry. The child who drove somebody else demented may adore you. Give them a chance. The child you find easy may clash with somebody next year. I would also implore teachers not to make things relating to kids about you. Stop making the child’s stuff about you. You’re the adult. Get on with it.
Make sure the parent piece is done well and make a real connection. Pick up the phone before a small problem turns into a big one. Share something positive and make sure the first time they hear from you is because there’s something good to share, not because something has gone wrong. Also, remember to listen. No one back in the day knew what any other person’s house looked like. Social media has changed that. Something similar is happening in classrooms. Parents see and hear a lot about education and can assume things are standard everywhere, and that schools can do particular things. Not so. We should probably communicate much better about what classrooms actually are, what schools can realistically offer and what teachers are actually doing all day. Principals need to lead on this piece, in particular. Set your standard. Back your staff.
Instant gratification is no longer acceptable or on offer in classrooms because we simply can’t meet the demand for immediacy when there are thirty children to teach. The world keeps giving children instant rewards in the form of excitement and euphoria. The idea is to give them what they want now and avoid any delay. Just swipe, subscribe, tap, tap, tap, and then move on. I’m sorry, but in Room 4 you won’t get a dose of dopamine every twelve seconds. There are times when you’ve worked at something for an hour, and it’s still not finished. Other times the reward comes next Friday. Other times it’s next month. And on some occasions the reward is that you’re better at something than you were six months ago. That’s something you have to accept.
This school year, never tell a child (or colleague, for that matter) to be strong when they have come to you to be weak. Schools need places where people can put things down. For too many, we are the place. They don’t do it with us? They don’t do it at all. That means we accept and live with big emotions every day. Crying, feeling, and absorbing it all. We confront it. We talk about it. We also get on with it. We are soft creatures, but we motor on with resolve and grit. We don’t give up, but we learn to keep going. Do hard times change you, and hurt you? Yes. But can you also lead children to stand up on their own and make a way in the world, even if they are a little fragile? Of course. You don’t have to be the strongest to move forward. And weakness means you feel and are present. Talk that way.
And finally, schools are homes. In every way that really counts, children inhabit them. They spend huge portions of childhood inside these buildings. Clean the classroom. Make it pleasant. Put beautiful things in it. Create warmth. Make it somewhere you yourself can happily spend hours a day. This is a year of their childhood. We are creating little domestic set-ups. Let them find the best place to store things. Let them do the jobs. Someone comes to us to borrow something? Let them find it. Mary will help you. Clean the boards, empty bins, wash down the sink. This isn’t punitive; it’s a communal, co-created learning space. Their space. Let them create it.
Happy days to us. Make it full, beautiful, and warm. Mind our beautiful little minds. Mind your mind. Take care of yourself along the way. Have a rich, messy, fun, and memorable year. Strike off the losses, and retain the wins as best you can. June always comes again. What a great job we have. Never forget it.
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