As we begin to welcome students back to school, it’s a stressful time for students, teachers, and principals. Parents? There is some stress, mixed with relief (see this video!). I should draw your attention to the most popular episode of the Catholic School Matters podcast I published last year: Advice from New Principals. It’s full of great “from the field” advice for principals. A couple of things to remember before perusing the list below for worthwhile resources:
- Your students don’t care what you know until they know you care. This directly flies in the face of “Don’t Smile Till Christmas.” Don’t simply aspire to be liked, sometimes the love you show is holding them accountable and enforcing consequences.
- Your students need routines. Some of them live in very chaotic environments. The sooner you establish routines and procedures, the sooner your students will relax.
- If you’re a new teacher, find mentors. Maybe one mentor for writing lesson plans, another for class management, another for dealing with parents. Don’t look for just one!
- We need to model growth mindset. If you’re simply rolling out the same lesson plans and activities, you are sending the message that you don’t care to try. Try something new. Even if it fails, you’re trying and students notice. Fail fast. Fail forward. Keep trying.
- When something happens you don’t understand (e.g. schedule change, a student gets added to your class, etc) try to understand why first. If you still don’t understand, work collaboratively to change it. And keep it professional. Students notice if you complain and will copy your behavior.
Below are the resources I came across the past year. I didn’t include the links from last year’s edition of the Back to School Issue (August 2016).
Resources for the first day:
- 5 Mistakes Teachers Make the First Week of School by Vicki Davis
- Learning Students’ Names and Improving Classroom Management by lauraleemoss
- 3 Inspiring Quotes and a Video to Start the School Year! By Ross Cooper
Resources for New Teachers:
- Find Your Marigold: The One Essential Rule for New Teachers by Jennifer Gonzalez
- A New Teacher’s Big List of All the Little Things by Middleweb
- Tips for a New Teacher by Danny Steele
General Resources for a new school year
- 7 Questions to ask yourself as you prepare for a new school year by Educational Discourse
- 5 Questions to Ask Your Students To Start the School Year by George Couros
- How Was Your Summer? By spoonvision
- Back 2 School: No Drinking from the Fire Hose Please! By Oskar Cymerman
- How to Bring ‘More Beautiful’ Questions Back to School by Mind/Shift
As we begin the new year, I’d like to draw your attention to the following resources:
- Subscribe to the daily collection of resources from Twitter: Catholic Schools Daily
- Subscribe to the Catholic School Matters podcast
- Subscribe to my personal blog
- Subscribe to thisweekly newsletter
Have a great start of the school year!
Dr. Tim Uhl
Dr. Tim's Blog 
There’s a big difference between what I have a right to do and what is right to do. And so just because I may have believed I was right in my past—does not mean I am not wrong in addressing you here. Yet I absolutely respect educators and love education as the one profession that makes all other professions possible: Teachers never know which of their students will be plumbers, architects, astronauts, entrepreneurs, scientists, nurses, construction contractors, lawyers, university professors, or perhaps even the next President of the United States.
As a former medical school university chancellor, the start of the school year was always the same-thing-only-different as the entire four years of medical school: Essential questions. What does it mean to be professional? How does personal and professional fulfillment combine to inspire peak performance and vice versa? And is it true a person is one sentence?
Unlike elementary school students, medical students think they know everything, and thus they come to medical school after four years of undergraduate college studies with a “closed mind.” Our job is to review everything they “think” they know and make what they learned “simple”—or at least “reduce it to its lowest simple common denominator”—especially their attitude. Take, for example, the meaning of professionalism. Wow, over the years we receive answers from the sublime to the ridiculous: “Professionalism is to hold oneself with great respect and integrity as to have a character that’s beyond reproach.” “Professionalism is to work at zero-defect excellence and to be ready at any hour of the day and night and holidays, if necessary, to make absolutely certain people are well.”
First, we must deem ourselves professionals, otherwise we’re not. Professionalism is simply to do our work so well that the persons we serve don’t know if it’s our job…or our nature.
To reach this height requires that we bring our personal goodness, happiness and character with us from home to our professional life—and that we take home a bit of our professional life back home. Here’s why: We are what we profess. Our contributions in our profession make us feel good—and who can dispute “emotional healthiness and wellness” is simply about how well we get along with others. The same traits of listening, supporting, encouraging, accepting, trusting, respecting, and negotiating differences we use professionally we also use personally.
Can we explain who we are in one sentence? For example, Abraham Lincoln’s one sentence might be: “I preserved the union and freed the slaves.” Martin Luther King, Jr., might have said: “I have a dream that all Americans are liberated from the jailers of freedom.”
We don’t have to be a president—of the United States or of our local gardening club—to learn from this specific lesson. One way to orient our life toward greater purpose is to think about our “one sentence.” Maybe it is: “I raised four kids who became happy, healthy adults.” Or “I invented a device that made people’s lives easier.”
Or “I loved my students so I cared “about” them, cared “for” them, and was “careful with” them. Or “I taught two generations of children how to read.” The important thing is as we contemplate our meaning, purpose and contribution, we begin with the question: What’s my “one sentence?” Then we begin today doing something to make ourselves better than we were yesterday, and repeat again tomorrow. Simple, happy introspection of all we are is a wonderful way to begin teaching our country’s future contributors.