Findlay High School's Laura Davis explains the #bestyearever!

The following post is written by Laura Davis.  She and I have chatted many times over twitter and in one of our chats, I asked her to write a guest post about how she is starting the new school year.  In this post, Laura explains how she and her whole school tried something a little different this year.  We can all learn from this post. 

I want to thank Laura for taking the time and effort to write this post and hope some of you will leave her your thoughts and check out her blog and twitter feed--they are below the post.  Cheers, Garth 

We are one full month into school and I can say without a doubt this is the best first month of school I’ve ever had in my 15 years of teaching.  No early mornings, or late nights at school trying to be ready.  No panic attacks whether my lessons would work or whether my students would pay attention and be cooperative.  There has been an unexplainable peace that has surrounded my classroom and me since the first day of school. 

Perhaps this is because after 15 years, I’ve finally got it all figured out?  No . . . that is most certainly not the case; yet, there is one thing that I know for certain.

The time we invest in our relationship with our students in the early weeks of school will have positive rippling effects, further reaching than just this school year. 

Investing time to know and understand my students, rather than to immediately begin pushing content at them, has allowed me to see them as individuals and understand how they learn and what matters to them.  This has grown opportunities for me to become a better teacher, mentor and nurturer to my students.    

 As we are wrapping up our first unit of study and beginning to prepare for our first big assessment this week, I am confident my students and I have already started down a path together that is filled with trust, humor and confidence.  I see it in their face as they enter my classroom with a smile; I hear it in their voice when they are willing and ready to participate and share.  I see it in the body language and hear it in their conversations with their classmates – they value one another’s opinions and ideas and are anxious to collaborate.
 

While the way this has all played out is my own doing, it is important to share that many of the ways that I spent these early days was borrowed from the playbook of someone whose work I admire a great deal, Garth Holman.  I first learned of Holman’s  (along with his collaborator, Mike Pennington) authentic student work in Alan November’s Who Owns the Learning.  I began following him on Twitter and am not ashamed to say spent more than a few hours reading the blog, http://www.teachersfortomorrow.net, that he also writes with Pennington.  Their blog, just like so many others that are written by teachers, was jam packed with more ideas than I could wrap my head around.  So, I took some of his ideas tweaked them and even added a few of mine own to build what I believed would make for a great start to the year.   I’m sad to say however, that I had so many good ideas I ran out of time to use them all at the beginning, but they are stashed away for later when we may need some reconnecting.  You can find my first few weeks’ lessons here: http://bit.ly/davisfirstweeks

At our first faculty meeting of the year, even before our students arrived, we talked about challenging ourselves to make this #bestyearever and we listened to the words of The Script’s song “Hall of Fame” featuring will i am, as inspiration of what we want for our students, for our school and for us this year.  The image that appears above is a snapshot of the poster of our building goals for this school year.  The quote seems to sum up beautifully my thoughts J

Giving time to know, understand and hear our students will always reap benefits far beyond what we might even ever see in our classroom.  Teaching them to think, care and advocate, will be skills they will take outside our classroom walls.  While, school is already in full swing now for all of us, I would urge you that if you haven’t already given this type of tiime to your students in your classroom yet this year, stop what you are doing and really connect with them.  
Here’s hoping that you all have the #bestyearever
Laura 

BIO:  Laura Davis, a 2014 PBS LearningMedia Digital Innovator, is a teacher at Findlay High School, with a diverse teaching background that has afforded her many opportunities to grow and connect with students. Spending half of her teaching career as an Intervention Specialist and the other half as a Freshmen History teacher, she has seen how teaching through technology has changed her students’ motivation and connectedness. She loves learning with her students and challenges herself as much as she does them. Additionally, she values the opportunities that social media affords her to learn and connect with others globally. She has presented at several tech conferences and is excited to add more to her resume this year. Laura looks forward to connecting and learning from you via Twitter, follow her @mrs_ldavis.  You can always check out her blog at http://www.lauralearningtolead.blogspot.com/ or at her classroom website: https://sites.google.com/site/fhslauramdavis/