Hi everyone

Last week I wrote about how I became a teacher.

Since then, I also officially signed my contract and got my school laptop and keys.

It’s just 5 weeks until I’ll stand in front of my class, so now it’s time to get ready.

In this week’s newsletter I’m sharing some more thoughts about what I am doing and why.

I’ll split this in 4 parts: Teaching goals, classroom management, class content, and everything else.

Teaching Goals

From my perspective, everything starts with the question of why I am teaching.

What is the goal I am aiming for?

Right now I think I should do what is maximally helpful for my students 10 years in the future.

Can they get the job they want?

Can they live a fulfilling, happy, healthy, responsible life?

Can they become participating and contributing members of society?

Enabling students to deal with these challenges well is the sort of goal I think I should aim for.

I should at some point clarify this further, but for now that’s good enough to give a general direction.

Classroom Management

Let’s start with some numbers:

A year has roughly 8800 hours (365 * 24 hours) or 6000 awake hours (365 * 16.5 hours).

Also during one year, a Swiss middle school student spends roughly 1000 hours (33 (lesson / week) * 0.75 (hour / lesson) * 40 (week / year)) in class.

So my students will spend roughly 11% (total) to 17% (awake) of their time in class, depending on how one wants to count.

So if we look at this the other way around, that means students spend 83-89% of their time outside of the classroom.

This in turn means that the time in the classroom is actually very little and precious.

It needs to be leveraged as effectively as possible.

Using this time well and effectively, that is the idea of classroom management.

I’ll follow the model of the Hamburger Schulinspektion, which suggests four steps, each building on the previous one.

Step 1: Ensuring learning climate and pedagogical structures

Step 2: Lead classes efficiently and vary methods

Step 3: Motivate students, enable active learning and knowledge transfer

Step 4: Differentiated, impact- and competence-oriented support for students.

There are a lot of specific details I could talk about here.

There is also a lot of trial and error I’ll have to do to make this work.

But to keep this section at a reasonable length, let me just point out 3 points that I think are worth highlighting:

1. Establishing clear, reliable pedagogical structures should be the first priority

Clear, repeating, predictable structures are going to be crucial.

That’s something I already observed when teaching German to adults: They love it when they know what’s coming. Each of my German lessons had a predictable rhythm. Every six lessons, there was a test, and after each class, there was a predictable set of homework (a lot of homework each week, but predictable, so students accepted it).

When I begin teaching in middle school I’ll also establish some predictable consistency for every 45 minute block. I won’t even start thinking in 90 minute blocks during the first 4-8 weeks. If I have two lessons of the same subject one after the other I’ll still treat them as two separate 45 minute lessons, so each of them can unfold with the normal rhythm. (I’ll mention some thoughts about this 45min rhythm in the ‘class content’ chapter below)

2. I’ll initiate teaching methods and routines gradually over time.

There are hundreds of things a teacher could do with his class. The book Teach Like a Champion by Doug Lemov alone mentions 63 of them.

I’ll start with just a few of them first and make sure they work well. Only once the class and I are familiar with them will I gradually introduce more (and perhaps discard some again if it turns out they don’t work as well as I want to).

This is also a topic for a newsletter of its own someday in the future, but I want to write about this more once I actually have more experience teaching in front of a class.

3. Differentiated teaching is not a top priority

Some people think that differentiation is the first and most important thing every teacher must do. However, the Hamburger Schulinspektion (and other studies) show that this only makes sense after the more foundational steps are already ensured. That’s why I intend to not use differentiated lessons any more than I absolutely have to in the beginning.

Alright, enough about classroom management for now. Let’s talk about class content for now.

Class Content

The 5 classes with the most hours that I’m teaching are History & Geography, German, German as an additional language, English, and French.

In the beginning I intend to use roughly the same 45 minute structure for each lesson in all of these subjects.

The basic lesson structure

One 3-5 min review drill

Three 10-15 minute core blocks, each with a different activity to maintain student engagement

One 3-5 min exit ticket

Starting every lesson with a review drill is something I copy from @Mr_Raichura who talks about it in Great Teaching, Unpacked, episode 3. It is a very time efficient way to build student knowledge. And knowledge, as even the Swiss Lehrplan 21 acknowledges, is the foundation for any skill development.

The three core blocks will be different depending on what lesson I am teaching. I believe they should involve three different activities, as research suggests students tend to lose focus after 15 minutes of the same task. That means that three is probably the right number.

The idea of doing an exit ticket for every lesson is something I learned from this YouTube Video (in German). It’s about letting the students answer the key question of the lesson on a sticky note. It’s a good review for every student and also allows me to get an impression if the students actually learned what they were supposed to in the lesson.

I think this setup should work for all the classes I will be teaching. I do actually expect it to also lead to strong memory buildup and good exam performance, because students get confronted with the same questions several times already before they see something similar again in their exams. But that’s just my guess. I’ll share some update on this later once I was able to gain some experience.

One thing I hope to avoid is class-planning chaos.

Some teachers I spoke with said they never plan more than a few lessons in advance because they’re unsure how far they’ll progress with their content. That means they just adjust the planing of the next few classes based on how far they were able to progress each time.

I’d really like to avoid this situation, because it would mean that I have no control over semester or annual planning. What I want to achieve is a clear focus for every lesson, and that focus needs to be under my control. I’ll try to design my lessons in a way that they can be a bit shorter or longer perhaps, but once a lesson is over we move on to the next one. I’ll have to see if that turns out to be unrealistic, but that’s what I am doing with my German classes for adults already, and there it works very well.

Everything Else

Alright, so above I talked about some of what I think are the most important aspects of good teaching. However, there is much more. For example:

• How can I leverage parent interactions to improve student performance (and thus make their lives more likely to succeed 10 years in the future)?
• Can I give significant amounts of homework to expand useful time beyond 1000 hours per year? If yes, how many hours to aim for? (1100, 1200, 1500, 2000)?
• How can I collaborate with other teachers to achieve even better results?

So you see I have a lot on my mind and a lot to work on.

That’s also one reason I am excited to participate in the Planungswoche Lehrpersonen organisieren ihren Schulstartalready starting tomorrow.

Alright, that’s it for now. Have a great week, everyone!

Gregor