Are you ready to make this year awesome?

BE CLEAR ON WHAT YOUR STUDENTS MUST LEARN!

Get familiar, once again, with the curriculum documents for your year level.  Focus particularly on what the students must LEARN in order to master year level knowledge, skills, and dispositions.  This will help you focus instruction and assessment on what matters most in order to ensure all students are successful.

BE CLEAR ON HOW MUCH TIME YOU HAVE!

Pre-planning a learning schedule for the year provides a guide to how long you actually have to support student learning. The learning schedule will keep you focused on essential learning and ensure you expose all students to the important year level knowledge and skills.

FIND OUT MORE THAN ACADEMIC SCORES AND ACHIEVEMENT!

Start the year finding out about your students and keep adding to this knowledge throughout the year.

Questions such as:

• What are you interested in outside of school?
• What do you want to achieve this year?
• What motivates you to learn?

are essential and important for the teacher to know.

Learning is something that happens WITH the students, not TO the students.

REVISIT AND REVISE YOUR REPERTOIRE OF STRATEGIES AND STRUCTURES

Take a stock-take of your repertoire of strategies and structures that you know work, or have worked in the past.  Be deliberate and test them out on the new group of students early on in the year.  Keep them, adapt them, or change them, based on how successful they are with the new group of students.  Always be open to learning more, trialling more, and adding more to your repertoire.

Feel free to share your own tips here.