I love swapping weekly routines with teachers. It shows what we value and what we prioritize for each day of teaching. I talked about my planning process in my back-to-school bullet journal post in August, but this plan can be a candidate for change based on the group of students each year. I always like to review my weekly routine each year when I do my reading each summer. Reflecting on these practices is one of the ways that I like to feed my own creativity and keep my teaching practices fresh for students. I know teachers always like to have established routines “that work,” but I would argue that the new things we try to keep our student-minds working like new. I got into teaching because learning was something that appealed to me; the nature of the weekly routine is something that begs to be refined over and over.

Let’s #swaproutines. I would love to know how your classroom runs and is organized with different activities and lessons.

Observation #1: This writing every day thing is more difficult than imagined. Even if it is a quick write. 

Observation #2: I am to the part of the school year where I am evaluating on a macro level what strategies and routines are working...and which ones are not. 

One of the changes I made this year was to routine paragraph warm-ups. I was sitting in a professional development in August, and the facilitator asked the question, "who uses warm-ups to start class?" I had decided to change, but the overwhelming majority of people do use warm-ups. My question, as a person who never used warm-ups and had anticipatory sets for all lessons for each day, I was curious as to what was working and what was not. Many people use Daily 5, etc. However, I was interested in having all students write a paragraph-no ifs, ands, buts, about it. 5-7 sentences is the expectation for the daily warm-up, and all students, I repeat, all students are hitting this benchmark at this point in the school year. Routine paragraphs are expected routines on a given thematic concept for each day. They involve note-taking, opinion, or critical-thinking.

My pre-intern is ending his time working in my classroom, and I have asked him this question: "Are you sure you still want to be an English teacher?" I asked him this question with a hint of sarcasm, but also one of seriousness. The Michigan Education Association published an article about "The Disappearing Educator" that I think all teachers and those involved in education should read. Where are we going? The answer is leaving teaching and not choosing to become a teacher in the first place. We have all heard the statistic in education about teachers leaving before they reach five years. I would argue that teachers are in jeopardy well beyond five years. Put us on the endangered species list.