You always remember your first: your first car, your first kiss.

This is called the primacy effect, and it’s the reason why I remember the first thing we learned, on my very first day of my educator training, fourteen years ago.

The sage advice we learned on day one?

“When you’re really tired out,” said our professor, “take a day off. Call in sick.”

Amazing. It’s amazing that in one sentence, on day one, the professor taught something deeply sobering, deeply compelling, and deeply affirming – all at the same time:

“Your job will be exhausting,” he was saying, “but showing up and doing it anyway isn’t enough. It’s not even correct. You need to be grounded, rested, and present. If you aren’t those three things, stay home and watch season one of Orange is the New Black. This is a higher calling, and you need to take care of yourself. YOU are the resource. Protect the resource.”

All that I read into my professor’s words. I have not called in sick more than three times in my career, but I know I could, should, and would, and most importantly, I know why.

Allow me to suggest that your summer is for the same thing. Getting your soul in shape for climbing the mountain ahead. Go on vacation somewhere beautiful. Learn to snorkel. Drink Mai Tais. Treat yourself like royalty.

You are a member of the Fellowship of the Ring at Rivendell, before heading into Murkwood. If that went over your head, skip it.

What else should you do over the summer? Here are my five suggestions!

1. Figure Out What You’re Teaching

If you’re a new teacher, you must accept the fact that you will not be “ready” for the school year, per se. Otherwise, there’s no reason this funny meme would exist.

That said, emergency rooms teach us to conduct triage: taking care of the patient who, essentially, is bleeding the most.

Twice in my career, I started the school year unsure what texts we would study. As a new teacher, if you have unclarity about what you are teaching, that’s where the bleeding needs to be stopped. Make an appointment with your current or future supervisor, and see if you can get some commitments about what you will be expected to cover.

2. Block Out Your Units on a Calendar

A unit should contain: a day or two of an interesting introduction to the unit, several days for coverage, a summative (mid-unit quiz), and some sort of wrap-up project or assessment. Units are generally two weeks to a little over a month. Spend your summer designing as many of the projects / assessments as possible. You will be able to bang out a quiz at 11:30 the night before you give it. You will not be able to design a project at 11:30 the night before – although I have done it. And my students would be the first to say: they could tell.

One rule of thumb: every unit will go way too long. Be sure to put the least essential unit last. You might run out of time.

3. Get your tools ready

Going to use an iPad this year? A laptop cart? Googledocs? ClassDojo? You will have a harder time learning the apps, platforms, and websites at 5:30pm on a weekday after grading a pile of quizzes. Spend your summer learning (and exploring) new tools for teachers. Surf Edutopia.com for new ideas. Do NOT exhaust yourself learning every tool out there. Choose a few and practice.

4. Decide on your policies

How do you handle tardiness? Do you give extra credit? What behavior would lead you to send a student out of the room. What do you do if a student is passing notes? Surfing the web during class? How do you handle discipline? All these are complicated decisions with major implications for your classes. Don’t decide on the spot. Read and reflect on what your policies will be. If you’re not in your first year, reflect on what did and did not work.

Incidentally, for thoughts on the policies listed above and others, allow me to refer you to my blog entry: 10 Things I Wish I’d Known My First Teaching Year.

5. Cultivate Healthy Practices

It’s pretty hard to start doing yoga, exercising, journaling, or therapy. It’s even harder when it’s two weeks before midterms. Unfortunately, in schools, it’s always two weeks before some cataclysmic calendar event. Choose a couple of spiritually nourishing practices, and begin making a practice of the them while you have a teeny bit more time on your hands.

Those are my Five Tips for the Summer. I’d love to hear from you — what have you tried that made life just a little bit easier come September? Please comment below!

Our teacher community continues to highlight many new potential features that can improve classrooms everywhere. We just launched one of those recently! With ’Shared Classes,’ teachers can connect other teachers in their school to their ClassDojo classes. This means that multiple teachers can give feedback points to the same class and send messages to the same parents with their own logins. Teachers can now easily partner with their grade-level team, specialist teachers, TAs, and substitute teachers WITHOUT sharing a log in 🙂

Visit ClassDojo.com to try Shared Classes out today!

At Sacred Heart School in Atherton, the “Code of the Heart” is a set of soft skills that all grades are expected to internalize and incorporate with academic skills. Characteristics of readiness, responsibility, respect and caring share equal emphasis on importance as academic performance. To this end, Mayrin Bunyagidj, a Sacred Heart first grade teacher uses ClassDojo to encourage her students for demonstrating the Code of the Heart aspects of character development. “Seeing and hearing specific comments about their character help my students to become more empathetic with their peers,” says Bunyagidj.

Watch more “Ideas for the Classroom“ to uncover other great ways teachers incorporate ClassDojo into their workflow.

Sonya Castillo is a bilingual 5th grade teacher teacher at Jefferson Elementary in San Leandro. Castillo tracks in-class participation with the ultimate goal of helping students understand how their goals are self-driven and self-motivated. Using ClassDojo, Sonya can customize feedback to be highly relevant to her classroom needs. She selects behaviors that help her students become more self-reflective. Also, she writes the behaviors in Spanish, enabling Castillo’s native-speaking families to check-in from a device or a home computer to see how their students are improving and participating. The specificity of her feedback also makes parent/ teacher conferences substantially more informative.

Watch more “Ideas for the Classroom“ to uncover other great ways teachers incorporate ClassDojo into their workflow.

Positive Behavior Intervention and Support specialist Paul Callis uses ClassDojo to help special education students build their confidence as learners. Callis, who supports students between 6th and 12th grade at the Coliseum College Prep Academy in Oakland, says his students usually need to work to build back some lost self-esteem before they can tackle more rigorous academic matters. Once the students feel valued and successful, Callis can begin to get through to their potential. “That’s when the work comes in. First, to get them onto grade level, they need to be in a positive place,” he adds. Using ClassDojo, Callis looks for ways to reinforce the positive trajectory he and his students are building. This reinforcement creates a virtuous circle of self confident students who help one another, are punctual and prepared.

Watch more “Ideas for the Classroom“ to uncover other great ways teachers incorporate ClassDojo into their workflow.

ClassDojo works well across all grade levels, including high school. For example, it can help facilitate group work in a multi-lingual setting where students speak a myriad of native languages. Managing group work in her highly heterogeneous classroom was tricky, says Tara Hobson of SF International High School. She uses ClassDojo to encourage group lab work in her 11th grade chemistry class. Points are awarded to students asking good questions, speaking in English, and following their roles during lab time. As Hobson moves around the classroom, she uses the ClassDojo app on her smart phone to track these behaviors, reinforcing them and bringing classroom expectations to a higher level. The dynamic of group interaction during lab assignments has since really improved she says. Hear more from Tara in the video below!

Hear how other teachers like Tara have used ClassDojo in their classrooms.

Evan Wolkenstein of Jewish Community High School of the Bay in San Francisco takes a telescopic view in his use of ClassDojo. He works backward from his desired outcome, asking the question “What kind of people do I want my students to be at the end of the year?” Wolkenstein’s 10th through 12th grade classroom is a place to not only learn material, but to learn great interpersonal skills for life. Evan believes one of the ways to bring this about is through cultivating active listening skills. Understanding the core concept — or the most important idea — of what you are hearing someone else say, builds the ability to reflect. Wolkenstein records instances when he observes his students’ applying this skill, and he rewards them for building on this somewhat ineffable quality. “The goal is listening to understand,” adds Wolkenstein. “The ClassDojo tool trains me as well; it helps me to remember what’s important to me.”

Hear more details on how Evan uses ClassDojo in his high school classroom:

Find more “Ideas from the Classroom” from other teachers, and see how you might be able to adopt new approaches to using ClassDojo 🙂

Miranda Hanson, a teacher at Travis Elementary School on Travis Air Force Base says ClassDojo helped her become a more positive teacher, and preventing her from only focusing on students who “act up”. Hanson focuses on conveying her expectations for good conduct with the visual interface of ClassDojo, and customizing behaviors to those important to her classroom. The visual cues help students understand the kind of behaviors she is looking for. By encouraging the good behaviors in children, other children strive to learn the same to receive positive encouragement as well! The students now even compete with one another to be the “Player of the day.” Watch more about Maranda Hanson’s use of ClassDojo:

Hear other teachers who use ClassDojo share their “Ideas for the Classroom” to improve motivation, classroom management, and student encouragement.

Kaytlyn Flynn of St. Joseph Elementary School in Alameda, CA finds ClassDojo an effective tool for easing the transition time between subjects. Flynn gives positive points to students for preparing for the next subject quickly and efficiently without stalling. Similar to Maranda Hanson’s students, Flynn’s students thrive on the competition of positive point rewards. When one student is rewarded for preparing quickly, the rest of the students then follow suit. Overall, “this cut the transition time in half,” says Flynn. Watch Kaytlyn share more details on how she reduced her transition times:

Hear from other teachers like Kaytlyn on how they used ClassDojo improve the classroom environment through student motivation!

We all remember classrooms in which the same three bright students would volunteer to contribute insights and opinions, while the rest of the class offered little but the “blank stare.” Net result? Risk-averse, introverted students miss out on the chance to move out of their comfort zone and the rest of the class misses out on the opportunity to elevate the discussion. Who is to say the girl at the back of the class doesn’t have a most original, quirky idea to bring to the table? Too often, the fruits of that shy girl’s imagination are kept under lock and key.

Astute teachers will do most anything to shift this imbalanced classroom dynamic. This is where ClassDojo’s “random” feature can make a teacher’s life easier. Emily Wood shares her thoughts on how the randomizing tool has focused and engaged all of her students.

Watch more “Ideas for the Classroom” to uncover other great ways teachers incorporate ClassDojo into their workflow.