Beginning a New School Year is a Big Deal
August 6, 2025
It’s August! After so many years of teaching, I still get nervous before the school year starts. Who will be my students? How will we get to know one another? How do I (re)create the learning environment of my class this fall for these young people?
I know I am not alone in feeling nervous as the new year approaches. Teaching is different from so many other kinds of work. The nature of our work is so wrapped up in the students—both who they are as individuals and as a collective—and it matters that each year we get all new young people to work with. Sure, doctors get new patients, and business people have new coworkers, but rarely is everyone they work with new. For us, however, the landscape is rebuilt each year. We might take this for granted because we are used to it, but it is a big deal.
Because we can’t learn for our students, building these new relationships and learning environments is at the heart of how the school year will go. It is about how our students will experience our classes, and how and what they will learn. All of this means that the first two or three weeks of the school year are deeply consequential. What we do with our classes during this time shapes the months that follow. If we work with intentionality, we can use this beginning to construct a classroom in which our students will flourish as thinkers and knowers. This goal involves doing three things:
- Creating a space in which doing the subject is a collective undertaking, not an individual and competitive one.
- Signaling to students what doing the subject is going to involve in this class, and what is going to be valued in doing that sort of work.
- Learning what students know and can do and demonstrating to them that we take them seriously as thinkers.
We accomplish these in how we relate to our new students, the tasks we choose to do with them, and the way we together build the classroom environment.
I think a lot about how math in school is so often not a space where students can show up as smart and see themselves as people who can do math, so I decided to focus this blog post on math. I am also offering a webinar on August 18 about beginning the school year in math. But whatever content areas you teach, the same sort of work would apply.
What we do together in math can play a big role in these first couple of weeks. Often these beginning classes involve testing. That makes sense because we want to find out what our students know. But when you think about what that signals and what it means for students’ first experiences with us, it is worth considering alternatives. The math tasks we choose can make a big difference. One math task I have used many times—“Write equations for 10”—is a good example of a beginning-of-the-year task. I have used this with very young children all the way to college students. I use it here to illustrate how the work of beginning the school year can be carried out in intertwined ways.
This task is deceptively simple. It looks easy but is quickly and spaciously challenging. It is accessible but not limiting. This kind of task is a nuanced version of what people often call “low floor, high ceiling.”
The students and I start by reading the problem statement together, and I ask, “Would someone say what they think the task is?” Together we make sense of the problem, and I learn what is needed to get to a shared sense of what it is asking. I am on the lookout for whether we have to talk about what an “equation” is and how it is different from an “expression.” Sometimes it is helpful to elicit a few examples and record them in a common space, such as a poster. I make clear that it is not a competition, but something we are doing together, to see what we can come up with. We begin to establish norms about how people contribute to a collective problem, and what sorts of responses they might make to one another. I model for them the kinds of things I say or do as their new math teacher and what I am like. By collecting equations together, we see that doing math is collective work and we get more done and get better ideas when we figure out the solutions to a math problem collaboratively. By affirming different kinds of mathematical contributions, I demonstrate how I listen and see them as thinkers. We arrive at some complex math quite quickly as well because even very young students begin to glimpse that there are infinitely many equations. Trying to prove that that is true is not easy but also within reach even for young children. It is a task that everyone can get into, but it also has no limit.
Another aspect of the beginning-the-school-year work is considering how we arrange the room physically and what norms we create for sharing the space so that students can flourish. What do small table groups signal and make possible? What do they limit or impede? What about a U-shaped desk arrangement? How is wall space used? What are ways of displaying the products of collective mathematical work and how do we develop habits of what we post from our work and how we use these records? For example, a poster (or posters) with many different equations for 10 and perhaps the definition of “equation” is one sort of resource for future connections. When (and why) are students’ names displayed next to their contributions? When (and why) do we choose to make records that signal that “we” made this? Where is the teacher’s desk or table, and are the supplies on it private or shared? Where are students’ supplies—markers, pens, glue, scissors—kept, and who is responsible for maintaining them?
A third and crucial part of the work is what students learn about us and how we see and relate to them as mathematics thinkers and learners. Being intentional about this involves demonstrating genuine and serious interest in their ideas, questions, writing, and drawing, and being authentically curious about why they decided something or how they figured something out. It involves actively dispelling the notion that what we are constantly doing is judging the correctness of their work. It means developing habits of openness so that when we see answers that are not what we “want,” we seek to figure out what students did and why, rather than immediately offering corrections. Another vital element is how we position each student by whom we ask to share their thinking. This involves how deliberate we are to disrupt common patterns of who is seen as contributing or “smart,” as well as how we respond, and broaden what we lift up about what is valuable mathematically.
I am nervous about the beginning of the school year for good reason—because the stakes are high. But, on writing this, I realize that I am also very excited because it reminds me of the power of teaching to create spaces where my new students can flourish.
If you are interested in learning more about how you can do this with your students, I hope you will join me on Monday, August 18, from 4:00 to 5:30 p.m. EDT for a webinar exploring ways to launch math in your class this fall to support your students to thrive mathematically this year.
