🌿 Your Tuesday Email: Forward with Your Students

Hello Reader!

Your students are watching how you end things. Make it count.

By May, your students have learned something important about you.

Not just the curriculum or your classroom procedures. They've learned how you handle hard things, how you show up when you're tired, how you treat people you disagree with, and whether you actually mean what you say about belonging and growth.

Everything you've done this year has been teaching them something. The final weeks of school are no exception.

What Students Need from the Ending

Students experience the end of the school year in wildly different ways. Some are relieved. Some are anxious about what comes next. Some are grieving an ending of a classroom community, a teacher relationship, a version of themselves they've become this year. A couple of weeks ago Tammy was in a classroom with just this sentiment. The teacher was sad, the students were sad, and they all were dreading the end of their year.

What almost all students (and your colleagues) need, regardless of grade level, is the same. They need to feel seen before they're sent.

That means more than a grade report and a class party. It means:

• Naming what you've noticed about their growth specifically, not generally.
• Acknowledging what this year was, the hard parts and the real parts, without sugarcoating.
• Creating at least one moment where students can reflect on who they've become this year.
• Sending them forward with something to hold onto such as a word, a memory, a moment of genuine acknowledgment.

These gestures don't require elaborate design. They only require your attention.

A Simple End-of-Year Ritual Worth Trying

Before the year ends, consider handing each student a notecard and asking them to write answers to two questions:

• What did you learn about yourself this year?
• What do you want to carry forward?

Then write each of them a brief, honest response. Just a couple of sentences from a person who actually paid attention.

That's the kind of ending students remember fifteen years later.

Podcast:

• This week: Ep 109 - If You Add Something New, You Must Remove Something with Allison Rodman. More initiatives won’t fix burnout if the real problem is overload. We talk about what schools can do when student needs keep rising and educator capacity keeps shrinking. The centerpiece is simple and hard: if we add a new focus, we have to take something away, and we have to be brave enough to decide what is a want versus a need.
• Next week: Ep 110 - White Spaces with Tammy & Christine
• Last week: Ep 108 - Human-Centered Schools is a Minimalist Approach with Dr. Randy Ziegenfuss.

Listen to the pod on all the platforms like Apple, Spotify, iHeart Radio and YouTube. Now you can follow us on Instagram.

Resources:

• ASCD article: From Professional Development to Professional Learning By Jessica Holloway (last week's pod guest!, Kenny McKee, Naomi Church, and Tammy)
• Blog: Foundations of Numeracy Part 2 on Growing Minds Consulting
• Podcast: The Minimalist Classroom on Easy EdTech

Reflection

What do you want your students to carry forward from this year with you?

What will you do in the last days/weeks to make sure they know it?

Yours,

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P.S. Forward this email to colleagues who you think would enjoy the connection and resources.