I’ve said this before, but the beginning of the school year is a rather rare time. For those first shining weeks, we (and our students) are open to real change thanks to the fresh start effect, where a new context allows us to envision, and sometimes implement, new versions of ourselves.

This fresh start effect combined with my perennial September desire to finally do it right this time has given me a large list of changes I’d like to implement this year. So I thought to kick off my first post of this new year, I would share my top three changes that I’m excited to make in ’24-’25:

Change #1: Learning to Love Quizzes Again

I’ve written a lot on my struggles with grades. They can lower intrinsic motivation, diminish the effectiveness of feedback, feed fixed mindsets, and hamper creativity, among other less-than-positive things. Also, I just don’t like giving them, as I prefer focusing on helping students to do it better in the future over figuring out a static rating for them right now.

Somewhere in my journey to figure out the role that grades should play in my classroom, I began to associate reading quizzes with grades and they quietly dropped away from my classes.  

This year though, the reading quiz is coming back in my classes in a big way. Quizzes might seem contrary to my dialogic, writing-focused style, but there is a very good reason for my resurgence of quizzes that I got from the new book Student Assessment by Dylan Wiliam, Douglas Fisher, and Nancy Frey: The quiz—which calls upon you to call forth information and use it—is a simple, textbook, and powerful form of both formative assessment and retrieval practice. Asking students to retrieve information without looking at it is one of the ultimate ways to strengthen the neural pathways that form memories and for us as teachers to get a sense for how strong the neural pathways students already have are.

Of course, my new approach to quizzes will be a bit different than my old approach. Previously, I tended to have multiple choice quizzes that focused on the kinds of details that show whether a student read closely or not. Essentially, they were carrots/sticks to try to get students reading closer.

Now, my quizzes will be more wide-ranging and focus on helping students to embed the most important details from class into their memories. Of course, I still plan to use them as the basis for conversations where I hold students accountable for reading and engaging with class, but the goal behind them will be different and the focus more on assessing and teaching than doling out rewards and penalties for doing/not doing the reading.

Change #2: Prioritizing Points of Connection

When I present at schools/districts about feedback, I often get a question about what type of feedback gives us the best return on investment, given that the time we have to provide feedback is never as much as we’d like. 

There are a few answers I usually give: Wise interventions where we seek to disrupt negative student cycles are powerful. Well-used praise can do amazing things. 

But one of the most powerful things we can do is simply to find and point out areas of connection. Humans are a communal species, and numerous studies have found that establishing even tenuous points of connection with someone can dramatically change their behavior. One study found people are 422% more likely to let a stranger borrow their phone for a call if the borrower first signals a connection by saying something about the weather before asking for the phone. Another found that students persisted 65% longer on a math puzzle when they were told they shared a birthday with a math major who guided them on the puzzle. 

Every year I have students write me a letter introducing themselves to me. Normally, I read them and write a short note, but this year I want to go further and have a short welcome-to-the-class conference with each student where I discuss connections from their letters. These conferences, which I have already started doing during independent reading, will hopefully allow me to find a point of connection with each student in the first few weeks of school. Further, by finding time to talk about these connections during class, I will actually save time because I won’t have to take hours crafting responses to the letters—responses that students may or may not read. 

Change #3: Shorter, Deeper Assignments

In “AI Cheating Is Getting Worse,” author Ian Bogost examines the trend of students and instructors at the college level using more and more Generative AI for school tasks. To help Bogost think through a brave potential new world where students increasingly generate assignments with AI while their teachers increasingly use it to respond to them (hear my thoughts on AI feedback here), he reaches out to none other than newsletter-favorite John Warner to get some advice. Warner offers several suggestions, but one grabbed my attention, as it is something I have been thinking about a lot this year: 

“Warner thinks teachers could address these problems by reducing what they ask for in assignments. Instead of asking students to produce full-length papers that are assumed to stand alone as essays or arguments, he suggests giving them shorter, more specific prompts that are linked to useful writing concepts. They might be told to write a paragraph of lively prose, for example, or a clear observation about something they see, or some lines that transform a personal experience into a general idea.” -Ian Bogost in “AI Cheating Is Getting Worse”

Having more short, focused assignments is something I argue for in Flash Feedback and nearly every lesson in Good Grammar has a short, lively paragraph or page as the final assignment. The reason for this is that short pieces better allow the student and the teacher to focus. Instead of having to think about everything, the student can examine one or maybe two concepts in a deeper, more focused way that will hopefully facilitate deeper learning. The teacher too doesn’t have to respond to everything and can instead give specific, faster feedback because they too are focused on one or two topics. 

I’ve long employed short, focused assignments, but this year I want to go further and do at least one focused writing assignment each week. My hope is not so much about avoiding AI plagiarism (I’ve found it is pretty easy to spot with my 9th graders and they are pretty good about not doing it after we talk about it); instead, I want to prioritize having even more points of connection and offer more feedback, as those two things above almost anything else help to accelerate both learning and building strong, positive relationships with students!

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Thanks for reading, and if you have some changes you hope to make in your classes, I’d love to hear about them and potentially share them with others.

Also, as you likely know, Good Grammar is out, but it needs some reviews so people know what it is about. If you are willing, I would love ratings and/or reviews on Goodreads and/or Amazon to help pass the word about how to teach and talk about grammar and language in a more joyful, affirming, and effective way! Seeing some would make my day!

As always, yours in teaching,

Matt