My Start of the School Year Success Plan

Building a Classroom:

Creating an Effective Physical Environment

Making the room welcoming to learners;

• A welcoming classroom is a room where students feel ownership that’s why students work needs to be displayed on bulletin boards, and built over time;
• It should also reflect what students are as people, that’s why in the first day of school I’ll let them draw their dreams and write their goals in the future and hang it on the walls of the classroom.

Making the classroom visually engaging;

• Bulletin board reflects student accomplishment so it should be visually pleasing for that I’ll use construction paper under it.
• Also to use the bulletin board as an interactive learning tool I’ll hang on it focus questions, an example of fiche de lecture so they can return to it when needed, and also some useful vocabulary
• To make the room as print rich as possible I’ll put on the walls posters, quotes, colorful maps.

Providing a physical arrangement that is safe and supportive of learning;

• I have limited space, so I’ll use the space I have for different type of activities, and I’ll teach my students an effective way  to transform the class to adapt the type of the activity, depending if we want to work as a whole group which fits the form U or small groups or individually.  
• I’ll put tags of everything in the classroom so the kids know where they can find the needed supplies and also learn vocabulary.

Building Appreciation for Others: 

Promoting Fairness and Respect

Modeling respectful interactions;

• By being a good example for the kids.
• Avoiding comments that may hurt a student.
• Making an immediate and clear statement about the importance of respecting each other when hearing a student make an insensitive comment.
• Using a calm voice and never yell at a child.

Facilitating student’s acceptance of differences;

• Ongoing discussions and activities about respect.
• Brainstorming and verbalizing what respect looks like by songs, role play, picture or even lessons that promotes listening to each other, sharing, and working as a team.

Planning for conflicts;

• Having expectations and consequences set up in advance.
• Class meetings to discuss conflicts or difficulties that students may go through, to try and find solutions as a class.

Building Collaboration: 

Promoting Social Development and Group Responsibility

Developing leadership in students;

• Class jobs are a good tool to develop the sense of leadership in students so I’ll make a list of jobs that my students can help in doing just like cleaning up, book distributing and collecting, taking care of the class library, attendance and the line; and choose every week students who will take care of that.

Offering leadership opportunities;

• Ask a student to create and deliver a mini lesson.
• Let students became teachers, so they can tutor the struggling students. 

Establishing learning groups;

• When an activity is planned to be done in groups, I’ll make sure to teach the students how to work in a group by modeling and also by giving every kid a role in the group: the supplier, the director, and the speaker. So the students work in a cooperative way and became self-directed learners.

If this post seems like an assignment, it is I started a MOOC on Coursera, and I kind of proud of what I wrote that's why I'm posting it, let's hope this plan will make me a better teacher.