Starting a New Semester: Engaging Students with High-Interest Lessons

It’s not quite the same as a brand-new school year, but starting a new semester naturally lends itself to a reset for you and for your students. It’s a new calendar year, New Year’s resolutions are on everyone’s minds, everyone got some rest over Winter Break, and (perhaps most importantly at the secondary level), grades have been reset. Everyone is starting with a blank slate. Because of this, we liked to start second semester with a high-interest or accessible (or both!) unit to work on engaging our students from the start and capitalize on their “new year, new me” energy and desire to start the semester strong.

As you’ll see below, what this “Okay everyone, we’re starting a new semester” reset looked like depended on the year and the class, but in each instance, we tried to make the most of students’ desires for a better semester with lessons and texts that encouraged participation and built up their confidence that, regardless of what happened in the previous semester, they are capable of being successful students. When we coupled a high-interest unit with a goal-setting activity completed the first week of the semester, engaging students in this strategic first unit was even more powerful. We asked students to reflect on their first semester grades by category rather than overall and encouraged them to consider their previous study and behavioral habits before setting reasonable goals for the new semester.

Our most successful semester opener, one we went back to for several years, was in our standard-level sophomore class: they were supposed to start the semester with Julius Caesar (Yikes, we know. Doesn’t that make starting a new semester a lot less fun? And we even taught it as a criminal investigation.), but instead of jumping directly into that text, we worked on engaging students with a mini-unit in which they review criminal investigation vocabulary (receiving full credit that very first day if they completed a simple activity by the end of the class period), watch an episode of the television show Psych, complete a “crime report,” which they use to determine the type of crime the perpetrator should be charged with and the sentence he should receive, and write a formal business letter to the chief of police making their recommendation and justifying their rationale. Students enjoyed the episode of the show, and because the details of the crime and motivation were easy to understand (it did take a few tries to get the episode right), they completed the crime report assignment successfully with minimal teacher assistance. We tended to have great buy-in from students on this unit, and many of them got a confidence boost from seeing that they can complete work, they can be successful, and they can earn grades they are happy with. Even the final writing assignment had a higher completion rate than usual. When we then transitioned to Julius Caesar, students completed similar activities and, having experienced success with the easier mini-unit, they tended to view the text as more manageable. A double win: starting a new semester off right and engaging students in learning.

In the years before we were supposed to start the semester with Julius Caesar, we started second semester preparing our students for the March administration (the semester began in February then) for the California High School Exit Exam. Nothing says welcome to a new semester like test prep, right? While not even we are going to pretend test preparation is fun, it did fall under that “high-interest” category. The results directly impacted students, so they had a lot of buy-in. We created the unit to include personalized homework assignments, frequent progress checks, accessible practice activities, and fun (really) review activities. While as teachers, we knew the exam was not that difficult and the majority of our students could/would be successful on it, they had built it up to be an insurmountable monolith. Even our strongest students feared they wouldn’t pass. So, as students saw through our practice activities that they could, in fact, be successful on such a big test, they were motivated to continue working and keep their grades up.

In our honors and AP courses, we took a slightly different approach, starting the new semester not with our most accessible text but with our most challenging one. We wanted students to encounter their most challenging text when they were motivationally fresh (is that a thing?), with a renewed desire to give their very best effort and put into practice any lessons they learned from their end-of-semester panic. As an added bonus, these tended to be “anticipated” classics: Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, Pride and Prejudice. Because most students had heard of these famous stories already, there was some interest in encountering them for themselves despite the challenge. While scheduling didn’t allow us to do a full introductory unit, we still began by engaging students with accessible introductory activities. For Macbeth, we started with a children’s version of the story; for Romeo and Juliet, we kicked things off with an interactive lesson about Shakespeare’s sonnets and a class emoji-storytelling competition (a real hit and so fun to see how easily digital natives can “translate”); for Pride and Prejudice, we showed the first episode of the 1995 BBC miniseries to help students get a sense of the time period and the humor that, if missed, can make the novel a real slog. These opening activities captured students’ attention and gave them a foothold in the challenging texts, setting them up to be successful.

Regardless of the strategy you take, opening with a unit that is engaging students, grabbing their interest, showing them they can be successful, and motivating them to give their best effort allows you to take advantage of the new semester energy and ride the momentum as far as you can.

How do you start a new semester? Do you have a go-to lesson or unit that helps students start the semester strong? Do you lean toward high engagement or accessibility? Let’s chat about this: email us at [email protected], or DM us @threeheads.works.