Starting Fresh: New Semester Tips for Tired (But Committed) English Teachers
January (or [shudder] February for those of you unlucky enough to have finals after Christmas break) is a strange time for teachers.
On the one hand, the new semester brings a clean slate, right as the rest of the world is making New Year resolutions. On the other hand, however, the exhaustion from the first half of the year is real. Winter Break, with its holiday-filled busyness, is hardly sufficient time and space to recover from 4–5 months of planning, teaching, grading, and all the minutiae that comes with it.
It’s normal to feel both burned out and committed at the beginning of a new semester. As two people who never left the world of education after the first day of kindergarten, we’ve always considered August, not January, the time for fresh starts and resolutions. But we’ve also found that the beginning of a new semester can be a good time to make small tweaks that will help you survive until summer.
Here you’ll find practical, no-fluff tips to help you reset, recharge, and refocus at the beginning of a new semester for a smoother second half of the year.
New Semester Tip #1: Reset Your Classroom Routines
Effective resets are preceded by reflection, so we’re including questions for you to consider, either by yourself or with a PLC member.
We think classroom routines are the perfect place to start. In our experience, most of our frustrations with students, even the academic ones, require revisiting our classroom management strategy.
On the first day of the new semester, revisit your class norms and procedures. It’s a natural time to do this since students need a reminder after break, too, and it can be a helpful transition from the “fun” of break back to the “work” of school.
Sometimes, this just means reminding students (and, perhaps, yourself) of the policies you established at the beginning of the year, but it’s also a good time to introduce any changes to your policies that you’ve decided to implement. Often, these changes can be small—a new seating chart, a daily bellringer, a weekly exit ticket, a participation points system—and still make a noticeable difference.
No matter how frustrated you were at the end of the last semester, try to engage in this reset firmly but kindly (perhaps even acknowledging that you, too, need the refresh)—starting the new semester with the tone of a drill sergeant is far less likely to get your students on board than if you tackle the new semester as a team.
New Semester Tip #2: Streamline Your Planning
When things haven’t been working the way you’d hoped, it can be tempting to throw out everything at the beginning of the new semester and start completely over (or is that just us?), but that’s rarely necessary. Don’t reinvent the wheel—reuse what did work last semester and focus your revision efforts on the things that didn’t.
Often, the adjustments you make to your classroom routines will have an impact on your students’ academic performance. But it’s also important to consider how you can better help your students reach your lesson objectives, which often involves planning ahead and then breaking down the steps to help students do well on the final task.
If planning ahead isn’t your natural instinct, however, and you constantly feel like you’re just trying to stay one day ahead of your students, consider batching your planning: can you plan out an entire week at a time instead of a day a time? How about one unit a time? Giving yourself time to think through the steps your students need to be successful at a task will help you create lessons (and units) that work the way you envisioned.
Leave some room for flexibility, however. Sometimes students need more time than you think they will. Sometimes they finish more quickly than you think they will. Sometimes you’re just tired and need time to catch up on grading. Be willing to drop an activity here and there or build in a “revision” or “catch-up” day.
New Semester Tip #3: Prioritize What Matters Most
Focus on your core goals—reading, writing, critical thinking—rather than “Pinterest-perfect” lessons. There’s just not enough time in the world to make every single lesson a masterpiece. If your students are reading, writing, and thinking every day (or most days), then you’re doing enough.
Simplify your first couple units. If things really went awry first semester, you may need to focus less on “fun” and more on basics—just getting students to complete their work successfully and understand the most important things they need to take away from the unit.
If things go well, you can reintroduce some of your more “fun” ideas as students seem ready for them. Or if it’s you who felt intimidated by “fun” activities, add in one engaging or unique activity at a time rather than feeling like every single day has to be Instagram-ready.
It also really helps to choose one or two anchor texts or big skill goals to center your semester around. Your curriculum map may list dozens of texts you’re “supposed” to cover. Choose one that you’re going to really dive deep into (for us, it was Julius Caesar), and then keep everything else simple. You’ll either have a great spotlight unit that you and your students will remember year after year, or by tackling one unit a year, you’ll build up the curriculum you dreamed of without burning yourself out.
You might want also want to consider starting the new semester with an accessible, high-interest lesson or unit that is relatively easy for students to do well on. This helps students ease back into school while also building their confidence, which will maintain their new semester motivation for longer.
Remember, coverage does not equal learning. Doing a few things well will be more powerful (for you and your students) than making sure you cover every little thing.
New Semester Tip #4: Build in Student Ownership
Something we don’t always think about when it comes to a new semester reset is how we can allow students to take more responsibility for their learning. As we know you’ve heard before, you shouldn’t care more about their learning than they do. But also, it’s second semester of whatever year they’re in—they should be leveling up, even if it’s just a little bit.
One easy way to do this is to encourage students to join you in your enthusiasm to start fresh. For several years, we started the new semester with a goal setting activity that helped students think about what they wanted to do better in the new semester and the behaviors and habits they needed to change to make that happen.
You might also consider small ways you can involve your students in the learning process: can you hand over the planning for one discussion by asking students to contribute questions? Can you give students a choice about their next reading assignment (even if you don’t want to go full-blown into literature circles, maybe you could give them three articles or three poems to choose from for a close reading activity)? Can you try out a new peer feedback routine or activity, even if it’s just teaching a mini-lesson and then asking students to check each other’s work for that one specific thing?
We’ll be the first to admit that we were always reluctant to hand over the reins to our students, but if you can find even small ways to do it, you’ll benefit from increased engagement from them and decreased pressure on you.
New Semester Tip #5: Protect Your Energy
We know very few teachers whose new semester resolutions didn’t somehow relate to making the workload just a tiny bit more manageable.
How can you incorporate a time-saving grading strategy? Can you try using a rubric for an assignment you’ve always hand-graded? Can you create a comment bank? Can you have students (or, gasp, AI) grade an assignment and then spot-check it instead of reading every single one? Can you convert some of your short-answer guided reading questions to multiple choice questions?
Schedule non-negotiable planning or catch-up time—even if it’s just our beloved 20 minutes a day. If you can set aside even a small chunk of time to make forward progress on that thing (whatever it is) that you’re always behind on—grading, parent contacts, lesson planning—you’re going to see improvements from the previous semester.
Consider also how you can implement systems that will make your life easier. Can you use checklists to grade or for students to check their work before you grade it? Can you use a template to send parent emails? Can you add an independent reading (or “quiet work”) day into your weekly routine?
Sometimes, doing something because it’s good for you can be just as impactful as doing something because you think it will be good for students.
New Semester Tip #6: Rekindle the Spark
It’s so easy to become burned out as teachers, and if there is anything you can do in the new semester to remind yourself why you became a teacher in the first place and what you love about it, that’s going to keep you going in a career that doesn’t offer nearly as many “highs” as we’d like it to.
Try one new thing that excites and challenges you: a project, a podcast lesson, a short unit on a text or topic you’re passionate about, an escape room, a student choice activity.
Connect with a colleague or teaching community, online or in-person, for fresh ideas and encouragement. You’ll remember that there are other good teachers out there who love teaching, and you’ll get ideas that you might never have thought of before. And you’ll be sharing the workload, even if it’s in a small way.
Celebrate small wins and student growth—even if it’s subtle. Buy yourself a pair of shoes if you stick to your “20 minutes of grading” for a full month. Put stickers on the papers of students who get an A on a vocabulary quiz for the first time. Tell the student who failed first semester that you’ve really noticed them trying this semester. Send a positive email home. The more you cultivate a positive community in your classroom, the longer you and your students are going to feel motivated to keep working within it.
More than anything else, remember to be kind to yourself. You can have a strong semester (and an improved semester) without having a perfect one (spoiler alert—no one has the perfect semester, even that teacher on Instagram you envy). You can be a committed and excellent teacher without burning yourself out, and it’s important that you proactively consider ways to do this.
It’s never too late to stop and adjust, but the start of a new semester is one of the best times to do it (and the time when you’re most likely to have student buy-in). We’d love to know what you’re doing to reset for a new semester: reach out to us at [email protected] or on Instagram @threeheads.works. Are you part of our mailing list? Join here to get access to our Free Resource Library and weekly encouragement in your inbox. Want to listen to us chat more about this topic? Check out our podcast episode.
