The One Summer Habit That Changed How I Started Every School Year

The first couple years of my teaching career, I always spent the last week of July in a slight panic.

You know the feeling. It has been said that late July and early August are the “Sundays” of the months of the year, and the scaries came with it. Summer is great: lazy mornings, beach reads, snacks by the pool, and never setting an alarm. But then July is nearly over, and the back-to-school anxiety starts creeping in. I used to replay everything that went wrong the year before and imagine how it would all happen again, except worse. Not to mention the back-to-school nightmares…

It wasn’t that I lacked motivation or wasn’t excited for a new school year. In fact, it was quite the opposite! I was very excited, I loved my students, and I loved my job so much that I made myself anxious over just wanting to get everything right. What I lacked was a bridge — something to help ease me out of summer mode and into teacher mode without it feeling like taking a polar plunge in my apartment complex’s pool.

The fix for me? Structured reflection. Honestly, I felt a little silly at first (was this really necessary? Would this actually help me?), but reflecting purposefully helped calm my nerves. It helped me organize my thoughts, clarify my goals, and prep for the year ahead. It was almost like talking to a therapist, but for free!

Why Most Teachers Skip Reflection (And Why That’s Costing Us)

Most teachers don’t reflect deeply between school years because it doesn’t feel like a pressing necessity. Like we should be doing something (organizing our classroom, updating the syllabus, making those dreaded seating charts) instead of sitting quietly with our thoughts.

But that busyness can be anxiety dressed up as productivity. Our nervous systems really should not be busy all the time, yet slowing down can make us feel lazy (and I think teachers especially are huge culprits of this). When we skip doing slower, more intentional things like this reflection step, we don’t address any of the deeper issues. And what happens next? Burnout arrives on schedule, usually around early February.

Meaningful reflection doesn’t have to take long, but it does have to be intentional. Asking the right questions makes all the difference.

What Good Reflection Looks Like

Admittedly, I was not initially great at reflecting. I made lists of things I wanted to do differently and set ambitious goals I never had a hope of keeping. For instance, I wanted to restructure my entire class into a gradeless system — something I probably saw on social media that sounded like a very utopian idea until I realized the students would never buy into it and I needed much more than just a couple weeks to do it successfully. If reflecting is causing you to completely rewrite the way you’re teaching, you’re probably doing it wrong, and you’re causing yourself all the same anxiety that made you start reflecting in the first place.

What I really needed were questions that made me slow down and think. Over time, I landed on a practice that covered a few distinct areas:

Rest First

Before I could plan anything meaningful, I had to check in with myself as a person, not just as a teacher. Had I actually rested? Was I eating well enough to fuel my body and brain, or was I relying too heavily on those summertime “girl dinners”? Had I recharged my social batteries with the right mix of barbecues and books? Here’s one question I came back to every summer: What routines or rhythms help me feel most like myself outside the classroom?

Picturing the Year I Wanted

Before jumping into logistics, I’d ask myself questions that had nothing to do with curriculum standards or pacing guides. Things like: How do I want to feel on a typical weekday in October? For example, let’s say my answer was “settled but still full of excitement.” I used that answer to help me plan activities and routines to do both in and out of the classroom to achieve that feeling. I knew that to feel settled in the classroom, I would need to spend ample time teaching, practicing, and reviewing classroom norms with my students. I also knew I needed to have my own post-school routine down pat (for me it was go for a run, shower, put on PJs, and have dinner before doing any grading or lesson planning). To help to still feel that back-to-school excitement, I knew I’d need to have fun fall-themed or homecoming-themed activities planned out for my students, and a few fall festivities on my personal calendar as well.

Culture Before Content

It’s easy to over-prepare teaching content and under-prepare for the relational and community building work of the first few weeks, especially if your curriculum is as jam-packed as mine was. Good reflection questions pushed me to think through how I wanted students to feel in my classroom and what rituals or norms I wanted to establish early.

An example: How do you want students to describe your classroom to their parents after the first week of school?

I wanted my students to feel like my classroom was a calming safe-haven, so I spent some time putting warm white string lights and lamps, plants, and wall art around my room. I co-created classroom norms with my students and printed a poster of those norms to go at the front of the room. With my students’ approval, I played instrumental or lo-fi hip-hop music through the speakers as they did independent work. I used a daily agenda and projected it on the whiteboard so that while students settled into their seats, they knew exactly what to expect for class and what to do at that moment. I incorporated games and other fun activities often and wasn’t afraid to veer away from the curriculum (every so often) if it felt natural or necessary. All of these things made my students tell me year after year how much they loved being in my class, and these things are all pretty easy to do!

Honest Instructional Self-Assessment

This is an area some of us would prefer to skip, but remember that the perfect teacher doesn’t exist, and it’s crucial to think about where we can improve.

Questions in this category can sting a little, but they can also be the most productive. Try: What didn’t work last year? Which strategy was I using out of habit, even when the data was telling me to pivot?

And sometimes there are ineffective strategies that you’re using just because your colleagues are, too, or that’s what you learned during your school years. Don’t beat yourself up if you come to realize that you’re doing this. Every teacher is different, and just because something doesn’t work for you doesn’t mean you’re a failure; it just means something that doesn’t work for them might work well for you!

Setting Intentions, Not Just Goals

There’s a difference between a goal (measurable, specific, can be stress-inducing) and an intention (a conscious determination; the why behind your goal). To help you figure out and set your intentions, one great question to ask yourself is: What is one belief about yourself as a teacher that you want to carry with you into the new school year?

When you run into challenges (and yes, I’m a realist and I’m saying when and not if), your answer to this question can help ground and center you.

To give you an example, my biggest belief about myself as a teacher was that I cared about my students more as humans than I did as academic beings. So when students gave me attitude, didn’t pay attention in class, or acted out, bringing myself back to this belief made me remember that their behavior wasn’t personal toward me, and it helped me give them (and myself) grace. From there, I was able to be much more intentional in my interactions with those students and how I handled the situations so I could ultimately achieve the academic and classroom-cultural goals I had.

Reflection Starting Guide

You don’t need a special notebook or a fancy spa-like atmosphere for meaningful reflection (although those things can be fun if you’ve got them). Just find a quiet space to think and jot down your thoughts. Do it in the notes app in your phone if you have to! The important thing is to start.

A few sample questions:

• What is one thing you want more of next year for yourself and for your students?
• What kind of community do you want students to feel from their very first day in your classroom?
• What is one instructional strategy you want to commit to getting really good at next year?
• What are you most excited about as you look ahead to the first day of school?

If you’re new to purposeful reflection, Moreland University’s 30 Summer Reset Journal Questions for Teachers is a free downloadable resource to walk you through the practice. It covers rest, classroom culture, curriculum and instructional prep, and more.

This is the resource I wish I’d had as a new teacher. I hope you find it useful, and I hope you have a great summer and a fantastic start to the new school year!

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