As this semester draws to a close, it is natural to begin to evaluate it for its successes and challenges. I start thinking about the changes I want to make to next semester and what I wish I had done differently and reviewing new tools that I have found over the past months. 

I feel like this is a natural process that all teachers go through as we approach the ending of semester or school year. Being reflective is something that is ingrained in us by our desire to do better for the students and any teaching program I have ever heard of. We recognize the importance of being reflective and intuitively practice it. 

My semester has been one of challenges to be frank. I have had personal challenges and professional challenges that have really highlighted the need to be purposeful in the classroom, my reflections, and reactions to my reflections. 

I feel like this year I fell into the trap of reflecting but not acting. I was thinking a lot about what was happening in my classroom, but not taking the time to process my reflections and create an action plan around them. Those last two steps are really important to being purposeful as a teacher and reflective professional.  The failure of not processing and acting on my reflections is one of the reasons, I continued to struggle.
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THE IMPACT THIS HAD ON MY CLASSROOM

1. More Chaotic than Normal. As you all know I am pretty dedicated to student-directed learning. I feel it allows me to differentiate more and meet the needs of students easier. This semester though my classes felt much more chaotic and stressful, because even though I was noticing students struggling and myself struggling with certain aspects of the content or the classroom, I wasn’t able to turn my observations and reflections into change fast enough. I think a part of me felt that I needed to let things play out and see where they went or I thought that there wasn’t anything I could really do in the middle of a semester and would have to wait till the typical end of the semester to reflect and make changes.
2. Increase of Classroom Management Issues. This is really tied to the chaos one as well, but I did have more issues with classroom management this year than I had in last two semesters doing the self-paced, student-directed learning. I feel that this stems again from students not feeling as secure in their learning and my inaction. 
3. Students not reaching Content Mastery. This is the one that really hurts the most. I don’t feel like my students this semester are really gaining a mastery of the content like they have in semesters past. My students this semester struggled in a way that I did not really anticipate and because I was not purposeful in my reflection, process, and action, the learning I feel suffered. This does not take responsibility away from the student-learner because they are also part of the equation but as the teacher I needed to be more proactive.

​Reading this, it probably seems like I am being really hard on myself and that it could just be one of the groups of students that struggle and no matter what I did in the classroom, those students were going to struggle. That could very well be true, but I also feel like this semester was a humbling, challenge that reminded me of two very important things about teaching.

1. Be present, reflective, purposeful, and proactive. I will admit to coming into this semester with a feeling of “I’ve got this”. I can handle anything because I am amazing and I don’t struggle with little things anymore. Well that is not the case. Just because I am senior teacher in my building and have a successful track record doesn’t mean that I will not struggle with things like classroom management and low-achieving students. This semester my students needed me to be more firm and more hands-on than I was prepared for in my student-directed system and I didn’t act as quickly as I should have to get them where I wanted them to be. If you find yourself struggling, a teacher needs to be proactive and take the time to reflect, process, and form an action to help alleviate the problem. This could require assistance from your teacher tribe and that is definitely O.K. I would actually encourage it. My teacher tribe is what has helped me the most this semester in figuring out what to do in my classes.
2. Keep Learning. As teachers we have to recognize that there is always something new to learn or sometimes relearn. I realized in the middle of this semester that it had been awhile since I had brushed up on my classroom management techniques and philosophy. I had not taken time to really read any interesting articles on teaching practices. I didn’t take time to bring up those issues in my PLC or with my other teacher colleagues. Teachers are learners. We need to keep learning to keep our skills sharp and focused on the best practices we know about and looking for new ones to add to our tool belt.  ​

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MY PLAN MOVING FORWARDI do not want to make the same mistakes I made this semester, so I have reflected, processed, and developed this action plan for next semester to make sure that I am being the best reflective and purposeful teacher I can be. 

1. Schedule time to reflect and process before I leave school everyday. This is going to be a big thing for me. Often I am running out the school door when the bell rings because I have automatically shifted to wife and mom mode. I have discovered this doesn’t work for me because I need to take at least 5-10 minutes at the end of the day and jot down my thoughts on the day. This should help me remember things that I need to focus on for the next day and add to my game plan. I typically do my best planning in the morning and I get to school pretty early because I realize that this works for me. The only problem is I don’t always remember exactly what my thoughts were at the end of the day by the next morning.
2. Schedule Work Time and Home Time. All teachers know that it is virtually impossible to 100% keep your school work at school and not bring it home. I know this, but what I plan to work on is being more thoughtful about my time. I need to schedule those days with my family if I know that I need to spend one or two saturdays a month on school work to keep myself ahead of the game. Then I that should free me up to really enjoy the time I have scheduled with my family and friends. I won’t be stressing about the work that I need to do or the problem that I need to solve at work. Finding a balance is difficult, and as a person that needs structure, I need to create my structure.
3. Don’t Wait to ask for help. This semester, I sat alone in my bubble for way too long and did not call on my teacher tribe. I know that they are there for me and I need to ask them for assistance. I am actually going to have as many people as possible observe me next semester and look for the key things that I am going to work to change in my class. This way I will have a bunch of people to talk to about my class and what I want to do. This has included all of our building administrators as well. I want their input.
4. Keep learning. I dragged my co-blogger Becca in on this one. We are going to start reading education and teaching practice books to review for ourselves and for our readers. We want everyone to keep learning. I am also planning to be more active on Twitter for edchats and reading new articles instead of just bookmarking them. ​

​Teaching is hard, but it is also amazing, fulfilling, and incredibly important. I want to be the best I possibly can be for my students and I think that doing these things will help me do that. I hope that you take away from this post that it is O.K. to struggle, because when we struggle we learn things about ourselves. That when you find yourself struggling at school take time to reflect on what is happening, but don’t just stop there. Take the next steps. Process your reflections and develop an action to help or celebrate if needed. Lastly, don’t forget to keep learning. Learning is essential to great teaching!

​It's no secret that I'm pretty competitive. I also love logic games. Brain teasers are my fave. When I heard about escape rooms, I was so pumped. WHAT IS AN ESCAPE ROOM?An escape room is an activity where participants are put through a search and find like challenge that include puzzles and locks. There is usually a given scenario to help engage participants such as: you are the survivors of a zombie apocolypse but you've all been contaminated. You are locked in a laboratory where they were creating an antidote. Find the antidote within an hour and save yourselves!....You can see how decorating and creating a story helps engage you in the game! Clues can be out in the open or hard to find (invisible ink, random numbers on the wall, etc.). Participants "win" if they can unlock all of the boxes - usually one is containing whatever you are trying to find (example: the antidote). When you find that box, you win!

There are a lot of scenarios where I would use an escape room! This blog explores a couple of times that I used (or would suggest using) an escape room!
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THE FIRST WEEK OF SCHOOL Day one - I introduced myself and did a welcome activity. 
Day two - I showed the syllabus and the classroom rules/expectations.
Day three - I gave a pretest (yuck)
Day four - BREAKOUT EDU!!!!!
First of all, pretests are not fun but for my class, they are necessary. Because we are on a three track system, it helps me to be sure students are in the right class and allows me to gauge the right starting point for the following week. After three days, they know a little bit about me and my classroom but now I want to know about them. Other than their academic work, I want to know their personalities - enter Breakout Edu. 
Breakout Edu has a lot of team building pre-made escape rooms. I had ordered their breakout box (you can also make your own!), picked a scenario, and set up my room. That first Friday, students came into the room and I simply introduced them to the scenario (you need to unlock the box within 40 minutes in order to get the prize!), and started the timer. There were a million questions. But that was my plan all along! I answered some basic structure questions but didn't answer anything that would help them solve the puzzles included with the escape room. I was looking for 

• Who spoke up
• Who took the lead
• Who knew the answer but didn't say anything
• Who tried to open the locks by trying a million different combination and not doing any of the actual work
• Who tried to disengage
• Who was incredibly motivated by competition and the game based activity etc.

This escape room helped me to learn who my kids were in 40 minutes in a way I haven't been able to accomplish before. It also gave us a jumping board for relationships. They definitely remember doing that first escape room and how much it frustrated them! How do I know they loved it? Because they asked to make their own as projects!
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As I've said in previous posts, I ask students to choose a project that shows they know the material. They have to present (or in this case facilitate) the project for the class. My Geometry class loved creating escape rooms for their congruent triangles unit. Even more helpful, it ended up creating a couple of days of review for my students before the unit test! They loved watching their classmates struggle through problems and they loved being sneaky about creating it. I definitely saw more engagement for this project choice than any other I've done so far!
Lucky for us, Breakout Edu provides a template for teachers to create their own escape rooms. It walks you through the process so nicely that of course my students can figure it out! 
I highly encourage you to have your students create escape rooms. Something I will be trying during my next unit will be splitting the class into two groups and having them create escape rooms for each other to try. That should amp up the competition! :)
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THE NEW BREAKOUT EDU OR 
​"CAN'T I JUST MAKE MY OWN?"Breakout Edu has recently changed their website/cost. It is now a subscription service. When I first began doing escape rooms, I definitely thought the cost was worth it. Now that I have the hang of it as well as the template for myself and students to use, I'm not sure how much I will go back to the site for more game scenarios. It really depends on your experience and how much work you are wanting to put into it. Getting the scenario from Breakout Edu takes almost no work. They have everything completed for you (including a Youtube video that walks you through the story and how to set up the room!). If you are willing to put in some more time (or give your students time to work on it!) you may be just fine creating your own!
Either way, you should definitely try an escape classroom! Competition, team building, content review and more can be gained from it! AND IT'S SO MUCH FUN!!!!!