Teacher for the Day
This is part two of a series: End of Year Honorable Closure Ideas
The end of the year offers a chance for us to celebrate as a classroom learning community in many different ways. This series highlights some of my favorite ways to honor the end of the year with students.
Around this time of year, the countdown is on! My sister who is an elementary PE coach told me she has 3 weeks left. Another teacher I work with says twenty days. It’s inevitable. Counting down the remaining school days can be exciting (and the exact emotional support us educators need at this time of the year. Am I right?)
In my classroom, I like to create a calendar signup sheet with the remaining days of school left right about now. I explain to the class that they are experts in (insert grade level here). They’ve spent so much time learning and teaching each other, they could lead the entire class for a day. We build this up. Get them excited. Then I dramatically call for a drum roll to announce…. TEACHER for the DAY! (They gasp every time. I promise.)
I got this idea from a school I worked at during my sixth year of teaching. The school was big into fundraising and throwing fancy galas for parents. They had a huge booster club. This was a bit of culture shock for me coming from a school who didn’t even have a designated room parent (but that’s for another post!). One of the auction items that parents could ‘buy’ for their students was teacher for the day. After seeing how much fun that lucky student had leading the class, I thought it was only fair that any student got the chance to be teacher for the day.
Students can sign up for whatever day they’d like. Some get very strategic and sign up for a certain day (I’ve heard “Fridays are better.” and “I wanna be the last teacher so you can remember me.”)
Students lead front start to finish. They open our morning meeting. They send students off to work. They lead the reading lesson, math lesson, and science experiments. All of it. I act as the teaching assistant in case they need any support (which they rarely do! I have the belief that: Kids can do A LOT!). The teacher for the day is in charge of managing the class, setting behavior expectations like voice levels or if partner work is allowable. They even lead small groups with a skill they feel they have mastered!
Any student can sign up to be the teacher for the day, and it’s important to explain that this is completely optional. Students always have the option to pass.
Last year I had two students pass and not sign up. They didn’t feel comfortable getting in front of the entire class for that amount of time. This was 100% acceptable. In the end, one student decided to sign up halfway through the rotation because they saw how much fun their friends were having leading the class. We didn’t make a big deal about it but showed our appreciation to the student for being willing to lead.
The objective of Teacher of the Day is to celebrate all that students have learned and allow students the opportunity to lead and lead well. (And let’s be honest, it’s also a really fun break for the classroom teacher!) It’s a chance to role play what it’s like to have a job and be an adult. A chance to call students by their last names and giggle together when the thespians of the class get SUPER into their role as teacher.
Teacher of the day is so much fun and brings a lot of joy into our classrooms at the end of the year. (If you haven’t read the post about JOY, you can find it here.) Joy is so important not just in our students’ lives but also in our own lives as educators.
Print up a simple sign up sheet, sit back and get ready to smile at the leadership your students can display at this time of year.
