A new school year is underway! After keeping in touch over the summer, past winners of the Harbor Freight Tools for Schools Prize for Teaching Excellence were eager to share their best tips for easing back into the academic calendar:

• “Pace yourself. We start the year with lots of energy and new ideas. If you try and do it all at once, you can burn out before Christmas. Try one new thing, one change, one new idea and give it a few weeks!” – Jay Abitz – Freedom, WI
• “I always have the students create a name tent or name tag day one with a goal written inside or on the back of it. They use the tag or tent until I pick a day to look at them. We discuss the goal and where they are in the process of obtaining it and it helps me learn and remember all their names.” Henrietta Jutson – Fayetteville, NC
• “Encourage soft skills development. While technical skills are crucial, emphasize the importance of soft skills like communication, teamwork, and problem-solving. These skills are often just as important in the workplace and can set your students apart in their careers.” Jeff Bertke – Piqua, OH
• “Get to know the students first and build a solid foundation between you and the students. Students are interested in making a connection with the teacher along with the content taught. The curriculum will come with time but the relationships you create early in the school year will last for the rest of their time in high school and beyond.” Jeremy Tarbet – Oro Valley, AZ
• “Keep yourself organized. One thing I do before the year starts is buy a yearly planner. I prefer the ones that have a small section for each day of the year where you can write. At the end of each day and throughout write down ideas, notes, and most importantly the things that made you or your students laugh or student shenanigans. This is a great resource to look back on at the end of the year for new ideas or improvements for next year as well as some laughs.” Konner Keller – Piqua, OH
• “To help students learn to hold themselves accountable and to allow the teacher to track project progress, I use a timecard system. Each day, the student must document in one sentence what was accomplished during class. If the student is late, absent, off task, etc., points are deducted from the pay at the end of the week. Each grading period, the daily points available to be earned each day doubles to encourage students to finish strong. This method of earning points is one of several ways students earn their grade. This system also provides a ‘paper trail’ of how a students’ grade was earned.” Kathy Worley – Santee, CA
• “Take your students on field trips. Yes, they are a lot of additional work for us classroom teachers, but they are so worth it. It’s good for my students to see what they learn in school being used in the real world (blueprint, measurement, milling, turning, grinding, routers) and talk to the guys working in industry—very often past students from my class!” Kevin Finan – Coconut Creek, FL
• “A tip I learned from a fellow tech ed teacher this summer at an automotive teacher summit is called flipping your classroom. For years, I mostly taught the things from the book first and then brought the kids out in the lab and demonstrated what I wanted them to be able to do. Then I would give them the opportunity to do the activity in the auto lab. Flipping your classroom is to demonstrate to your students what you want them to know and how to do it first and then tie in the book learning afterwards so your students can then see the reason for learning the theory after they have seen it and done the activity. This process can create immediate interest in your students, so they have more interest in learning the theory behind how and why something works. For our students and for ourselves we need to change up how we do things to keep learning fresh and interesting.” Dan Van Boxtel – Kaukauna, WI