This is an invitation, a moment to pause, think big, and reclaim your children’s voices in the classroom. This is an invite to twist.

I am fortunate to have frequent visitors to my classroom. Many of them are students in the graduate education courses I teach in the summers and evenings. Often, as my visitors depart, they ask, “What do you do to make your classroom work and how can I do it, too?” This question is BIG and bewildering, because our community of learners is built atop a mass of small decisions grown out of my larger philosophy of how students learn.

I roll just outside of tradition. It is hard to encapsulate the theories that build up our days, but as I reflect, there are some specific decisions or “twists” that, over time, have changed the way my kids “do school.” I call them twists, because they are small tweaks on big traditions offering new opportunities, ways of seeing, and possibilities for who "drives the bus." I would like to shine a light on my top 10 twists sitting just outside of the ordinary but have brought out the extraordinary in the children I teach.

Leave your walls blank for the first day of school

Give yourself a break. Step back from the luring calls of websites like TeachersPayTeachers and Pinterest. Throw away all of your commercial posters, and open up the year with bare bulletin boards and walls. Watch how your students become empowered as they make the classroom their own.

Ditch behavior management systems based on penalties and rewards

Take down the behavior chart, review the research on motivation, and invite students to take the lead in running the classroom. Try out community meetings, one-on-one conferences, and empathy as chief tools for helping students grow emotionally and socially.

Let your students choose their seats

Each week invite students to select where they sit in the room. Choice seating prompts students to have authentic conversations about learning styles and peer collaboration and increases their level of ownership for the places where they thrive. Encourage students to construct and reconstruct desk and table configurations to best fit the learning goal.

Step away from the copier

Take one day when you step away from the copier and refrain from using any previously copied worksheets and materials. Instead, invite students to orally tell stories of their learning, reflect in a spiral notebook, or use a variety of artistic representations to show what they know. Notice what happens when students no longer need to learn how to “complete” the worksheet and instead concentrate on experiencing the content on their own terms.

Take a wonder walk

Take a walk with your students across campus, in the surrounding neighborhoods, or simply through the halls to another part of the building. Before you walk, voice an intention—to search for environmental print your students might use in their poetry, to capture dialogue by unexpected bystanders to serve as inspiration for their writing, or to notice how the desks in different classrooms are arranged and why. These walks engage students and extend the learning spaces in your classroom.

Try oral storytelling

Throughout the day tell oral stories. Invite professional storytellers, parents, school employees, and members of your larger community in to tell their story. Storytelling builds empathy, awareness, and connections while building the foundational skills for growing lifelong writers and readers.

Give your leveled library a vacation

Un-level your library and discard your buckets with letters indicating who can and will read what particular books. Then engage your students in thoughtful conversations about how to select books that grow them as readers, and how readers select different books for different purposes. Invite students to reorganize the library in a way that best fits their needs.

Create a student-teacher writing/reading dialogue journal

Each week ask students to write to you in a composition book about what they are writing and reading. Then respond narratively to their journey. Occasionally, send the composition book home and ask parents to join in on the written conversation. Use this book to engage students in the talk of real writers and readers, to show the interconnection between writing and reading, to highlight individual trends, and to document growth over time.

Read books that spark critical conversations

Read provocative books aloud to your students that speak to issues of race, power, poverty, sexuality, and gender. Engage students in oral and written conversations on whose voices are heard, whose are silenced, and why.

Put the Lined Paper Away and Step Away From the Stapler

Provide students with multiple types of paper to write on including plain white, lined, and colored. Instead of giving children pre-made blank books, invite ownership and innovation by letting them take charge of the stapler and tape dispenser.

Want to share your classroom twists? Email them to social@/.

Dorothy Suskind is a fifth grade teacher at St. Christopher School in the Richmond, Va., area and an associate adjunct education professor at University of Richmond.