The 180 Days project began as an earnest attempt to share the decisions Penny and I make when determining what will fit into a single school year. To move beyond the surface-level responses we had grown accustomed to giving, we decided that the best way to get to the answer was to first plan a year together, and then to teach a year together. The audio companion you’re listening to captures a glimpse of that year. The 180 Days book, however, has evolved into much more than simply sharing what we did. For more on our process, I highly recommend reading the book as well.

At its heart, 180 Day sis about why we did what we did. Creating a classroom conducive to raising engaged readers, writers, listeners, speakers, and thinkers continually led us back to closely examining our decision-making process. And teaching the units we designed meant paying attention throughout the unit to what our students were learning. That led to unforeseen lessons that had to be taught (or retaught). This created tension in our year plan since extending time during one unit constricted time for something else. The bottom line: it didn’t all fit.

Given the demands of the modern-day classroom, we were forced to make critical additions and deletions. We began making these decisions in the summer before we met our students, and we continued to make them as the year unfolded. Often, we found ourselves making decisions while standing in front of a room full of adolescents. In this audio companion, it is our intention to capture some of these decisions and to share our thinking behind them.

Truth be told, both of us are feeling a sense of unease in opening up our classrooms to this level of public scrutiny. This attempt to show why we do what we do—and exposing all that we didn’t get to in a year of teaching, even with our best intentions—is very different from writing a book that simply shares what we would like to do. It feels risky to have to account for sometimes painful decisions. Why does this stay in? Why does this get cut? Why are we teaching it this way? Why did this work? Why did this not work? What should we do next?

We think about this work constantly—our spouses would say obsessively—and we still don’t have all the answers we’re seeking. But we know this: teaching is seductive simply because of its complexity. We want our love of English to be present in the lives of our students this year, and we want our lessons and units to be clearly organized in order to effectively teach well, day in and day out.

• After our initial visits to each other’s classrooms, we were intrigued by our different teaching worlds, and these visits led us to consider some interesting questions:
• In what ways would a ninth-grade year in New Hampshire look the same as a ninth-grade year in California? In what ways would they look different?
• What is common no matter where you teach?
• How will our very different environments shape our decision-making?
• How will the difference in the hours we have to teach students affect our decision-making
• What kind of cross-country collaboration might occur between our students? How might our kids benefit from this collaboration?

We knew it would be easier to continue to do what we have done for years, but after visiting each other’s classrooms, we could see that a collaboration would challenge our thinking and our practices. These questions would push us both to new understandings of teaching and learning.