January 28, 2026
Day One, Term 1 – Making Sense of the Mayhem
The first day of a new term has challenges but also opportunities. It is a time of vulnerability and excitement but also a chance to start relationships that could strengthen throughout the term. Renaissance Australia explores the opportunities for learning that exist for students and teachers and suggests ready-to-go tools that will help busy teachers navigate their way to better outcomes.
It’s day one. The morning tea, lunch and drink are packed. The goodbyes have been said at the gate and a new term, a new day and a new class begins. Apprehension swirls in the air. Fleeting glances dart around the playground before the bell. Will they like me? Will I fit in?
The students must be feeling the same!
We’ve all been there, even the most experienced teachers can feel the beating wings of those little butterflies in the stomach as we meet and greet a new class. Why is this? Well, they and we are only human and we all carry with us our need to be accepted, liked and respected.
Day one represents our first meeting and the time that we are looking for alliances, and, as teachers, to discover what the class ‘feels’ like.
- Who will be ‘easy’ or ‘difficult’ and what is a good strategy to explore these traits?
- Is there a quiet one or two, who will take longer to work out and where, if anywhere, are the cliques?
- What about the ‘cool’ kids or the ones eager to please?
All this observation, calculation and interpretation is going on from the first minutes of the class and will continue for weeks.
As if all that is not enough, let’s not forget that we also need to leave ample head-space to actually teach them something!
So is the lot of a teacher on the first day of term. Add to this a of administrative tasks, a mountain of teaching material and, of course, the parents you can see why this is no job for the faint-hearted. Indeed, with all this and, on top, a multitude of personalities, characters and learning styles to navigate it is arguably one profession in which AI would struggle to effortlessly compute the ‘answer’ – at least for the moment! However, amid all the activity, lies an opportunity.
Term 1, and its inherent challenges, could also be seen as a critical diagnostic window, not just academically but also as a portal into a student’s attitude to school, to self and to underlying challenges they face or opportunities they possess as a person.
We, as teachers, have our intuitions and experience to draw on when it comes to making decisions about learning but the students are not so well versed in the skills of reflection, self-evaluation and goal-setting.
As a partnership between student and teacher then, we could try to find ways to create some from this heady mix of opportunity and bottle our findings for use throughout the term so that what we learn in the first few weeks is not lost.
When we look to the market for ways that can help teachers in this endeavour, we see that Renaissance Australia is one education provider that has been able to provide tools which help.
These tools work alongside the students and teachers and allow schools to capture what the teachers have already noticed and, of equal importance, what they have not. With the well-documented time constraints and a myriad of demands on teachers’ time, schools need a reliable, tried and trusted early intervention tool that will inform and guide and one that is not onerous.
Renaissance’s ‘Pupil Attitudes to Self and School’ (PASS), is such a tool and incorporates an initial 20-minute survey that helps uncover hidden barriers to learning or opportunities to be explored and acts as a basis of understanding between student and teacher.
Tools such as this can act as de-facto ‘teacher-aides’ and instill confidence in the teacher and re-assurance for the student. The findings from this early enquiry stay and grow with the student through mid-year checks and culminate in year-end reviews, helping to avoid reactive and, potentially, ‘too-late-fixes’ later in a student’s journey.
The old saying, “A stitch in time…..” comes to mind when we think about early intervention but we should also be cognisant of the fact that however a school decides to tackle the issues of learning styles, it should not stand as a ‘one-off’ solution.
It is unlikely that a cohort of teachers or students would take the time and energy needed to use a tool if they thought that a new method would be used the next time. Perhaps, then, a compelling argument could be made for schools to find and commit to a suite of tools that is comprehensive, informative and, above all, useful. As mentioned earlier Renaissance Australia’s suite of PASS, CAT4 and NGRT help schools build an early, evidence-based understanding of students and make informed decisions before issues escalate
So, within the noise, fun, excitement and, often confusion of day one, both students and teachers get their first glimpse of what the year ahead might look like. It can act as a snapshot of what lies ahead and, if the observations of those first days and weeks can be recorded and explored, then, the opportunity will not be lost.
Want to go deeper?
The first weeks of Term 1 offer a powerful opportunity to understand how students really feel about school, learning and themselves – before assumptions set in and patterns become harder to change.
PASS (Pupil Attitudes to Self and School) captures this insight through nine evidence-based attitudinal factors, giving schools a clear, early picture of student wellbeing and engagement.
Understand the key attitudes that influence learning, motivation and behaviour – and how they can be supported early.
See the type of insight schools receive and how PASS data can inform targeted support, whole-school planning and meaningful conversations.