“YOU’RE A HUMMINGBIRD AND YOU NEED TO BE LIKE AN EAGLE” “I think there are a lot of people who will just work as hard as they can and actually working as hard as you can all the time is just bad, right? You actually can't work as hard as you can all the time. Sometimes you have to phone it in.” “One of the things that my mentor teacher told me in my first year here—I was preparing all of these lessons that were like, every ten minutes we're switching the activity and everything is modified (…) And it was just really detailed, really intensive. And she was like, ‘Right now you're a hummingbird and you need to be like an eagle. You need to be swooping (…) You need to think about all of your classes (…)—how can you get students working on something where they're the ones doing the work, not you? You have to balance it. Can you get one class kind of driving itself while you do the scurrying for another class, finding that balance among your classes?’ And that was huge for me. Project-based learning—there's a lot of prep that goes into the project, but then you launch it and the kids are the ones doing the work. So that advice was huge for me, and it was also permission. Actually, when kids are doing a lot of the work, they're learning more than when I am doing all of the work and they're just passively receiving or doing tiny little pieces. There is something about kids doing the work that is more valuable.” “GIVING YOURSELF PERMISSION” “I think that, ultimately, it feels like it's really about just giving yourself permission (….) Why would you want to be here until 9 PM? I mean, unless you want to, right? (…) But if I'm grading essays, not only do I not want to grade essays until 9 PM, but I literally can't—I'm not giving them good feedback because I don't even know what I'm saying, right? (…) You can work really hard for two hours and then you can leave it. I feel like we just constantly need to give each other that permission (….) Yes, you do have important work that you need to do, but do you need to do all of it tonight? Does it all need to get done? And what does it mean to get it done? Can you chunk that down for yourself? It's like an I.E.P. of pacing and chunking. We need to pace and chunk for ourselves as well.” “If you really want to do a good job, you're taking this break for your students. Your students are not going to benefit if you come in really cranky and you have these materials that don't even make sense because you made them at 9 pm.” “I LIVE BY MY PLANNER AND I WRITE” “That's always been something that I've loved to do. I live by my planner and I write. You know—What are the things that I'm trying to accomplish today? And if I finish my list, I finish my list. And if I got an email (…), I'm not going to deal with that. That's not on my list.” | REUSING MATERIALS “I'm very organized—my Google drive is very organized. I have all of the notes from all of the lessons and all of the materials I've ever done sorted, and I can find them and I can reuse them. And I remember—I'm like, ‘Oh, this works. This didn't work.’ So I'll make notes to myself—Change this, or I delete this thing and replace it later. And so I feel like Year Seven Me is in a very different place than Years One and Two Me, in that I feel like Past Me—whenever I'm leaving that kind of paper trail for myself—I'm doing Future You a favor.” GRADING “I feel like it took me a while to figure out, like, what is the feedback that is actually useful to students? And what is the feedback that I need to give students? What is the trail I need to leave for myself so that I feel prepared to write a narrative evaluation for them every cycle? Once I figured out a system for that, it was much easier.” “Sometimes I spend all this time creating a very complicated rubric for myself and for them, where I'm evaluating all these different things, and then they get it and they're like, ‘I don't know what this means’, right? And sometimes it's just like, I'm looking for two things. Did you do the two things? And then here's a sentence about my overall impression of it, and that's more meaningful for them and it's more useful for me. So thinking about the purpose of the assessment and the purpose of the feedback,and really zeroing in on that, has been very helpful in terms of time it takes to grade.” “And trying to stagger essays. I mean, the big essays just take so long. Projects, I can breeze through giving feedback on them, but essays—if I make all my classes have an essay due the same week, I'm screwed and that's going to be a bad week.” |