June 30, 2024
10 Lessons From My First 6 Years of Teaching
Are you a new or first-year teacher wondering what lessons you can learn from experienced teachers?
In this podcast episode, I share my top 10 lessons as a new teacher from my past 6 years of teaching experience. Everything from comparing myself to others, classroom management, work-life balance, lesson planning, and more!
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// ABOUT
I’m Helena, a coach for new and first-year teachers sharing knowledge on how to have a thriving career and personal life.
The Present Teacher Podcast is a resource for classroom management, classroom organization, time management, and teacher wellness. Follow along and learn how to thrive in the classroom and in life.
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00:00 - Lessons Learned
08:25 - Trusting Your Teaching Journey
20:28 - Teaching Strategies and Classroom Management
31:10 - Teaching With Authenticity and Self-Love
38:07 - The Power of Self-Care in Teaching
47:15 - Empowering Teachers for Success
WEBVTT
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Hello and welcome to the 100th episode of the Present Teacher.
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My name is Helena, the creator of the Present Teacher, and over the last three years I have been sharing online everything I know about anything from how to keep your students engaged, how to have strong classroom management, how you can prioritize yourself as a teacher and everything in between, and I really wanted to do something special for this 100th episode and really reflect on how far I've come.
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So today I want to talk about the 10 lessons I have learned from my first six years of teaching.
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This is going to be really good.
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So, with that being said, let's dive right in.
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Hey, teacher Bestie, my name is Helena and I'm the creator of the Present Teacher Podcast.
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I'm a first-year teacher coach and in this podcast you are going to learn everything from simple, actionable classroom management, socialist learning and teacher wellness strategies.
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You know that impact you want to make in the classroom.
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We're going to make it happen here.
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Now a little backstory If you are new around here.
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I started off as a kindergarten teacher.
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When I first started, I moved from Oregon to New Mexico with my then-boyfriend, now-husband, kyle, and I started teaching kindergarten in a small town in New Mexico with my then boyfriend, now husband, kyle, and I started teaching kindergarten in a small town in New Mexico for about three years and after those three years we went ahead and we moved to a town about an hour and a half away and I started teaching second grade.
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Now when I graduated with my master's degree from Eastern Oregon University, I was 21 at the time, and when I mean 21, I turned 21 in February and I graduated in June, so I was very much a baby, 21 year old, and I was really scared about starting this new chapter in my life.
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But very determined starting this new chapter in my life but very determined I got two years done of college, done in high school, and so it really was interesting for me to run into teaching, where I thought the hard work had been done when I first started teaching but, to be honest, done when I first started teaching.
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But, to be honest, that was far from the truth.
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In fact, when I first started teaching, I felt extremely overwhelmed.
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I was the first car in the parking lot, I was the last to leave and I was told by my peers that even when I was student teaching that I was very young and that I needed to be more serious and strict and that my students would walk all over me.
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I was told not to smile until December and I was told that I was way too friendly and I need to really serious up a bit if I wanted to be taken seriously as a teacher.
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Now, looking back at all of the amazing lessons I've learned along the way, it's been quite a ride and I feel like I'm a completely different person than when I first started teaching.
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When my first year started, I was diagnosed with anxiety and depression and I actually went on medication for my anxiety and depression during my master's program, but I found that the medication that they put me on wasn't really helping, so I just decided to go all natural.
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I did continue counseling when I moved into my first year of teaching, but I just remember feeling like I could never get ahead, like I was constantly underwater and, no matter what I did, I just couldn't come up for air.
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And I remember when my kindergartners graduated.
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I remember seeing their faces and I remember tearing up because I felt like I failed them.
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I felt like I was so busy trying to get everything done that I didn't actually get to teach.
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Now, don't get me wrong, I did teach them some things Admittedly not as much as I would have liked, but I felt like with teaching, there's so much under the water that people don't see.
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It's like a duck under water.
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Our to-do lists and the workload can be so large sometimes that it's hard to navigate, and I just wanted to be there for my kids and connect, and so I felt like I failed them because I could never get that year back, and it was in that point in my life where I decided you know what?
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I can't do this anymore.
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I either need to find a way to make teaching easier or I'm not going to do it at all, so that next year I dedicated an entire year to figure out how can I make this easier.
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And it started working.
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Not only did I start, you know, leaving work on time, but I had extra space now to create a community online and share what I've learned, and that's why I created the Present Teacher.
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The whole message behind the Present Teacher is I'm here to help you to learn and manage everything else, so you can show up in the moment and be mindfully in the moment with your kids, because I've been there where you've just reached emotional fatigue and you space out when you come home and you have nothing left to give to your family, let alone yourself, and I don't want that for you.
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And if it's possible for me, then it's possible for you too.
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I'm well, I think I'm awesome.
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I'm nothing special, and if I can do it, you can too.
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So, with that being said, here are the top 10 lessons I've learned around teaching and just life in general as a teacher during my first year, six years of teaching.
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So the first lesson that I learned is to trust yourself.
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Now, when I started teaching, like I said, a lot of teachers had an opinion or just bystanders had an opinion on how I was running my classroom, and this became very apparent for me when it came to classroom management, I felt like I was.
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You know, I started to hear the voices that said that I was way too fun and outgoing and my kids were going to take advantage of me.
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Fun and outgoing and my kids were going to take advantage of me.
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So I remember going online and trying all of these classroom management strategies that just didn't end up working.
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I tried everything from Blurt Beans, sticker stores, you know something?
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Bucks, school bucks, whatever they are tallies, sticker charts, all everything between and not and I even use clip charts because my whole school used it but it didn't feel great.
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And but I didn't trust myself then because I felt like I was so new that who am I to know what's best for me and my kids?
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And I'm here to tell you now.
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When I stopped looking back or listening to those people outside of myself and I started listening to me, that's when things started to change.
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I stopped listening to what all the experts say online that you're supposed to do.
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I stopped listening to the teacher next door and I started to ask myself what do I want to do?
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What do I think is best for my class?
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And the more I leaned into it, the more I found strategies that actually worked for me and they felt good and better.
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Yet they worked.
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After spending an entire year of trying everything, I had finally found out what worked for me.
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So, with that being said, I want to remind you to trust yourself.
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I know, especially during the first couple of years of teaching, it can feel really hard to trust yourself and to listen to yourself when there's so many things you're learning.
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But I promise you, if you lean into what feels good and the things you want to do, you're going to find things that work well for you.
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Something I like to tell the teachers I work with or coach, is that the only difference between you and an experienced teacher is they've had more time to figure out what works for them.
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I'm gonna say that again the only difference between you, an experienced, and an experienced teacher is that they've had more time to figure out what works for them.
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So stop listening to what everyone else says.
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Sure, use them as inspiration, but really start leaning into your own voice and your own desires, because your desires are safe guidance.
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Whatever you want to do, I like to think of those ideas, those aha, maybe this will work.
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Or I really want to try this.
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Those little thoughts that come up throughout the day.
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Those are what I like to call inspired action.
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They're those little nudges that the universe, or God or whatever you believe in, kind of shows us which path to go to get to the end goal that we're trying.
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So trust yourself.
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You know way more than you think you do, and it's so easy to drown out your voice, but you are the expert and you can try a million things that don't work well for you or well for you know they work well for someone else, but they won't work for you, and that's not necessarily a bad thing.
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It just means that you were different, and I think it just means that you're different and I think it's wonderful that you're different and you get to make something completely your own.
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Teaching is like one big experiment.
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You get to try things and create things that are your own and your own concoction and methods and strategies and frameworks to get to where you are, so where you wanna be.
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So just know that you can trust yourself.
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So repeat after me I trust myself, I love myself.
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My desires are safe guidance.
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I get better and better every day.
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I cannot fail.
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Failure is not an option.
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No matter what actions I take, failure cannot happen.
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I can't mess this up.
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I get to be the expert.
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I am the expert.
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I get to run the classroom.
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How I feel feels good to me.
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The second lesson I want to talk about today is that feeling like you are not enough and you can never get caught up or do enough.
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Now I know deep down, when it came to teaching, it was really easy for me to feel like I wasn't doing enough, like I had to have the Pinterest perfect classroom.
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I had to be really good at classroom management.
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Like that teacher next door, I had to be weeks in advance, like the other teachers, and the truth is, I was really doubting myself and I felt like I wasn't enough and I could never do enough.
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And this was probably one of the main reasons that, even though the main things were done during the school day, I continued to stay late and work so much is because I secretly didn't feel like I was enough.
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I felt like, no matter how hard I worked, I would never be enough as a teacher and I wasn't doing enough.
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I have these limiting self-beliefs of like who am I?
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I'm not smart enough, I'm not mature enough.
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I'm not, you know, positive enough to run a classroom.
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I'm not smart enough to run a classroom.
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Who am I?
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Why?
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Who trusted me with this?
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But the truth is, you are enough and you are doing enough.
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If you have this deep down desire to do teaching, then I believe that you were meant to be here and you are exactly where you need to be.
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And this was something, especially when I felt like a failure, that I need to hear and I know, as teachers, we don't hear it enough.
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It's easy to hear all these.
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You know critiques and lacking areas and I know how easy it is to be hard on yourself and to compare yourself to everybody else and where they are in their journey.
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But just know that you are enough and you are exactly where you are meant to be in your journey.
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Your journey is your journey and it's gonna be messy and fun and you're going to learn things along the way, but that's how you get to the perfect ending.
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That's where you get to figuring out the perfect strategies and methods for you.
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So just know that you are enough and you are doing enough.
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I know it's easy to feel like you aren't doing enough for your kids and that they're behind and you should be working harder, but you just don't know how.
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I want to remind you that you are enough, you are doing enough.
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Each day that you show up, you are doing enough.
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So repeat after me I am enough.
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I am an amazing teacher.
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My students are learning every day.
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My worth is not measured by how much work I get done today.
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I love myself.
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I am enough, I am doing enough.
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I am doing work every single day.
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Every single day it gets easier and easier.
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I am enough, I am enough, I am enough.
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The third lesson I have is something that comes from being a slight perfectionist, and that is the better it gets, the better it gets.
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I'm going to say that again the better it gets, the better it gets.
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So at some point during my second year of teaching, there became this shift where I was no longer bringing my teacher bag home and I was no longer staying late.
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In fact, I was getting everything done, and I think I secretly felt guilty.
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I felt guilty that I found a way to make teaching easy, because I was told from the get-go that teaching had to be hard and it had to be difficult.
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And the truth of the matter is is that teaching gets to be fun, and I know online it's so easy to hear about how hard teaching can be, and even my story at the beginning.
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But the truth is you get to choose what teaching is like for you, and the easier it gets, the easier it gets.
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When you find things that work, you can continue to do it, and when you find things that don't work for you, you can then pivot to something else and honestly, like I said, the better it gets, the better it gets.
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When you are working, find yourself thinking it's too easy.
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It's really easy to self-sabotage yourself.
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It's easy to add stuff onto your to-do list that you don't even really have to do, and this is where I started to really lean into my classroom running activities.
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So this was something I came up with, especially a quick crossover from the business world to the teaching world, and these are the business world, are referred to as income producing activities, but essentially, what are the main things that you need to do to keep your classroom running?
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And what I found for me is that the main things I need to do to keep my classroom running are classroom management, lesson planning and prepping, data and grading, family communication or communication in general, and my own well-being.
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So when I found these areas that I needed to consistently keep up on week to week or month to month, I found that these were the main things I needed to do week to week or month to month.
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I found that these were the main things I needed to do.
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Otherwise, my classroom would completely fall apart.
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Everything else was extra and they were things that I were filling my to-do list with that didn't necessarily get me anywhere.
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So this could be things like, I don't know, creating a super cute themed classroom.
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Well, yes, as someone who had a Harry Potter classroom, I love having a cute classroom, but it's not something I necessarily need to have keep my classroom running.
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Instead, it's things that I get to do when there's extra time, extra motivation, extra creativity in my energy and stuff like that.
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So, with that being said, when I started to notice that my to-do list started to shift from these nice to do things to the classroom running activities, I found things became easier and I felt guilty.
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I felt like I was cheating, but along my teaching journey I found that there's three different kinds of teachers.
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There's the teacher A, who, honestly, all the whole team benefits when there's the teacher A on their team.
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They're the teachers that are on top of the deadlines, know when things are due and, you know, has everything color coded.
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As someone who had a teacher A in my classroom it's it's or on my team I really appreciate having a teacher A.
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Then there's teacher B.
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Now, definitely had some teacher Bs on my team.
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They have what I like to call organized chaos, meaning from the outside looking in, you don't quite know what's going on, but to them it makes perfect sense.
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I'm so glad it does for them.
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So those are the teacher B's, and then there's the teacher C's, and I like to think of the teacher C's as the teachers who like to figure out a way to make things easier.
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They like to make things more simple, and they might be referred to as lazy, but seriously they're just using the phrase that they're working smarter, not harder, and I discovered that along my journey.
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I'm definitely a teacher C, and if you can resonate with anything I said, you might be one too.
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So, with that being said, you don't need to feel guilty for making teaching easy.
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Teaching was meant to be easy.
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God, the universe, whatever you believe in, didn't put you into teaching so you could struggle and have a really hard life.
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They put you there.
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You were put here to enjoy your life and to make an impact and find an easier way to go about things, and I 100% believe that for you, because I 100% found that in me, and if I can do that, then you can too.
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So, with that being said, repeat after me the better it gets, the better it gets.
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Teaching gets to be fun.
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Teaching gets to be easy.
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I do not take on the energy of feeling negative or guilty for finding a way to make teaching easy.
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Teaching gets to be easy.
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Teaching gets to be fun.
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I'm working smarter, not harder.
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I make things easier every single day.
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Things are getting easier and easier.
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My life is getting filled with more joy every single day.
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My life gets to be full of love and fun.
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The better it gets, the better it gets.
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As my life in the classroom gets better, my life outside of teaching gets better.
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And as my life outside of teaching gets better, my life in the classroom gets better too.
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The fourth lesson I have for you goes a lot along with the lines of the last one I mentioned, and that is it's not cheating to be happy.
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I talked about being a teacher C and throughout my life, I realized that things that genuinely generally made were difficult for other people weren't necessarily difficult for me, but things that came easily for other people were harder for me, and it can feel like sometimes you're cheating because you see other people online or in your hallway or in your school really struggling with something and you can really start getting in your head of well, I feel guilty that it should be so easy for me.
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So then you'll naturally come up with ways to make it harder than it needs to be.
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So this is where that whole idea of it gets to be simple how can I make this easy?
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One question I often ask myself throughout my teaching career was how can I see things differently?
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How can I make this easier?
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And it's not cheating to find ways to be happy as long as you are doing it integrity with you.
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I fully believe that if you I don't know um, still someone's lesson plans and you know do some things that just don't fill in alignment with you to get to the finish line, you're just genuinely not going to feel happy about it.
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But if you find a system where you can reuse some of the lesson plans you've made in the past years and tweak them in a way that feels aligned with you, then that's not necessarily cheating.
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That's just working smarter, not harder.
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That's using your resources and using years of experience so you don't have to start from scratch every time.
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So, with that being said, it's not cheating to be happy.
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So, with that being said, repeat after me I get to be happy.
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I deserve happiness.
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I am worthy of success.
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I am worthy of happiness.
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I get to be happy in teaching.
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Teaching gets to be fun.
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Teaching gets to be easy.
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The better it gets, the better it gets.
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The fifth lesson I learned along my six years of teaching is your desires are safe guidance.
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I talked about this a little bit earlier.
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But going back to my classroom management example, when I, my first year of teaching, pretty much the whole school were using things called clip charts.
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Now, if you're not familiar with what clip charts are, essentially they're different colors.
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Everyone has a clothespin.
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They start at one color and then, as they make good choices throughout the day, they move up.
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As they make, you know, not the desired choices, throughout the day, they move down and they might have some consequences like missing recess, sideline conversation, missing free time, contact, home, etc.
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Now, while this may be popular, I absolutely hated this method.
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I hated it because I didn't.
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As a child, I was extremely shy.
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I hated walking in front of the whole class Ironic because I'm a teacher, I know I definitely had to get over that one but I hated walking in front of the class.
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I hate walking across classroom.
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I would get all sweaty and stuff like that, and so I felt like this kind of management system was really almost shaming kids.
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And don't get me wrong, if you use a class, you know a clip chart then, and if it feels great to you, then please, you know, keep using it.
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But it just didn't feel in alignment with who I was and the kind of teacher I wanted to be.
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So then I use the questions I talked about earlier.
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How can I see this differently?
00:23:08.034 --> 00:23:35.900
No-transcript.
00:23:35.900 --> 00:23:41.980
So that's when I ran into whole brain teaching and that's when I ran into the super improver wall.
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So the super improver wall is essentially a gamified sticker chart where everyone starts off on one color.
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As they make great choices throughout the day, you can give them a sticker Fun story.
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I gave my second graders scratch and sniff stickers and, oh my gosh, it was really cute watching them go up to the wall and scratch them and smell the wall.
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They're dorks, but I love them Anyways.
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So this felt really aligned to who I naturally was as a teacher.
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And, granted, I don't use that as my sole classroom management strategy by any means or plan or foundation.
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But I wanted to add, like frosting on top of the cake of something that was more positive as opposed to the clip charts.
00:24:28.511 --> 00:24:46.693
So I started to use that instead and I ended up having a way better experience with classroom management, so much so that I was asked to help train substitutes in my district and it just feels better when you listen to yourself.
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Just feels better when you listen to yourself and this goes back to that story of your desires are safe guidance Meaning.
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I believe that, again, the universe, god, whatever you believe gives you these little ideas throughout your day or your week and as you listen to what feels great to you, you can choose to take that action and it gets you closer to being that teacher that you are on your journey of becoming and when you, oftentimes when you make decisions from a place of scarcity of I'm just trying to figure anything that works, I'm going to listen to any voice.
00:25:22.632 --> 00:25:37.134
You might make choices that are not necessarily aligned with who you are as a person or as a teacher, and they won't often work and that's because they just are in out of alignment for you.
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So that's why I always recommend to the teachers I coach that your desires are safe guidance, meaning that your desires are God-given, universe-given, energy-given, whatever you believe in.
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So listen to them, listen to yourself and your own intuition.
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If you want to try something, try it.
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You can't fail, you can't mess it up.
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Worst comes to worst, it doesn't work and you try again tomorrow or you try something else that feels good.
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Teaching is just one great big experiment.
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Again, the only difference between you and an experienced teacher is they've had more time to experiment and find things that work for them.
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Now it's your time to try, and you know, be a scientist or be a painter and play with colors and just come up with something that's uniquely yours, that works well for you.
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So your desires are safe guidance.
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So repeat after me, it feels good to listen to myself.
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I listen to myself every single day.
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Things that I want to do are guidance from the universe or the world or God.
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Whatever you believe in.
00:26:44.249 --> 00:26:46.602
My desires are safe guidance.
00:26:46.602 --> 00:26:48.647
The better it gets, the better it gets.
00:26:48.647 --> 00:26:50.102
Teaching gets to be fun.
00:26:50.102 --> 00:26:51.807
It gets to feel fun.
00:26:51.807 --> 00:26:53.531
Teaching gets to be easy.
00:26:53.531 --> 00:27:02.467
It gets to feel easy, and I make decisions every single day that make it easier and more fun and make me more happy in general.
00:27:02.467 --> 00:27:03.748
All right, so.
00:27:03.748 --> 00:27:12.800
So the next lesson I have for you are that the experts started exactly where you are Now.
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To be honest, I'm thinking of creating an entire book about this, called actually I'm not going to give away the title, but if you are interested, I'm thinking of doing some kind of book club where I release a chapter to only the people that join the book club and you can give me feedback, but on you know how to automate your classroom and show up in a way that feels good to you.
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