How To Shift From Exhaustion to Efficiency This School Year While Building a Strong Class Culture

How to work smarter, not harder and together not against each other in the classroom

By Catherine Patterson-Sterling, PhD, RCC

As a teacher do you often feel like you are working harder than the students?

Perhaps teaching is one of the only jobs whereby the workday ends, but in actuality, the workday restarts again at the end of the day or even into weekends with the never-ending pile of marking and prep that goes into as well as flows out of every lesson plan.

Not only do teachers cover the curricular outcomes, but also materials need to be engaging, because let’s face it youth will not buy into schoolwork unless it somehow peaks their interests.

Teachers then are the masters of all things relevant, exciting, and engaging as they find better ways to set learners up for success.

This process is exhausting and if as a teacher, you have just set up your classroom, started your first PD Day or are preparing for your start-up staff meeting, then exhaustion is that dark cloud that starts to loom on the horizon.

How Can We Make This School Year Different?  

The opportunity is to work smarter not harder and to take advantage of resources that will not only meet curricular outcomes, social and emotional learning frameworks, but also contribute to a strong class and/or overall school culture.

Below are three tips-

1.       Simplify Lesson Planning With Templates, Pre-Made Printables, or Videos

Do not invent the wheel if the wheel has already been created. Tweak it instead! For example, the program “Twenty” is a new resiliency resource from Grades 5 to 10 with over 60+ lessons that have integrated mind mapping (goal bus) small group exercises, videos, and pre-loaded quizzes as well as reflection prompts already loaded on to a learning management system. Topics such as screen time overload, resiliency, future planning, critical thinking, goal-setting, self-regulation, healthy relationships, executive functioning and more are covered as 6 animated characters get into situations that students in your class can problem-solve. The heavy-lifting has been done for you and you can click on any applicable lessons while pushing play or have students work from their own individual log-in copies. Also, these lessons help you to build a strong classroom as well as school community as students learn a toolbox of skills for managing mental health, building resiliency, strengthening executive functioning and goal-setting.

FREE TEACHER’S COPY AVAILABLE at: https://www.softskillstrainingcenter.com

2.       Leverage Technology and Automation

For example, load an explanation of an assignment into your Microsoft Teams class page so that you are not repeating yourself or going back to the beginning when a student has missed time away from class. Utilize resources on learning management systems to eliminate photocopying and the physicality of organizing papers. An example of leveraging technology is with the program “TWENTY” listed above.

3.       Build Strategies Around Focus so that Students Do Not Exhaust You With Their Behaviors

The saying is that if you build systems, then the systems carry the weight. Create a system for how your classroom flows and then you will not have to constantly remind students. Also, utilize social coaching techniques that help re-focus students to be on task without exhausting yourself.

Read more in this article: “The 3 Student Behaviors That Will Make or Break Your School Year and How to Tackle Them Fast!”  

Finally, the biggest exhaustion factor is focusing on what is not working instead of what is working. As Educators, when we stop and take stalk of what is going well, the bright lights and glimmers in the learning that does happen becomes that much stronger. Also, when we support students with a toolbox of skills for how to manage technology, increase resiliency, and connect back to the why of learning as part of future-planning, then we are able to stand strong against any negative entitlement and learned helplessness learner attitudes that come our way which have the potential to steal the joy of teaching.

We step into possibility instead of managing impossibility.

Essentially, we stop being exhausted and become energized.

About The Writer:

Catherine Patterson-Sterling, PhD, RCC is an educator of 20+ years with diverse experience in all levels of elementary, high school, and post secondary education as a teacher, counsellor, and clinical supervisor. With extensive experience in research and counselling, she understands the impact as well as sources of disengagement as well as chronic absenteeism on learners at all levels. She is also the creator of these new innovative programs “Twenty”  & “LOTUS” sponsored by Soft Skills Training Center and Patterson-Sterling Consulting and Counselling Services.