We all know that we have the hardest job. Unfortunately, not many others seem to know this. We spend 60+ hours a week and still often feel like we are unsuccessful in our jobs. Social media, news stories, lawmakers, and stakeholders often portray education as broken and the fault of the teacher. We lack stress and coping mechanisms to continue working in a demoralizing climate. How do we find the reason we became educators with the constant mandates and judgment from within and without education? Over the past several years I have made significant changes to my own (dare I say it?) mindset and discovered a few actionable practices that have allowed me to rediscover the joy and value of teaching. I thought for sure my test scores would suffer if my focus wasn’t on academic achievement and mastery of the core. What I found was the opposite. The more I enjoyed teaching STUDENTS through content, the more growth my students showed. And I only worked 45 hours per week! Prioritize, minimize, encourage, let go, and move on. The primary focus of the session will be spent on prioritizing and learning to rewrite our own personal story to avoid burnout and change negative feedback into positive feed-forward to fuel the actions we make.
