New teachers can use these ideas to sustain themselves when the demands of the job seem overwhelming.

1. REACH OUT

Teachers love teaching, and that usually includes teaching each other. Find a teacher or teachers who inspire you and ask them questions about lessons, classroom management—anything that you could use some help with during your school day. They’ve been in your shoes, and they want to help with resources, problem-solving, or even just support.

There are also ways to connect beyond your school or district. Consider joining a professional organization of teachers; many have state or local affiliates where you can connect. There are professional organizations for every teaching area, such as those at listed at TeachersFirst. Alternatively, you can ask your colleagues if they can recommend any organizations. Online teacher groups through social media can provide a lifeline of support or at least a laugh.

2. REUSE YOUR IDEAS

Create a system to organize your materials online so that they are easy to find again next week, next month, and next year. The digital age has been a wonderful time for organization of teaching materials. Google Drive makes organizing lesson plans and materials relatively simple. It’s easy to modify and adapt your plans as you go for a seamless planning process.

In addition to saving and organizing what you’ve created to reuse at a later time, adopt strategies that can be used repeatedly. In our classrooms, we have a few protocols that we use frequently, such as CEAL (Claim, Evidence, Analysis, Leaving Thought) for writing paragraphs, and LAPS (Literal, Analyze, Prove it, and So what) for responding to texts.

Having go-to strategies is good for you because you aren’t constantly inventing and constructing new ones, and it’s good for students irrespective of what grade you teach because routines are stabilizing and accelerate skill development. Finally, don’t think you have to reinvent the wheel—if you see or read about a good strategy or lesson, use it. You can always make changes so that it fits your particular teaching style.

3. REGULATE

“Tomorrow is another day.” These are words we’ve uttered countless times in our teaching careers. As we have worked through countless issues and scenarios, we have had to say it less. Leaving the job at the door becomes a healthy practice no matter what your profession is; guilt-free weekends and evenings make coming to work in the morning much less stressful.

It’s really important to draw boundaries around your time to maintain a healthy balance. You don’t have to grade papers all weekend—create realistic timelines for returning graded work. Timely feedback is important, but not every assignment requires the same attention. While tests should be scored within a few days, other assignments can take longer or be scored in class.

You can focus on just one standard to expedite grading, and some assignments can be scored as credit/no credit. At the end of a grading term, design your deadlines to make sure you’ve left yourself enough time to complete grading without causing yourself undue stress.

Make it a habit to practice the things that help you be your best self: exercising, reading, going outside, playing with your children, cooking, etc. When you leave teaching at the door, it opens up mental bandwidth for you to enjoy or focus on other equally important things in your life. There’s true power in a fitness regimen or other enjoyable pursuits to help keep teachers fresh in their daily teaching.

4. READY YOURSELF

Spending some time outside of your teaching day to prepare for future days can make your mornings easier and your days less stressful. For example, you can prepare for your week’s lunches on Sundays. It saves time and reduces the number of decisions you have to make before leaving for school.

This may seem over the top, but you can also plan your outfits for the week on Sunday nights. Gather all the pieces of each outfit, including shoes and accessories, and place them on hangers ready to go. That way, you’re not frantically rummaging through drawers for your panda socks when you’re already running late.

Also in the category of feeling ready is to always have a backup plan. Overplan—always have options in case the original plan falls flat or runs short. When you are new to teaching, timing is difficult to gauge, and more often than not, activities will go faster than you might think. In those cases, things that are ready to implement, such as relevant discussion questions, related quick writing prompts, or extra reading, can mean the difference between a disastrous class and a satisfying one.

Classroom management is very connected to engagement. If students aren’t engaged in class activities, behavioral issues are more likely to erupt. Even something as simple as an exit ticket to summarize the learning can fill in a few minutes at the end of class in a productive way.

5. REMEMBER/REFLECT

We’ve all had the situation when a difficult incident or class dominates all thinking about the day. Let it go. If it helps you to let it go, vent first to one of those teachers to whom you have reached out. They will be able to relate to those trying times and can lend support. Then, venting done, focus on positive moments: when a struggling student made a breakthrough, when a student gave you an origami swan, or when you laughed with your students.

Frequent reflection, in fact, is a powerful tool for your growth as a teacher. Think about why things went the way they did: lessons, assessments, interactions, and activities. When things go well, consider how to replicate that success. When things don’t go as well, consider how to improve that element of the lesson.

Finally, repeat to yourself, as often as you need to, why you became a teacher, and remember that even though you might be going through a rough patch, you are making a difference.

Reference: https://www.edutopia.org/article/5-motivating-practices-help-new-teachers-keep-going?fbclid=IwAR2jqqAZrirljt_jvP9p9JSF9OFhSzx3jrLDsBx_UCi-Gr03RBwUHskgvlo

Here are 6 evidence-based strategies to help you complete your stress cycle:

1. Breathing

Deep, slow breaths down-regulate the stress response, especially when the exhalation is long and slow and goes all the way to the end of the breath so your belly contracts. Breathing is most effective when your stress isn’t that high or when you just need to siphon off the very worst of the stress so you can get through a difficult situation.

A simple, practical exercise is to breathe in to a slow count of 5, hold that breath for 5, then exhale for a slow count of 10, and pause for another count of 5. Do that three times — for one minute and 15 seconds of breathing — and then see how you feel.

Casual but friendly social interaction is the first external sign that the world is a safe place.

2. Positive social interaction

Casual but friendly social interaction is an external sign that the world is a safe place. People with more acquaintances are happier. Just go buy a cup of coffee and say “Nice day” to the barista or compliment another customer’s earrings. Reassure your brain that the world is a safe, sane place, and not all people suck. It helps!

3. Laughter

Laughing together, and even just reminiscing about the times we’ve laughed together, increases relationship satisfaction. We mean belly laughs — deep, impolite, helpless laughter. When we laugh, says neuroscientist Sophie Scott, we use an “ancient evolutionary system that mammals have evolved to make and maintain social bonds and regulate emotions.”

A warm hug in a safe and trusting context can do as much to help your body feel like it has escaped a threat as jogging, and it’s a heck of a lot less sweaty.

4. Affection

Sometimes, a deeper connection with a loving presence is called for. Most often, this comes from a loving and beloved person who likes, respects and trusts you, whom you like, respect and trust. It doesn’t have to be physical affection (though physical affection is great). A warm hug in a safe and trusting context can do as much to help your body feel like it has escaped a threat as jogging a couple of miles, and it’s a heck of a lot less sweaty.

One example of affection is the “six- second kiss” advice from relationship researcher John Gottman. Every day, he suggests, kiss your partner for six seconds. There’s a reason behind the timing: Six seconds is too long to kiss someone you resent or dislike, and it’s far too long to kiss someone with whom you feel unsafe. Kissing for six seconds requires that you stop and deliberately notice you like this person, you trust them and you feel affection for them. By noticing those things, the kiss tells your body that you are safe with your tribe.

Another example: Hug someone you love and trust for 20 full seconds, while both of you are standing over your own centers of balance. Research suggests this kind of hug can change your hormones, lower your blood pressure and heart rate, and improve mood. It doesn’t have to be precisely 20 seconds. What matters is you feel the stress easing, or what therapist Suzanne Iasenza describes as “hugging until relaxed.”

Of course, affection doesn’t stop with other human beings. Just petting a cat or dog for a few minutes can help complete the cycle too.

5. A big ol’ cry

Have you had the experience of just barely making it inside your home — or bedroom — before you slam the door behind you and burst into tears for 10 minutes? Then you wipe your nose, sigh a big sigh and feel relieved from the weight of whatever made you cry? You may not have changed the situation that caused the stress, but you completed the cycle.

Have a favorite tearjerker movie that makes you cry every time? Going through that emotion with the characters allows your body to go through it, too.

You might experience completing the stress cycle as a shift in mood or mental state or physical tension, as you breathe more deeply and your thoughts relax.

6. Creative expression

Engaging in creative activities today leads to more energy, excitement, and enthusiasm tomorrow. Like sports, the arts — including painting, sculpture, music, theater and storytelling in all forms — create a context that tolerates and even encourages big emotions. Arts of all kinds give us the chance to celebrate and move through our big emotions.

P.S.: How do you know you’ve completed the cycle?

It’s like knowing when you’re full after a meal or like knowing when you’ve had an orgasm — your body tells you. You might experience it as a shift in mood or mental state or physical tension, as you breathe more deeply and your thoughts relax.

It’s easier for some people to recognize than others. For some people, it’s as obvious as knowing that they’re breathing. That’s how it is for Emily. Long before she knew about the science, she knew that when she felt stressed and tense and terrible, she could go for a runor for a bike ride and at the end of it she would feel better.  She has always been able to feel it intuitively, that shift inside her body.

Don’t worry if you’re not sure you can recognize when you’ve completed the cycle. Especially if you’ve spent a lot of years — like, your whole life, maybe — holding on to your worry or anger, you’ve probably got a whole lot of accumulated stress response cycles spinning their engines, so it’s going to take a while before you get through the backlog.

All you need to do is recognize that you feel incrementally better than you felt before you started. You can notice that something in your body has changed, shifted in the direction of peace.

“If I was at an eight on the stress scale when I started, I’m at a four now,” you can say. And that’s pretty great.

Excerpted from the book Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle by Emily and Amelia Nagoski. Copyright © 2019 by Emily and Amelia Nagoski. Used by permission of Ballantine, an imprint of Random House Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

References: https://ideas.ted.com/emotionally-exhausted-burnout-completing-stress-response-cycle/?fbclid=IwAR0o6TCws1QShF3dmyrrHZ2lNOZI_Zat9uB61TLtLs18uROp-vjz-NwkNKk

Technology is like oxygen— a necessary component of children’s life. Blogging is a fairly simple and helpful support for writing instruction. With technology, there is a blending of new ways of thinking about the teaching of writing, beyond the paper and pencil forms of writing instruction of the past, allowing for integration of information, communication, and technology literacy (Partnership for 21st-Century Skills, 2009). Moreover, blogs connect the literacies of the home to school. Last but not least, integrating blogging into classroom writing instruction can engage students and motivate them to participate more fully in the writing process.

Reference: Lacina, J., & Griffith, R. (2012). Blogging as a Means of Crafting Writing. The Reading Teacher, 66(4), 316–320. https://doi.org/10.1002/trtr.01128