6 Effective Teacher Practices That Will Lower Your Anxiety.

Has anyone ever told you before you made a decision to become a teacher that your weekends might be jeopardized for life, you will have to cope with anxiety, your mind will always keep working on unit and lesson plans even during vacation, anything you see in life will be subconsciously evaluated towards the possibility of using it in a classroom?

When I was pregnant, I would read “What to expect when you are expecting” manual that would make me even more nervous. The “after-life” after having a baby is dramatically different from the book although I still felt I had a good “101 mom life” course to prepare mentally.

And yet, although taking on teaching is comparable to taking on motherhood in its profound effects on your life, such a manual does not exist for any teaching profession.

What happens after you become a teacher is a matter of learning on premises by making mistakes and committing to professional development every day for many years.

What it meant for me is being trapped in the never-ending compulsive idea of working, planning, doing something every free minute of my teacher’s life. I would think that if I have some free time, I might as well spend it on writing lesson plans, searching for materials, looking through what I already had, constantly thinking and planning and thinking and planning.

It was exhausting and mentally degrading. What makes these practices even more damaging is that you can’t always stop doing them even if you are a teacher with a 10-year experience. It just comes as an occupational hazard.

You know it can kill you, but it comes with your profession. In my teaching life, I was lucky to realize it pretty soon after I started teaching in K-12 that I cannot allow “teacher’s ever thinking mind” control my everyday life. It took some books, dozens of podcasts, several conversations with colleagues to make a mental shift toward building walls around my time to protect me from burn-out.

In this post, I am going to tell you about six ways I build boundaries between my teacher’s life and my personal life and explain why it’s necessary.

1. Effective Teacher Practice that Saved My Sanity During the 1st year of Teaching is Trusting My Teacher’s Intuition.

I always felt spontaneous moments of effective teaching can beat any planned lesson by 100%. I always felt my behavior and energy in the classroom was affected and would change by what was happening in the classroom at a particular moment.

Thus it was not always dependent on what I had planned prior. I always knew my teacher’s intuition never failed me. I am the one who takes dozens of decisions in a second, and those decisions are right if I trust my gut.

So what I have understood is that I am a much better and more efficient teacher being in the moment of teaching, dealing with a situation right there when the moment requires that. Have you ever caught yourself thinking that sometimes an unplanned activity or even a lesson went much better than a planned one? Ironic, isn’t it? Why does it happen?

For me, it’s teacher’s intuition. My teacher’s brain that is subconsciously working, planning, re-planning, differentiating, evaluating takes over in the moments when you need it. It produces the answers like the missing puzzle pieces.

It analyzes the situation like a supercomputer and gives me a list of instructions to follow. It is an impromptu reaction. It works. It’s effective. It’s your teacher’s intuition in action. Trust it!

2. Rested Means Happy for an Effective Teacher.

I used to dread weekends and any week-long breaks from school because I knew my mind would push me into doing school work on my days off.

I felt exhausted during time off. Some of those reasons are insecurity, anxiety, fear of what comes next. I assumed my working during days off will somehow help me feel better when I go back to work. I was wrong.

What I did during time off from school had almost no impact on how I felt coming back to work. I knew I needed a shift, so little by little I started getting back my weekends and days off. Now I can tell for sure, taking schoolwork home is a bad idea.

It will not only be counterproductive, but it will also bring unnecessary overwhelm and anxiety. Who says you need to bring schoolwork home anyway? What’s better?

Weekends are to rest, and there should be no other agenda. Having a relaxing day or two will charge you for the whole week. Having a realization that my life does not revolve around my profession has been a pleasant discovery for me.

Reclaiming my days off and switching off my teacher’s mind during weekends and breaks have been a dramatic mind shift in my life. So don’t sweat! Reclaim your weekends!

3. Effective Teacher Pursues Interestes Beyiond Teaching.

Being a teacher does not entail having an interest related to teaching, does it? If you are the one with interest related to education, good for you. If not, don’t feel guilty about it. I don’t.

Pursuing your interest in your free time does not only distract your busy mind, but it also makes you who you really are. A lot of times we forget that we are, teachers, humans too.

They say if you enter the classroom, forget about your worries and emotions because this is what teacher do – they act teachers. Somehow it was counterintuitive to me. Not taking into account who I am, what interests me deprives me of identity.

If I am down and upset, I am sorry, but it affects my lessons. I can’t help it. I can’t fake being OK either. My students caught me being fake a couple of times.

And the question they asked was: “Miss, are you OK?” This is the truth. It is the moment to surrender your fake façade and accept that you are a human too. It doesn’t take much time to be in control of your feelings as a teacher. Within my two years of teaching in high school, I can pretty much control how I feel 80% of the time. I have learned it, trained myself, educated myself.

It was not necessarily related to getting accustomed to being a teacher, but it was largely a part of my self-improvement and life-transformation journey I took upon some time ago to reach the state of “you know what, I am quite happy with who I am and where I am.”

So my idea is you can’t fake it. You can’t teach the material you hate with a passion. If you can’t get excited about the things you teach that bore you, then find what you are passionate about to teach. And to find it, you need to distract your mind and dedicate your free time to pursuing your interest. I love reading. I am the biggest bookworm.

Suddenly the task of teaching a book or a story becomes less boring because reading is my interest. And having mastered the art of reading, I can humbly offer my students some great suggestions about becoming readers too. I also love self-improvement type of reading.

Guess what? My comments for students’ writings became more open-ended, prompting students to dig deeper and find answers that are different from multiple choice or black-and-white answers. I distaste shallow thinking; therefore, I teach my students to do the opposite: to question answers, to ponder, analyze, appreciate errors and not chase perfection.

And this is because I allowed myself to pursue my interests guiltfree. Inspired over the weekend break, I return to class in a very different state of mind. I am ready to tackle millions of questions and turn my passion into effective lessons.

This is what happens when your life does not revolve around teaching – it makes you a better teacher!

4. Effective Teacher Practice is Knowing That Simple is Perfect.

The scariest part of teaching is probably the idea that lessons need to be complicated so that students can develop academic skills you are targeting.

Content objectives are formulated in complicated words. Standards are complicated to interpret. Activities need to be complicated to offer a mental challenge for students who throw “Teacher, it’s boring” bombs. We tend to overthink and forget that being complicated is miserable and uncomfortable.

Many times my mind was galloping over the list of everything I planned in my complicated lesson. I would rush students from task to task, often would answer my questions, and feel exhausted at the end of the class.

My mistake was I thought the lesson need to be a super-duper out-of-space type of experience to bring value to students. My a-ha moment came during one of those lame-duck days when some students were finishing up their projects; other students were bored because I asked them to practice their presentations.

And this is when I felt relaxed and in my zone (such days inspire me) when I decided to drag the students who had finished their projects earlier into a “roundtable” group, and we practiced speaking in front of each other. I have to tell you, there was a level of resistance; however, in a minute or two, many unwilling students gathered at the table and speaking started.

Students rotated and presented their projects, talking about their immigration experiences. There was a thrill going around the group as my students were discovering the joy of speaking to each other in a different language (my students are English language learners).

They would encourage each other, ask questions about their stories, laugh at pronunciation, talk about their struggles with the language and discuss local rumors. I would prompt ideas to talk about and compliment students on their language.

At that moment students were real, relaxed, not pushed or hustled to jump from task to task. They had the central stage. And this is when I understood that perfect lessons come from simple ideas and from giving students initiative and voice.

What’s more important is it cost me no energy, paper, planning time. Don’t get me wrong. I haven’t become a lesson guru after that day.

My lessons can suck too sometimes. I am learning and exploring the best in my profession. That day, however, taught me a lesson: most effective lessons come from simple ideas.

5. Connecting To Other Educators is One More Effective Teacher Practice.

I have heard about the power of connecting. It can be connecting to colleagues, club, mastermind group, anything you can find. I also know it has been hard for me to connect because I am an introvert. It’s not easy for me to start communication, become part of a group, invite myself to visit a colleague’s class or talk to an administrator. I am a loner. I prefer to suck at something and deal with it by myself.

And yet, I found isolating creeping up on me and causing anxiety I couldn’t handle. So what I did is I connected digitally and through paper.

I delved into podcasts, books, online clubs that offered me a piece of mind, advice, inspiration, practical tools, and, most importantly, tips to fix my crumbling teacher’s identity. What I was desperately searching for was inspiration and purpose because lack of inspiration and purpose makes a miserable teacher.

Over the time, I found many valuable things that helped me in my everyday work in a classroom as well as my life. The most valuable discovery was I realized that my life quality did not depend on my possible struggles as a teacher. And on the contrary, improvement in my life quality has minimized my struggles as a teacher.

You see, for me, it worked the opposite way. I didn’t try to fix myself as a teacher. I started with rediscovering myself as a passionate person, and this eventually made me a much better and happier teacher. Let me give you an example. I love reading articles about the brain, language and cognition.

It’s not for professional development; it’s just for me because I love it. And what I learn helps me understand the learning of my students better. I love the sport.

I like action and feeling of exhaustion after a work-out or a run. This knowledge about myself leads me to reading articles about how physicals activity is an essential aspect of any lesson.

Connecting can take many forms. For me, it was a reconnection with a real me, my interests. For others, it can be a connection to a group of colleagues, a book club, friends or family.

6. Final Effectice Teacher Practice is Not To Take Everything Seriously in the Classroom.

The final idea is all about perception. Mine was terrible. Have you ever had this feeling that after one of your lessons sucked, bombed, trashed entirely, you feel like the whole world knows that you did that? Sounds familiar?

Yeah, that was my perception. I would feel like crawling into a hole to hide from people’s judgments or calling sick for 10-15 days with no pay.

To turn this kind of perception into a healthier version was tough. What helped me is accepting one truth that I think all new teachers have to know and acknowledge: the beginning sucks. And it will suck for a while. You will feel like the lamest teacher in the world.

This feeling can throw you off. AND THAT’S OK. That’s ok to learn, make mistakes, experiment in the classroom, discover your worst and best days. You just have to stop taking your mistakes seriously. Be a learner. Accept that you are learning, and that’s how teaching goes.

Do you know surgeons who operate on patients the day after the got their diploma? Do you know presidents who are great right after they are elected?

Do you know principals of schools that have no issues? How about teaching a class of 25-year-old teens that you never met before on September 1st?…

Do you understand where I am coming from? Accepting that I will fail before I succeed saved me a lot of headaches and heartaches. And it can work for you too. Just don’t take it seriously.

Talk to you later!

P.S.:  Download this How to be an un-serious teacher and set boundaries flyer!