Six Strategies for Thriving as an Introverted Teacher
Dec 03, 2018
If you are an introvert, you are probably exhausted right now. And that’s because the system isn’t designed for you. It’s designed for people to be hyper-social and to process things externally. You spend hours working with others. You are asked to be on duty in the morning, meet with parents before school, be “fully present” throughout the day, allow students to visit in the spare hours, and collaborate with your PLCs during your prep period.
You’ve probably heard that the best teachers build relationships with students by coaching and by attending sporting events. You might feel the pressure to volunteer for every field trip or school dance or community activity.
But the reality is you need to recharge. You need time process things on your own. The truth is that you have gifts to offer your community as an introvert. So, with that in mind, we will be exploring what it means to thrive as an introverted teacher.
Carve out introverted times in your teaching practice. One strategy that works well involves student-teacher conferences. As a middle school teacher, I met one-on-one with every student once a week. Instead of wandering around monitoring the class, I pulled students aside to talk about their progress. I kept the direct instruction short and scheduled lots of one-on-one time. This kept me from burning out and it helped students get valuable face time with their teacher. Confession: I often hit a point in March when I couldn’t be as present. I would zone out a little and that’s okay. When my students wrote blog posts and articles in journalism, I would crank out a few of my own. Perhaps I wasn’t as “on” but the upside is that they saw their teacher as someone passionate about writing and they knew I was quietly available to help them as they worked independently.
Cultivate an online community. Being a classroom teacher could feel isolating. However, I didn’t thrive on the hours of face-to-face collaboration. So, I still need community. I still needed people. That left me in a bit of a jam. Enter social media. Although I would go on Twitter and Facebook, I also enjoyed the conversations on the margins, in direct messages or Google chats or Voxer conversations. To this day, I have a few close friends as a result of this PLN and they are the ones who I have deep conversations with. One of my best friends here in Oregon is Luke Neff, who I met through collaborating on visual writing prompts.
Find an introverted hobby. I chose an introverted hobby. I write often. If I’m not writing blog posts, I’m working on a novel or a column. It’s my chance to process things internally and creatively. More recently, I’ve gotten into video creation. I also enjoy Minecraft.
Limit the noise. I always had a basic noise limit in my room. This might sound harsh. However, I couldn’t handle really loud classrooms. I created experiences where extroverts could thrive as well. My students got a high level of peer-to-peer talk time and they can listen to music on headphones during independent project time. They were often excited about our hands-on projects. And yet . . . our room ran on a gentle hum more than a loud cacophony.
Give yourself the permission to be alone. Give yourself permission to withdraw. I used to feel like I had to attend every sporting event to support my students. I felt like I had to coach sports. I felt the need to allow students to come in before school and hang out. Eventually, I realized I was a better teacher when I wasn’t exhausted. In the same vein, I didn’t go to the staff lounge for lunch. I rarely even turned on music. I would eat alone and read or maybe go for a walk. Man, I miss Phoenix sometimes. It was always so sunny.
Volunteer for introverted projects. I was the first to volunteer to design a logo or a website. I would design curriculum or write a proposal or edit a video. People assumed this because I was tech savvy, but that wasn’t the case. I just enjoyed work that allowed me to be self-directed.
It’s possible to thrive as an introverted teacher. You just have to rewrite the rules of what it means to be a passionate, dedicated teacher.
Watch the Video
The following video is a short reflection on what it means to thrive as an introverted teacher. If you are interested in seeing more videos like this, you might want to subscribe to the New Teacher Academy on YouTube.
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Managing the Paperwork as a New Teacher
Nov 23, 2018
There’s a certain kind of teacher who gets excited when they go to Staples. This is the teacher with the binder system and the folder system and the system to integrate the binders and folders. This teacher has a color-coding system that corresponds to the neon sticky notes. This type of teacher loves the minutia of teaching and the sense of accomplishment in staying on top of paperwork. If you are that teacher, this blog post is probably not for you.
But there’s another type of teacher who struggles with details and hates administrative tasks. I was this second type of teacher in my first year of teaching. I was excited by well-crafted lessons. I focused on student engagement. But paperwork? That was something that got in the way of the real work of teaching. But then I had a day when I lost a student’s assignment. She’d been learning English and she wanted to keep an essay she had written so she could type it up to email to her family back in Mexico.
I couldn’t find it.
I searched through the turn-in bin and it wasn’t there. I looked at another pile of papers that I had graded but hadn’t entered into the grade book. It wasn’t there either. In the meantime, our team leader called me to inform me that I was already four minutes late to a meeting. I realized, at that moment, that my inability to manage paperwork was actually a bigger deal than I had assumed. Eventually, I found this student’s essay in the turn-in bin. But I decided, I needed to think strategically about the entire paper trail.
The Paper Trail
So, the paper trail is the connection paperwork from the moment something is an idea of an assignment all the way to the moment a student gets the assignment back with teacher feedback. It helps to think about the entire thing from start to finish:
Ideas: where do you plan to store ideas for lessons and assignments? Where will you store graphic organizers, materials, handouts, etc? If you are teaching in a project-based framework, where will you store the components of projects?
Lesson plans: Where will you store your lesson plans and unit plans?
Sub folder: Where will you store your updated sub folders so that if you have something prepared if you are absent?
Lesson materials/assignments: Where will you keep the items that need to be photocopied? Where will you keep the items that have already been photocopied?
Passing out papers: What will be your system for making sure each student gets papers?
Absent students: What will you do to make sure that students who are absent get the assignments, notes, etc.? What is your process when the studnet comes back?
Collecting assignments: What is your system for collecting assignments from students? How do you collect them efficiently? How will you ensure that students have their names on their papers?
Storing unfinished assignments: Where do students keep the assignments they have not finished? Do they have cubbies? Do they have their own file folders? Or are they supposed to keep an organized binder?
Storing collected assignments: Once students have turned in an assignment, where do you store it before you have given feedback or graded it? How do you separate out the assignments that have been graded or not graded?
Inputting grades: What is your system for inputting the grades after you collect the assignment?
Returning the graded assignments back students: What is your process for getting the assignments back to the students after you have graded everything?
Communicating grades: What is your system so that students know what their grades are? How will you deail with missing work?
This might seem overly complicated but I found that it helps to think of a single assignment from idea through finished work with feedback and then design a system that works for you. I kept all materials and ideas on a file folder on my laptop. I then printed up the lessons and the materials one week in advance and I would get all photocopies done one week in advance (choosing the least busy time to go to the staff lounge and make copies). I then kept each day in a green hanging file folder for each day of the week.
As students walked in, they would go to their hanging file folder that I kept in bins and they would grab their graded work along with the handouts for the day. Each student had a class number (the class period and the corresponding alphabetical number) that matched where they were in the grade book. At the end of the class period, students would hand me all their work from the day. I then quickly organized the papers in numerical order. I would leave feedback and grade their papers with my gradebook open and then place each turned in assignment in hanging file folders where they would get their graded work.
My system changed when we went fully project-based and I began using student-teacher conferences to do standards-based grading. It also changed as we went one-to-one and tracked student work through Google Docs.
The Other Paperwork
Note that the following are other paperwork areas that can trip up new teachers:
New students: What is your “onboarding process” for new students? How do you get them up to speed when they join your class weeks after the class has already begun?
Permission slips: What is your system for keep track of permission slips, money, etc.?
Student data: You’ll likely need to keep track of student data from things like fluency tests, benchmarks, etc. How will you manage that?
District and school communication: What is your system for keeping up on your communication?
Documentation of discipline issues: How will you document discipline issues? (I personally found that Google Forms worked well because they were timestamped and then they could be turned into a spreadsheet)
Class newsletters: How will you organize things like class newsletters that need to go home?
Ridiculously important paperwork: How will you stay on top of certification paperwork, clock hours for professional development, and other paperwork that will be critical to staying certified?
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A Student-Centered Approach to Classroom Procedures
Nov 21, 2018
We know that procedures are vital for classroom management. But is it possible to create classroom procedures in a way that honor’s student choice and agency? In this podcast, we explore a specific, practical strategy for developing classroom procedures together as a community.
Embracing a Student-Centered Approach to Classroom Procedures
Whether we realize it or not, procedures exist all around us. When you turned on your smartphone to listen to a podcast or powered up your tablet to read this blog post, you followed a set of procedures. When you go check out at the grocery store, you follow specific procedures, from the guesswork moment of “which line is faster?” to the moment you get your receipt.
Procedures set the expectations for how things work. They are those systems and structures that help things run smoothly. Often, these procedures seem invisible, based on the visual cues of our environment (an idea that we will explore in the future when we look at UX Design). In many cases, these connect to the norms (another idea we’ll explore in the future). But sometimes the procedures are unclear and in these moments, you might feel confused. You end up doing things the “wrong way” even if you have the best of intentions.
The same is true of a classroom. Students walk in on the first day unsure of how things work. If they’re older, they’ll probably have a general sense of how things work and where things go. But the classroom space is unfamiliar and the expectations are unclear. Often, teachers will take the whole first week to go over classroom procedures with the students.
However, there’s also value in asking students to help develop the classroom procedures. Here, you work as the facilitator guiding students through the process of creating and negotiating the procedures for your community. The following are some of the benefits of this approach:
You start from a place of empathy. In other words, you start with the question, “how do I create systems to fit the needs of my students?” rather than “how to do I get my students to fit the systems I created?”
Your students experience a sense of ownership. When they get to develop the classroom procedures, they experience more voice and choice in the structures and systems of the community space. This sends a powerful message that they belong and that you value their input.
You model conflict resolution early. This process will include some conflict and you will have some moments of give-and-take. But that’s okay. You are modeling constructive criticism and conflict resolution early on in the year.
You set the tone for a democratic classroom where every voice is honored. Students should leave the experience feeling like they have a place in your classroom.
There are many different ways to develop class procedures democratically but I thought I’d share one specific strategy that worked well for me.
How the Procedure Grid Works
This strategy empowers students by bringing them into the conversation about procedures in the first week of school. Here’s the gist of how it works:
Step 1: Students start with a sticky note where they write down any question they have about what they are allowed to do or not allowed to do in class. They might also ask questions about where items are located, how things are turned in, etc. These are typically questions like, “Am I allowed to use the restroom? Can I sharpen my pencil? Can I throw something away? Am I allowed to get materials?”
Step 2: As a whole class, we go through the sticky notes and look at questions that are similar. You can do this by having students read and add questions together in a crowd or you can do this by asking the questions as the teacher.
Step 3: Take the most common questions and put them into this procedure grid, which is based on the methods of grouping (individual, partners, small group, and whole class). You can check out what this looks like by watching the video at the bottom of this post.
Step 4: As a whole class, we collectively decide on the procedures. It helps to encourage students to come up with a strong rationale for their procedures. For example, students might say that headphones are fine individually but they are disrespectful when working with a partner or listening to a teacher. It can be tricky. Some students find it disruptive if you allow students to throw something away direct instruction. Others get anxious having to wait. So, there’s a need in this phase to negotiate these procedures together. In the process, students learn, not only what they are allowed to do but why.
Step 5: Create an anchor chart or poster with the procedure grid. This is a chance to remind students about the class procedures and treat misbehavior as a learning opportunity. I found that it also helps to include the grouping in your slideshows, to reinforce the ideas in the procedure grid. So, if students do a warm-up and see the icon for individual work, they can check the procedure grid if they are unsure of what to do.
It also helps to type the procedure grid up and keep it as a handout for new students who arrive later in the year.
Note that this takes a full class period. However, it saves time in the long run, because you’re not spending weeks on classroom procedures. By day two or day three, students generally understand how things work and by the fifth or sixth day, you might take the anchor chart off the wall.
The procedure grid is a visual representation of how the class works. However, note that it’s not comprehensive. You will still have to show students where items or located and how to turn in classwork. You will still need to develop class rules or norms to set other behavioral expectations. But this is a great starting place for general classroom expectations. The goal is to increase student ownership and buy-in while also setting the tone for a class with clear expectations and smooth system.
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