The podcast designed to speak life, encouragement, and truth into the minds and hearts of educators and get you energized for the week ahead.
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If you always put everyone else's needs before your own...
If the only time you get for yourself is late at night when you really should be sleeping…
If you know you need to prioritize self-care (eating well, exercise, hobbies, getting rest) but just haven’t been able to find time…
This episode can change EVERYTHING.
You see, the problem isn’t so much about a lack of time, but about a lack of habits that fit your lifestyle.
And that’s GOOD NEWS, because creating better habits is pretty simple once you understand a few foundational principles (and how to adapt them for your personality.) You can start prioritizing time for yourself today and see results immediately!
In this episode, I’ll teach you step-by-step how to:
You’ll be able to walk away from this 90 minute audio training with a deep understanding of how a simple habit of self-care can counter feelings of exhaustion and overwhelm.
Discover how changing the way you think about taking care of yourself can make a difference right away AND help you establish sustainable self-care habits that work for a lifetime.
Season 6 of the podcast won't begin until August, but I've got something I think you'll love in the meantime...and it's in a format I've never offered before.
I've created a free, on-demand video series called "5 Summer Secrets to a Stress-Free Fall." It's also available in audio only if you'd rather listen.
You can watch or listen to the entire training anytime you want, and finish in less than an hour. I'm sharing all kinds of practical time-saving strategies and simple mindset shifts that will help you:
* Discover how to create your end-of-summer vision (what do you want your life to look like when summer is over?)
* Select attainable, realistic goals that will move you toward that vision
* Learn simple time-saving tips that will help you work smarter, not harder
* Explore 5 productivity strategies for home and school that will help you feel more accomplished AND allow you to truly relax
* Get ideas for using your summer to get ahead for fall, including key tasks that can be done now to free up more time once school begins
CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP AND ACCESS THE VIDEOS NOW
Also, keep an eye out for another mini episode like this in June...I'm going to check back in and let you know when I have a brand new free live webinar you can sign up for. I'm in the middle of creating it now and there are SO MANY STRATEGIES I want to share to help you get more done in less time. I'll be back when I've narrowed it down to just my best stuff and am ready to accept sign ups!.
Season 5 has come to a close, and I'm looking ahead to Season 6. I would love your feedback on what's working (and what's not.)
I'm particularly interested in your thoughts on the new episode formats I tried this season. Are you enjoying the interviews with experts? How about the coaching calls I'm conducting with teachers?
I've also felt like the podcast eps have slowly gotten longer over the years...is this a good thing, or would you rather me stick to the original 10-15 minute time frame?
I'd love for you to take just 3 minutes to let me know your thoughts. You can sound off on anything you've been thinking about the podcast, and let me know if there are any topics you've hoped I would cover.
CLICK HERE TO TAKE THE SURVEY
Thank you so much for your feedback and support!
The episode you’re about to hear is a free coaching call I conducted with a graduate of the 40 Hour Teacher Workweek Club. It’s a combination of instructional coaching and life coaching all sort of rolled into one, where I’m answering teachers’ specific questions about productivity and balance and managing it all.
This particular call is a teacher named Claire who teaches special education. She works with kids in grades K-6 and actually splits her time between 2 schools, so she’s at one school with one group of kids in the morning and another in the afternoon.
Claire’s initial question is about how to use her summer to get ahead for fall when she doesn’t know the needs of the students in her classroom. Her caseload can change a lot from year to year and that makes it difficult to plan ahead. So we talk through some systems she and any teacher can create during the summer that will make the following school year easier to manage. We talk about getting digital files organized, getting procedures in place, and so on.
I then challenge Claire to figure out 2-3 of her biggest time-wasters and use her summer to figure out a better way. It’s very hard to find the time and mental bandwidth to take a step back during the school year and analyze systems, so summer is really perfect for that. And when she told me what her biggest time suck is, when she talked about collecting data on student progress and grading their writing, she had a really big aha moment that I think is going to resonate with you in a powerful way, too.
Claire and I dug really deeply into how to analyze if something really has to be done, if the things we perceive as mandated are in fact requirements, and analyze teaching practices through the lens of whether they’re actually effective for kids rather than if they’re the way they’ve always been done, and they way everyone else does them. I love that moment in our conversation and I can’t wait to share it with you.
At the end of the call, I mention a free on-demand video series I've created to help you plan out how to use your summer. You can sign up for that here:
http://thecornerstoneforteachers.com/secrets
Today we're going to talk about the little things students do that are rude, disrespectful, or just annoying. The things that don’t necessarily warrant some kind of consequence, but that you don’t want to let slide every time. How should a teacher respond to eye rolling, teeth sucking, muttering under the breath, and so on? What do we do about bad attitudes?
I don’t want to settle for trite rehashed info, so I reached out to Robyn Jackson because I knew she could take this conversation to a deeper level. Robyn was a National Board Certified English teachers in Maryland, just outside of Washington DC, and has since been and administrator, adjunct professor, consultant, and speaker. She’s been championing equity, access, and rigor for over 15 years.
Robyn is seriously one of my favorite experts in the education space, because she has a deeper understanding of human behavior and motivation than anyone else I know, and she always keeps it real. I’ve had the pleasure of seeing her speak in person a few times just hang on her every word--there’s so much good info there. She has this lovely way of uncovering the root problem and also sort of calling you out on your own mess instead of allowing blame-shifting.
Grab a notepad when you listen to this one, because you’re going to want to take notes!
Want to give your feedback on Season 5 of the podcast?
Let me know what you liked and what you want changed here!
I want to use this episode to dive more deeply into a topic that I’ve touched on quite a few times, which is problem of overwhelm. Overwhelm is a huge issue for just about everyone, but particularly for teachers.
I want to help you understand an important contributing factor that a lot of people underestimate or just don’t give much thought to. Once you understand what’s creating or worsening your feeling of being overwhelmed, the solution because clear, simple, and pretty straight forward.
Listen in as I share how you can avoid overscheduling yourself, and create more margin in your life through building in buffer time.
Want to give your feedback on Season 5 of the podcast?
Let me know what you liked and what you want changed here!
The episode you’re about to hear is a free coaching call I conducted with a graduate of the 40 Hour Teacher Workweek Club. It’s a combination of instructional coaching and life coaching all sort of rolled into one, where I’m answering teacher’s specific questions about productivity and balance and managing it all.
This particular call is with a 5th grade teacher named April. April’s challenge right now is with trying to find balance and intentionality during times of year that are super demanding, such as parent conference week.
As we get into the conversation, we dig deeper into her social media habits, and exploring how her desire to learn from and connect with our educators is sometimes swallowing up more time than she intends, and interfering with her ability to get a good nights sleep and stay in balance.
You’ll hear me mention a free intentional connectivity challenge, and if that’s something you’re interested in joining, you can sign up here and join us!
For many teachers, PBL is a very different way of facilitating learning, where kids are identifying a real-world problem and developing its solution. It’s an incredibly powerful, effective, and cross-curricular way for kids to learn. But it’s not always simple to plan, and manage, and assess, so we’re going to talk about some practical teaching strategies.
We’re also going to look at how to address some of the pitfalls that students face. PBL is incredibly rigorous, or should be, and we all know that kids aren’t always excited about rigor and working hard--they can’t just pass a test at the end of the unit and be done. With PBL, kids show what they learn as they journey through the unit, interact with its lessons, collaborate with each other, and assess themselves and each other. It’s pretty complex stuff. It’s a tough juxtaposition with the “fill in the bubble” standardized testing mentality that most are expected to juggle simultaneously.
I have two guests on the show today to help us explore these issues--they are the co-authors of the new book Hacking Project Based Learning: 10 Easy Steps to PBL and Inquiry in the Classroom. You’ll hear from Erin Murphy, who is an assistant principal and certified literacy specialist in the East Penn School District in Pennsylvania, and Ross Cooper, who is the Supervisor of Instructional Practice K-12 in the Salisbury Township School District in Allentown, Pennsylvania.
Erin and Ross are passionate about inquiry-based learning and have supported countless teachers in implementing it, through not only their school-based work but also through the PD and workshops they conduct. I’m really excited to have them here to help us move past the jargon and buzzwords, and talk about the realities on doing PBL with kids.
This is the time of year when many teachers are facing huge decisions about their careers. You may not be sure if you’re even going to have a job next year because your teaching position has been cut. Your decision might be whether to look for another teaching job, or find a different career altogether.
Others of you are wondering: should you stay home with your kids, or save up for another year first? Should you try to get a job in another school? Should you ask your principal if you can take that open spot in another grade level? Should you apply for that position as an instructional coach or an administrator?
In many ways, these are deeply personal questions that no one can advise you on. There are so many factors to consider and only you know them all, and understand the relative importance of them all.
So rather than give you advice about what to do, I’m going to teach you my system for making these kinds of big decisions. I’ve changed schools 5 times and grade levels 3 times, and relocated to other parts of the country for work twice.
And I always felt confident about the choices I made because I created a system that helped me think through every aspect of the decision and weigh the options not just on an intellectual, rational, logical level, but also on an emotional and heart level. Listen in as I share my process.
Today I’m going to let you listen in on a coaching call I did with a 9th and 10th grade ELA teacher named Taylor. Like all the teachers I’m conducting these free coaching calls with, Taylor completed a year in the 40 Hour Teacher Workweek Club and has made really strong progress in work/life balance. Before joining the club, she worked around 80 hours a week, and she’s not working around 55-60, for a net savings of 20-25 hours a week. So she’s obviously doing a lot of things right when it comes focusing on what’s most important and letting go of the rest.
However, Taylor is now committed to being a class advisor, and that’s causing her to work a lot of additional hours. As we talk, it becomes clear that she’s going to have to eliminate some things from her schedule.
But she’s getting stuck on figuring out what she can realistically say no to when it comes to grading, which is what takes up the majority of her time. And, she’s having a hard time saying no to students when they ask her to do extra things for them.
Listen in as I talk with Taylor about how to figure out what can realistically be eliminated from a teacher's workload in order to free up more time.
