Learning from Narcissus

This week at school was a bit of a ride emotionally. As I have been focusing more on maintaining routines and being consistent with our schedule, I'm finding that there is much more of a feeling of stability in the classroom, and I also got to a place where I was feeling some burnout and mounting frustration this week. Luckily, I was able to talk through the emotional side of it with my therapist and the tactical side of it with my manager and grade-level colleague, and that led to some productive shifts.

First, what went well this week? 

It has been helpful to set aside this time and space for weekly reflection. It's interesting to come back to what I wrote last week and see that the intentions I set largely came to pass. We are on a great trajectory with Growth Mindset and a process orientation. After practicing in math journals for a week, I'm seeing that students are much more focused on their mindset, math practices, and the actual math they are learning. I'm no longer seeing entries like, "I finished lesson F5 and my mindset was medium." Instead, students are writing things like, "I created models to show the relationships between multiplication and division and equivalent fractions. I was getting frustrated trying to get the fractional units to line up and be the right size, but I used positive self talk and stuck with it." A resource that has really helped is this set of mini-posters from TPT. They're free, and I color printed them and put them on our math board at the front of the room. I also created some new class rules focused on growth mindset and executive function (with some help from ChatGPT), and they have been a great anchor for myself and the kids. Pause and Plan, in particular, has been hugely helpful with prioritization.

On a personal level, something has clicked around being able to prioritize exercise. Even though it's hard for me to put the brakes on and shift gears after school, I followed through on my plan to exercise after school and before daycare pickup on Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday this week. On Tuesday and Thursday I did a 20 minute Peloton ride and on Friday I went for a walk in the arboretum that's right near my school before packing up and heading home. Prioritizing at work is something I want to continue to work on so that it gets easier for me to follow through with the things I want to do in my personal life. I talked to my manager, our Assistant Head of School, about this and she suggested that I made a list of "must do" tasks that I need to complete in order to teach the next week. This is not meant to be an aspirational list; this is the bare minimum. I took that a step further and checked in with my grade-level colleague about our shared planning, and she's been having similar feelings. We decided to truly divide and conquer with some planning, so I'm going to fully take on math, including printing, and she's going to do the same with our humanities block. I think it's going to be a little hard for each of us to teach from the other's plans without tinkering with everything, but I can tinker when I have time, and it will be great to have materials that are ready to go when I don't have time. I'm so lucky that my colleague and I are quite aligned in our teaching style and sensibilities about what ought to be in a lesson, so I think this will be very successful.

Here's my "must do" list for each week:

• Morning Meeting (10 minutes): We follow a very predictable routine using calm classroom followed by announcements, student sharing, and an activity when we have time. I have all of the calm classroom exercises printed in a binder, so the only prep for this is making a note of announcements for the week in my weekly plan and changing up the activity every week or two depending on how many times we have actually gotten to it.
• Math (I'm hoping to get this down to an hour including copies, and it will be faster in future years): Adapt slides and student facing materials from our curriculum for math lessons. Record videos for self pacing using the slides and upload them to Google Classroom for students. Pull materials for our math review block. Create one slide per day for the math discussion block we have at the beginning of our math block before students start self-pacing.
• Humanities (30 minutes): Internalize the plans my colleague creates. Read and annotate any texts we'll be using.
• Word Study (10 minutes): Look at our slides and make any adjustments based on the sorts students are working on in Words Their Way. Copy new sorts for students. I made binders with all of the sorts from PDFs I found online, so this tends to be very fast. I place sticky notes on the pages with student names of the sorts they're working on, which means I don't even need my computer to prep sorts. I can just take the binders to the copy room and I'm good to go. After Spring Break, we are planning to switch students across classrooms for Word Study so we can each focus on 2 - 3 groups max instead of duplicating work by having 5 - 6 groups in each room. We assess frequently to move kids around, so this won't lock kids into a track of any kind; it will just be a way to increase group size and decrease prep.
• SEL (20 minutes): At a minimum, I need to print a lesson plan and any student facing materials. We have access to Second Step as well as Harmony (which is free). Right now we are using this block to work on projects for Black History Month, and after March Break we are planning to use some of Angela Watson's resources from her newish Finding Flow curriculum.
• Family Communication: At a minimum, we are required to send a newsletter every other week as well as two whole group Seesaw posts per week. I'm getting better about noticing good moments to take a couple of pictures right from the Seesaw app on my phone and writing a quick caption in the moment, so the Seesaw isn't taking additional time. My colleague and I do the newsletter together, and because we are just plugging into a template on a shared document, it's down to about 20 minutes on the weeks we need to do it. I'm also supposed to send home two pieces of graded work per week, and I don't currently have a great system for that. I mark almost all of my students' work with quick comments, but I give it back to them and that's that. As I'm writing this, I'm realizing that I could incorporate this into our weekly "Reset" block when students get new homework, do class jobs, and cut their new word sorts. They could also clean out their folders at this time and take home marked work to show their families.

Learning from Narcissus: We're really enjoying our Greek Mythology Unit! On Friday, we read about Echo and Narcissus (the version from the excellent McElderry anthology). In this version, one of the aspects of Narcissus that is particularly elevated is his quickness to anger and inability to see Echo or try to understand her suffering. This prompted me to reflect on the ways that I have been a bit reactive lately. There are lots of things that have contributed to this - ADHD and overstimulation, feeling stress about some learning gaps I'm seeing, overwork - but what clicked for me is that when I am in that state I'm not able to really see and care for my students or myself. I'm working on being honest with myself and my students about my own emotional states while inviting them to share what's up for them. On Friday, I mentioned feeling frustrated and naming that I was feeling a little down on myself because I was feeling like a lesson wasn't going well and I had wanted it to be different. As I get more clear about my feelings, my hope (and my sense) is that it makes clear to my students that my emotions aren't about them. I have noticed students sharing more with the group and with me about how they are feeling, and I'm so grateful for the opportunity to build a more honest and vulnerable community with them. 

Heading into this week, my intention is to focus on prioritizing so that I'm left with time and space to truly recharge. When I do this, I have so much more capacity for presence and connection, and that supports our classroom more than the extra bells and whistles on my lesson plans would. It's such an obvious insight, one that I've had many times, but also one that I need to revisit again and again.