Overwhelmed Teachers

Teachers long to celebrate not only their results but having a clear direction for their work. Without this clarity, we often can’t even see that our work is making a difference. Instead, we stay trapped in cycles of overwhelm that go something like this: get excited about an idea → try it → the students find all the ways it doesn’t work→ try something else→ nevermind, there’s a fire drill and an assembly next week→ here’s a new initiative from your principal to focus on asap→ you realize the real problem isn’t the thing you were trying to solve it’s something else→ change to a new idea→ try it→ forget what I was originally trying to do. I’ve been there, and more! What about the following?

• Going into your classroom or on your computer and forgetting what you were originally going to do.
• Keeping all your tabs open because you are actually working on all those things. Simultaneously.
• Trying something new and giving up by November. Trying something new in January and giving up by March. Trying something new in May.
• Making all the decisions while needing to drink enough water, to go to the bathroom, schedule an appointment, and eat during your “duty-free” 20-minute lunch.
• Spending most of your time thinking about what just happened or what’s about to happen (not the bigger picture).

Whew! No wonder you’re feeling overwhelm, right? Not anymore. If you’d like to see the Facebook live version of this post, you can check it out here.

What if these were the words you were saying?

• “They’re doing it!! I’m seeing growth and comprehension across my student body!”
• “The curriculum feels more inclusive, more kids engaging”
• “Built in scaffolds have been very helpful so that it doesn’t turn into a reactive situation.”
• “Students are feeling more confident at tackling complex texts now that they have seen some success with it.”
• “Students respond well when they feel they have the ability to engage with the material without me, their teacher.”
• “Thinking about it proactively is helping me be wiser about how much I give students to read or to do.”
• “The guiding questions help me stay focused on what’s important. I feel like I can do these lessons a million different ways.”

The comments all come from teachers who used my literacy lesson plan and joyfully stepped out of overwhelm. It’s possible for you too.

Tips for Overwhelmed Teachers

There are five simple solutions to get you there.

Manage your mind, don’t let it mismanage you.

Validate the heck out of how you feel, but emotions are meant to rent space in your body; don’t give them a permanent home. Once you’ve acknowledged, expressed, validated, and sat with how you feel, figure out what you’re thinking that’s causing you to feel that way, and try on a different thought. The trick is to find the balance between acknowledging what feels like reality and inviting ourselves to step into a better one. It’s like that thing in the magazines where they give you healthier food swaps that are still palatable. Here are three common overwhelm thoughts and their healthier swaps. 

• Perfection: Everything has to be perfect. Swap that out for I’m doing my best or Learning is a process. 
• Isolation: I’m the only one who can do this. Instead, try I share responsibility for my students’ success with lots of people, including the students themselves.
• Time: There isn’t enough time. Try I make the best use of the time I have or there’s plenty of time for the right work.

For more thought-swap ideas, check out this article–so many of these harmful thoughts are rooted in white supremacy culture.

Adopt an aligned curriculum.

This could be a highly reviewed curriculum for purchase or an OER, but some external roadmap toward your most important standards. This can alleviate some of the overwhelm of what to teach, but in its place can come “there’s so much to teach” because external curricula often overdeliver (thanks?). While I like using an aligned curriculum to help ensure I don’t lose the thread, I also like to debloat that sucker. I focus on the priority standards and put the rest in the maybe pile. I’d rather do a few things well than a lot of things very poorly. This approach accepts imperfection, runs toward creativity with the constraints of time, and shakes me out of isolation. Having an external roadmap makes me a better collaborator. It’s not my idea versus someone else’s–we are navigating to the destination together.

Don’t unpack the standards.

Compare them. A lot of districts spend time on long, drawn-out standards unpacking, and while there is value in deep textual analysis (I am an English teacher, after all), people can get stuck perfecting and arguing in this process for a long time. In ELA, we often act like we have to teach a standard from scratch, but our standards spiral. Look at the standards in the grade level before yours. See? You are not responsible for giving students the entire origin of the concept of theme. You probably only have one or two fresh items to introduce. Again, let go of perfection and trust the colleagues before and after you to opt your classes out of the time war.

Use my literacy lesson plan.

This lesson plan is extremely process-based (not perfection or performance-based). Students are engaged the whole time in learning–not in performing. The lesson plan relies extensively on collective action of the classroom community–how we read, discuss, and write together matters. The teacher may design the lesson beforehand, but once class starts, the students become the primary agents (especially as they gain experience with the form). Finally, time is not the enemy of this simple lesson plan. Doing a few things well is the whole idea.

Trust a system.

Between an aligned curriculum and a daily literacy lesson plan, there is a system. I trust it and rely on it to buoy me against the waves of school. The system includes a cycle for teaching reading, writing, discussion, and language. Without these cycles, I would lose the clarity I need in order to see the impact of instruction on students. These system pieces are covered in-depth in my forthcoming course–something I’ve never shared to this extent before and is a particular zone of genius for me. This ability to create a stress-free yet stable commitment to our multi-faceted standards is what teachers ask me to share all the time. I’ll have more details announced soon!

Is teaching worth the stress?

How are you feeling about these simple solutions? You may be feeling like it’s not really the standards that are the issue because so many other things may be contributing to any overwhelm you may be experiencing. Certainly there are other issues that seem more pressing. My simple lesson plan used consistently is well within your locus of control, and can bring you some relief.

Increasing Teacher Productivity

Before I dive in, let’s talk about the “Increasing Teacher Productivity” from the title. It’s important to remember that productivity isn’t about doing more. It’s about achieving the best results in the most efficient manner.

When I began developing the four moves every literacy lesson plan needs, I believed that I could create change with students AND enjoy my weekends. If you’d like to see the Facebook live version of this post, you can check it out here.

 I only have so much time with my students, and every moment is precious to me.

When I found myself struggling to prepare lessons and grade assignments each day, it would’ve been tolerable if my students made the progress I longed for them to experience.

Most of my students did okay, but I could tell that it didn’t matter that I was their teacher. They did as well as they would do, as they had always done.

I was spinning my wheels and not impacting those that needed something different. 

This has always been important to me. There were times in high school when my own success seemed unlikely, but I made it. I long for my students to have that same experience.

9 Things To Do Less Of

So what did I do less of and how did it contribute to reading growth?

1. I taught fewer novels. This allowed me more time to build more background knowledge through text sets. Students who were absent or couldn’t connect with the whole-class novel had more entry points with different texts.
2. I spent more time on a text. We read only a few paragraphs a day, so we have time to really close read. Students have the chance to build a mental model of the text, which supports their comprehension and gives them the processing time they need to navigate challenge.
3. I simplified independent reading. I let go of lots of complicated forms and focused on a question of the week in my conferences–same question for everybody saved my mental bandwidth. This question was aligned to our whole-class reading standard so that students had time to transfer the learning to greater independence.
4. I managed my creative energy. The most popular influencers have nothing on teachers when it comes to content generation. I decided to opt out of the content monster by slowing down and making every day look the same. When we need a change-up, I bring it on. Because everyday looks the same, everyone has enough time to learn the literacy language and routines that sustain growth. I have time to focus on instruction and not worry so much about the shiny one-off lessons.
5. I focused each lesson on one standard. Students know what we are practicing, and they practice it across reading, discussion, and writing throughout the lesson.
6. I used cycles of gradual release of responsibility. Writing is another reading accelerator that must be regularly practiced but can often be time-consuming for teachers. We might write everyday, but not everyone is writing on their own everyday. We cycle through modeling, whole class, small group, and independent writing.
7. I focused on parts of writing. Early in the year, I may only give feedback on the claim, evidence, etc. to allow students enough time to focus on a key concept before they get overwhelmed by the complexity of all the facets of writing..
8. I put grading in the backseat. I take the minimum required number of grades, about 6 per trimester in my district. This gives me more time to teach, give feedback, reteach, and build relationships. This has a less direct connection to reading growth, but for high school students, grades can often help them write negative stories about their abilities, making it harder for them to dare to believe they can understand what they read.
9. I am willing to stretch a lesson across days. We recently changed to shorter classes, and it’s crazy, but I feel those three minutes! Rather than sprint through the literacy lesson plan, I will take my time across multiple days. The only hurry is the one we create for ourselves and our students. Again, this is a social-emotional service, allowing students the space to learn the material (with a teacher who’s feeling calm and collected).

Teacher Productivity Can Work For You

How are you feeling about these productivity strategies? You may be feeling like productivity has nothing to do with reading results, but if the most important things aren’t prioritized, so many other things will control your time. My simple lesson plan used consistently creates productive results.

During the 2017-18 school year, I got serious about data collection for freed reading. I’d heard enough doubts that what I was doing was making a difference that I wanted some numbers to go alongside the anecdotes and student quotes that I shared. Last year, I taught two classes, one for freshpersons that scored below the fortieth percentile on the statewide reading assessment, the other an Honors U.S. Lit course for juniors. I used freed reading in both courses, and here’s what happened.

I’ll cover what happened with USLH in another post, so let’s focus on Reading Strategies. The students started the year reading an average of about 75 pages a week, stayed there for basically half the year, then really took off, ending the year where my USLH students began their junior years. My target for a typical ninth-grader is to be reading at least 100 pages a week by the end of the year, but they smashed past that. They did the reading, but what did I do to get them there?

Protected Time

Students got time to read every day for 10-20 minutes in class, and I fiercely protected this from intrusions by the curriculum, their peers, and themselves. Their homework every single night was to read for 15 minutes. I checked this once a week, so it was flexible. Have to work one night? Double-up the next night. To check their reading, we converted the time goal to a page goal (see the next section). Students kept track of the goal on these bookmarks, then I recorded the information once a week on a clipboard for when they inevitably lost their bookmarks. I’ve tried tracking reading a number of ways, and this is the simplest way I’ve found to ensure that the students are at least as mindful of their goals as I am. For the “page by” sections, I add their weekly goal number of pages to the page they are currently on in their book. Some students figure out what to do and take it over after a few weeks. Others don’t. If they are close to finishing the book, I write “finish and start” as the goal on their bookmark and tell them to do the math.

Regular Goal-Setting

To make our initial goals, we follow Penny Kittle’s suggestion in Book Love: have students keep track of how many pages they read in 10 minutes, then have them multiply it to get how many pages they should be reading in a week. In our case, it was 75 minutes in class and 105 minutes as homework for a total of 180 minutes. I spotted them five minutes and had them multiply by 18. We are on trimesters, so every six weeks they collected their reading in a log that made the growth visible. I have included this example, so you can see what students end the year being able to see. Here is a blank copy that you can duplicate. It will automatically make the bar graphs for you. I make it as an assignment in Google Classroom so that it automatically makes a copy for each student that I have access to in one folder.

To set a goal for the next six weeks, we looked at their weekly averages. After that first timed goal, we used reality as a basis for future goals. Sure, a student might in theory be able to read a certain amount (and should!), but continually telling students they should be reading 80 pages a week when they are reading 40 doesn’t do any good–even that might be requiring more effort than they ever put forth before. Constantly asking for double growth would be unreachable and discouraging. We honor reality with the rule of 10%. The next goal is 10% higher than the previous average, rounded to the nearest 5 pages. These small wins build momentum. I also don’t set goals above the class target. If I have students reading hundreds of pages a week, I’m not going to keep pushing them greater volume. We’re focusing instead on reading a balanced diet (Don’t know what this means? Subscribe to my email list for a free, 3-day course on it!).

As part of this work, we also celebrate every six weeks the students who read the most average weekly pages, the 3 students who saw the biggest growth between six-week sets, and the growth of the class as a whole. These practices dispel myths about who is/is not reading. And when students see the class average, they are sometimes inspired to step up their game.

3. Systematic, Sustainable Practices

In my free, 3-day email course, I review all my whole-class practices, like books talks and conferring, to support this growth. That’s where the rest of the work occurs. While the practices themselves may not be new to you, the particular ways in which I use them to achieve growth for my students may be new. My approach keeps the practices going over the year and gives you tangible ways to move all students at once toward freer reading.

The Legacy of Freed Reading

The freshpersons represented in this data set are currently sophomores. Many of them visit me regularly. Thirty percent of them have told me that they plan to take USLH with me next year. For many of them, this will be the first honors course of their high school careers. They are all students of color, who are disproportionately “selected” for my reading class and disproportionately absent from my honors course. While there are many reasons they may be wanting to pursue USLH, I can’t help but wonder what role seeing their reading growth played in convincing them that they could do honors work, that they had it within them all along.