You’ve spent the last three months learning all kinds of new ways to deliver instruction and teach in a distance learning environment, despite never having experienced this as a learner or having been trained how to deliver all your content in new ways – and you made these changes overnight.
While you somehow got through the most surreal educational (and life) experience, you may be looking back at what you’ve learned and now have more questions than answers as we move forward.
Now that school has ended for this year and you’ve had a moment to take a breath, you may be wondering, “What in the hell am I going to do next year?”
How am I going to teach? Will I even have a job? How do I deliver content and realistically meet all the guidelines and expectations without spending 10 hours a day this summer rewriting my curriculum and planning for multiple types of teaching platforms and situations? How can I balance my family and professional lives when I don’t even know how classes will be structured? I’ve never been trained for distance teaching, and I’m not sure how to adapt my performance-based classes… there’s so much to worry about!
As educators, we tend to be organized with plans for every contingency that could come up. But in a pandemic and during a time when there’s so much anxiety about what school will look like in the fall, the time we normally take during the summer to relax and recharge can easily be hijacked by stress and fear of how to teach and support your own family in a sustainable way.
Are you going to spend all summer worrying about next year or would you rather spend it making sure you’re ready to face whatever comes at you without the stress, anxiety, and exhaustion taking over?
It’s possible to use the next few weeks as a time to rebuild your own toolbox with skills you can use to keep yourself in the best mental and physical space possible so you have the stamina to do this important work.
Don’t waste all summer trying to figure out where to start. Jump to the front of the line by figuring out how to recharge by identifying your own current mental and physical health status so you can determine what you can do to take care of your own needs so you can support your students, family, and yourself in the upcoming year.
Where do you even start when it comes to figuring out what is creating the most stress for you so you can begin to figure out how to address it?
I’ve designed an assessment to help you do just that!
Check out Moffat’s Mojo Meter for Educators. This quiz will help you identify the very things that are keeping you from being able to truly relax and recharge this summer.
I hope you find the few minutes you invest in taking this assessment to be helpful in identifying what you need to do for yourself in order to support everyone else through this journey.
Peace-
Lesley
