Teacher talk Teacher survival tips to help you thrive and survive in 2023

Accept that there will always be a list of things to do –ALWAYS!

Prioritise your tasks to not feel overwhelmed. Create 4 different categories of work you need to get done:

4 To do today: This is stuff that requires immediate attention – urgent phone calls, time-sensitive forms, lesson plans, meeting prep, resources for tomorrow etc.

4 To do tomorrow: These tasks do not have pending deadlines

4 To do when convenient: These tasks can be done when you have a good amount of time available

4 ‘To do’ work for parent/learner volunteers: These tasks will save you a tremendous amount of time. Plan ahead and have volunteer parents/learners help with time-consuming tasks – many parents are just waiting for an invitation and an extra benefit is that you will have a chance to build a great relationship with your parents!

1 2

When you do decide to start an hour earlier or stay an hour after school to work, shut the door and work. Actually, work!

Avoid the staff room where one can easily get stuck after school – no chilling and chatting … even if you are desperate for some adult interaction. Learn to close your classroom door during your hour of prep after school or early in the morning before anyone is there. You will be more focused and accomplish more. An added benefit of using the hour after school is that it will give you time to decompress.

Learn time-management skills, organisational skills and stress-relief skills.

They will help you free up some time and benefit you in multiple facets of your life! Schedule appointments – having to be somewhere at a specific time is a great way to get you out of the schoolyard on time and spend some much-needed time on yourself. Macmillan Teacher Campus offers a great course on time- and stress management – look out for our schedules on email and social media to make a note of when this topic will be covered in our Teacher well-being week range.

Set a schedule and actually stick to it.

If you say that you are only going to work for one hour after school, then ONLY work one hour after school. Focus your effort … refrain from searching for great lesson plans and then going down the rabbit hole of Pinterest and eventually, 3 hours later, finding yourself looking at a YouTube video on “How to become a giraffe whisperer” … wondering where the time went and how nothing got done (including the lesson plan you initially researched!). With that said … avoid time-thieves such as your phone, social media and emails. We are so quick to pick up the phone to see what was missed during the day, and sadly, it’s usually nothing super fantastic that couldn’t wait a few more hours. This steals your time and distracts you!

I remember the times when I was a victim of throbbing bag syndrome. Throbbing bag syndrome is when you jam-pack your bag full of all kinds of papers and lists and documents and textbooks … including marking you need to do, memos you need to read, and that note you wrote to yourself after that hurried phone call from Faith’s mom. You take your bag home, full of all the best intentions, imagining an evening spent dealing with everything so you can start the next day with a clean slate …. you bring in your bag, where it sits in the corner like a malevolent beast, and you don’t touch it at all. But you never stop thinking about it … get rid of throbbing bag syndrome by simply refusing to bring work home as a rule (accepting there are always times when this is not possible).

Do things in groups.

Each time you need a copy, you probably don’t walk to the copy machine one paper at a time. You likely save up until you have a few things that need to be copied and walk down all at once and make the copies together – it saves you time, right? Think of all the phone calls you need to make – bundle them and do all your calls in one sitting. Do the same with work. Batch your work. When you plan, plan all your art lessons and then all your math lessons for the week. Then, take care of all the paperwork at the same time, make all your copies at the same time, then gather all your materials at the same time, and so on.

When I first started teaching I thought I had to … I shudder at that thought now. That was crazy. I didn’t know. I hated marking. Then, one day someone told me that you should only grade something after they have had enough practice with the concepts. So, sometimes I give checks for doing it, sometimes learners check their own work, sometimes we check in class, sometimes I check as they do it. For example, teaching creative writing FET Phase ... you do not mark the whole essay when you are actually focusing on teaching learners to write a great attention-grabbing first paragraph. Don’t mark every mistake. I spent so much time marking every mistake in learners’ writing. I deducted points for little errors in math work. Now I only look for mistakes that pertain to what we’ve been learning. I scan learner work instead of studying it. I learned to consider if learners demonstrated what we’ve been learning, instead of looking for perfection.

Network – It can make a difference

Network with teachers in neighbouring schools, get to know them and collaborate, exchange assignments, tests, great lesson plans. Get help. Ask an experienced teacher for ideas. They are usually very excited to share. Check out sites such as Teachers Pay Teachers or Twinkl for ideas, amazing lesson plans or activities.

Struggling to get the class to settle down so that you can start teaching?

Save time by ensuring that you are waiting at your classroom door first, before your learners arrive to line up. This way, you are “marking your territory” – yes, just like a dog. They will understand that they are entering your space now. You set the tone from the start. For more practical classroom management tips/discipline in the classroom, contact Macmillan Teacher Campus to join their very popular and effective “Strategies for positive classroom discipline” workshop.

Delegate:

If you are lucky enough to have technology in your classroom, have an earlyarriving learner boot the computer and digital whiteboard each morning. Something as simple as that makes a difference for the busy teacher. Think through the “start of day” and “end of day” tasks. Delegate them to learners. It promotes responsibility and is one small thing that helps build community.