If you’ve been following me for a while, then you know that in the spring and summer of this year, I released three new journals, all of which are focused on self-care habits, gratitude, and happiness for educators of all types. This is something that I want to talk more about, which is why I’m going to publish a few blog posts about these topics so that I can share more of my thoughts about why self-care is important for educators and share ways to make it manageable and achievable while you’re working full-time in a school. In this specific blog post, I’m highlighting some of my favorite self-care activities from my Free Self-Care Challenge for Educators, so please keep reading to get more insight about why I suggest these activities for you.
42 Ways to Amplify Student Voices in the Classroom
Happy back-to-school season, teacher friends! Somehow 2018 is positively flying by, and it’s already time to prepare to head back into the classroom (if you’re not already back in it)! Recently, Teachers Pay Teachers hosted their annual back-to-school site-wide sale, and I ran a giveaway during that time to gift three teachers with TpT gift cards. My prompt on the giveaway post asked teachers to share how they plan to amplify student voices in the classroom this year, and I received some really awesome responses that I wanted to share with you in this blog post. Keep reading to get ideas for how to make sure your students get time to talk — and to be heard — in your class this school year.
8 Reasons Why I Think I Failed as a Teacher
Hi, I’m Leslie. I used to be a middle school teacher. I quit after only three years of full-time teaching, and I haven’t returned. Even though I’m coming up on my three-year anniversary of when I left my teaching career, this is something about which I still feel embarrassment and, for some reason, shame. Teaching is a hard profession, and the term “hard” is multifaceted here. One of the reasons it’s hard is that, here in the U.S., the general social expectation is that teachers will give up everything to teach kids for laughably low salaries and be happy about it. So…when someone like me comes along and realizes that it’s just all too much and decides to leave…there’s a kind of judgment. This post is all about why I think I failed as a teacher and why it’s still hard for me to talk about.