10 Steps to Better Self-care

Right about now many of us are thinking about including better self-care in our resolutions for the new year. Teachers, all of us, from those who teach K-12 to those of us in adult education, are known for donating our energy and personal time in order to give our students an enriched classroom experience. Self-care has never been easy for those of us who've chosen this field. But these days in Canadian settlement English programs--with the roll-out of Portfolio Based Language Assessment--good self-care has become even trickier and more elusive for many of us.

Below are ten ways that I attempt to arrive at the end of the work day or week feeling there is still some energy and time left for me, for my hobbies, for exercise, for family. These are things you may or may not already have thought of or made part of your life. Some of these tips relate to physical well-being, others to mental, spiritual, and emotional wellbeing. I hope you come away with at least one new idea to try in the new year and will take the time to use the comments section to share with us how you feel about this topic.

(1)  Reduce the cognitive load. Or rather, be mindful of where you and your students may be spending cognitive resources that you could free up via routines and wiser organization. Work smarter, not more.

• Keep lists. We only have so much working memory. To feel less stressed throughout the day, I find it helpful to keep a written list of things I have to do. At school I maintain a tiny corner of the whiteboard for the things I need to remember, such as printing out my time sheet for my site supervisor or calling my dentist.

• Keep well-organized files, both soft and hard. My day is easier and less stressful because I know exactly where everything is. If I need a resource on the topic of citizenship to use with a CLB 3/4 class, I know it's on my flash drive under Canada - Citizenship, which is in alphabetical order along with Canada -  Geography, Canada - Government, and Canada - History. In case you're not already annoyed at my having my ducks lined up in a way that would make Martha Stewart proud, I'll add that establishing a logical file naming convention is another thing I'm very glad I thought of at the beginning of my teaching career. For example, files to do with the ESL Literacy reader "Food from Home" are named Food from Home crossword, Food from Home word shapes, Food from Home activity pack, etc. This way they all end up together on the storage drive.

• Use routines. Routines free up cognitive real estate for the content of the lesson, and this applies to both student and instructor. When students know what to expect, they can help you more easily. My students know that as soon as they enter the classroom after an absence, it's their job to check "the box" for the worksheets they missed. With routines like this one, the class can practically run itself, which means less stress for me than I would experience in a class where students were continually asking for direction.

(2)   Get your sleep. I am absolutely amazed at how much better I feel after going to bed early and getting those proverbial eight hours. I smile more. I let go of little annoyances more easily. I remember to breathe.

(3)   Nourish yourself. Stay hydrated and bring healthy meals and snacks every day. This has been a hard one for me, especially hydration. I've found ways to incentivize these new behaviours until they becomes habit:

• Buy or upcycle a pretty water bottle; maybe even infuse some cucumber, lime, lemon or mint leaves in it. Most of my morning students nurse a little jam jar of green tea with goji berries all day long. They set a great example for me.
  
• Buy or make an attractive lunch bag. I had to go online to find one I liked. I make up the first two or three lunches on the weekend and later mix in some leftovers or a Luvo organic frozen dinner for days when I've run out of homemade meals. If you think you don't have time to make healthy meals, let me tell you about grain bowls. I cook up a batch of brown rice or quinoa in my little rice cooker, then open and rinse a can of garbanzo beans, lentils, or other legume. These form the base of my grain bowl. From there I add in something crunchy, such as sunflower seeds, something green, such as seaweed or barely wilted baby spinach leaves. You might like to toss in a soft-boiled egg. Finally, add a dressing of your choice. I just mix up a tiny bit of sesame oil and vinegar. I divide this up into three lunch containers and...Bob's your uncle!

(4)   Guard your breaks. Take breaks away from clients and, if you're an introvert like me, away from colleagues, too. Retreat to a quiet room or close and lock your door. Don't stress out over being perceived as rude. Folks will get over it. If you have to, make a sign for the door that says, "I"m on a legally mandated break. Back at X:00." Do whatever restores you, whether that be deep breathing, cranking up some music, playing a game on your phone, whatever! I see too many of my colleagues spending their entire break and the first fifteen minutes after class trying to be their students' social worker.  That may work for them, but for me it would be a recipe for burnout.

(5)   Take a load off.

• Follow Martine's Rule Number One. This one ties into 'routines' above.  Remember to delegate to students everything that can be handed off to them. If you didn't have time to make that wonderful graphic organizer, project an exemplar and pass out notebook paper. I did this recently when we needed a Venn Diagram graphic organizer. One student grabbed the tea tin off the hospitality station and started passing it around, as it was the perfect size for our two circles. Literacy students can make flashcards.
• Strategically place quiet work. I was listening to a podcast from Jennifer Gonzalez / Cult of Pedagogy the other day on the topic of what she calls Grecian Urns. You have to listen to the podcast to find out how she arrived at the term. That's her name for an activity that takes up a lot of time and might be fun, but has no real educational value. She warns us away from them, of course. That being said, even she admits there can be times when you consciously choose to give students an activity that will get them out of your hair because, hey, you can't be ON all the time. This is the point where I admit to you that I embed a quiet activity in the lesson most days at 2:40. That's when my literacy learners and I are worn out. We've been working hard on listening, reading, writing and speaking. They need a break, and I need time to clean up the hospitality station. So that's the point in the day when I give them a puzzle. Yes, the puzzles have SOME value. But honestly? I need twenty minutes of quiet.

(6)   Wear sensible shoes and comfortable clothes. I know this is a hard one for my colleagues who like to wear high heels, but in the end you are going to have to decide which you value more: how you look or how your feet and back feel after hours of standing, walking, and stair-climbing. I find that I enjoy going to work more when I can spend my day dressed in clothes made from natural fibres that breathe and that are tailored to allow for easy movement. I am a big fan of Lagenlook. As for shoes, I've tried many brands and have found I can rely on Joseph Siebel and Blundstone for their comfort, support, and longevity.

(7)   Be authentic. It takes a lot less energy to be yourself than it does to wear a mask all day long.

Not very long ago, I was experiencing the emotional and physiological vagaries that accompany menopause. Because my students and I have an honest, real relationship in which I am a human being who happens to be the facilitator of their language learning and collaborator in shaping their curriculum, I was able to be candid with them regarding what was going on with me. During an especially difficult morning, I whispered to one of them, "I need to step out. Can you lead the lesson for five minutes?" I indicated to her what was going on. The transition was seamless. I knew I could trust the students to carry on without me. Because we are real with each other every day, this was no big deal. I also need to note that our way of being together also empowers my students to be their fullest selves. The student in whom I confided is a retired OB/GYN. I was honouring what she brings to our group--her expertise as a physician specializing in women's reproductive system--when I chose her to receive my whispered 'I need to step out' and my reason for needing to do so.

(8)   Work smarter, not longer. Weave in some Back-to-the-Well. Cut your marking time in half. Go materials-light at least some of the time (see also Dogme in ELT).  By following recommendations for the teaching of vocabulary or lexical chunks as outlined by Gianfranco Conti on his blog and in this week's blog post about a shift from focused to thorough processing, I believe you will end up making life easier on yourself while becoming a more effective language instructor.

(9)   Advocate for yourself and for your team. The number of signatures on this petition says to me that settlement English teachers in Canada are facing a crisis in their agencies and classrooms. If you are happy with Portfolio Based Language Assessment as it is being implemented at your workplace, then scroll on; number nine is not for you. If you are unhappy with what is happening, find a way to connect with others in your field. At the very least, get your head out of Canada and join a group such as the Facebook group Global Innovative Language Teachers, where trends and fads such as this one can be put into a wider context.

(10)   Protect your capacity for joy. If doing your job well and having a life outside of teaching have become mutually exclusive, it is time to re-evaluate. Life is too short to live it in such a way that you turn down play dates with children, don't ever walk in the woods, never find time for a day trip, no longer have time for hobbies. Decide now, before the new year begins, where you're going to draw the line. What will be your signal to yourself that enough is enough?

When my lesson planning is corralled and self-care managed to the extent that I have time and energy for an evening class one or two nights a week, date nights with my partner, and blocks of unstructured down time throughout the week, I know I am achieving work-life balance. If not, that's when I know it's time to step back and see what's going awry.

How about you? Are you making resolutions to do with self-care in the new year? Do you have self-care strategies to share with me and with our peers in this field? We would love to hear.

Canada with CLB 1L

I don't usually teach "Canada and Citizenship" at the literacy level. However, this time around I, without giving it much thought, used an off-the-shelf pictorial needs assessment document instead of the usual one that I have customized for my learners. The one I got from a resource on Tutela.ca includes Canada as an option; of course that was the students' top pick.

Somehow, as a result of a mix of desperation and serendipity, I found a way to make the lessons come to life.

For the first week's module, we made a little six-page reader with the basics. I projected the book with blank lines up on the board and elicited the language, helping with grammar. Then students copied our sentences under the pictures in their own booklets.

This was the last time this group used primary penmanship lines. Our next module we graduated to regular lined sheets without the middle dotted guideline. They were pleased.

For week two, we took a little break from the map of Canada in order to incorporate a real-world task, map skills. This was done for the sake of an artefact for their portfolios and turned out to be an engaging module heavy on kinaesthetic means of learning; we turned the classroom into the streets and avenues of downtown Windsor. Students became fluent in giving and receiving directions to a few key landmarks around the core.

Back to the bigger map of Canada, learners made posters to help them remember which industries and foods are produced in each region.

We also started practicing offering, accepting, and declining food--a useful language function as newcomers make their first friends in Canada.

After days and days of practice with the rather large set of new terms, we made a video of our "Touring Canada through Food" party. The final test was closer to CLB 2 than 1, and all the class veterans aced it! Thirteen questions with NO images to support. They rocked it.

To finish off the theme, we picked out tourist post cards for one another, wrote little messages on them, addressed them to one another (for real), and asked the kind teacher to mail them.

A typical message went something like this:

Dear Ali,
Today I visited Niagara Falls. It is beautiful.
Your friend, Marwan.

Perhaps not this weekend, but very soon I will try to get the materials and checklists/rubrics for PBLA assessment onto my website for you to download and use.

Meanwhile, I have just uploaded other free materials for teaching housing HERE. Scroll down to "A Crack in the Tub."

I hope you're enjoying your teaching week. I sure enjoyed mine!

PBLA Drove Me to Better Self Care (and other good news of the week)

No black cloud is without its silver lining. At the end of 2016, I was about ready to start a work-to-rule protest due to how much extra stuff I was expected to do as part of my job. I was expected to continue creating the content for my courses and was simultaneously expected to take on the new responsibility of meeting artefact collection quotas while creating all the tools, forms and trackers that should have been handed to me with the roll-out of Portfolio Based Language Assessment. As you might have noticed, I nearly snapped.

I love the organization that I work for; in the end I chose not to stop my main volunteer activity. However, I knew I was stressed out, testy all the time, sleep deprived, and not taking proper care of number one. With January came the idea of making some self-care resolutions for 2017. Here are some of the promises I made to myself two months ago:

• Adhere strictly to Martine's Rule #1. For the morning students, who can handle it, adopt Back to the Well like never before.  This will free up time and energy for the new bureaucratic demands of PBLA.
• Bring a balanced, healthy lunch and enough healthy snacks in my lunch bag to keep my blood sugar even throughout the day, to keep my brain functioning well and my moods level.
• Stay hydrated. I'm very bad about not doing this if my only choice is water. Lately I've treated myself like a princess by indulging in RISE lemongrass kombucha. Talk about feeling pampered all day! (No, I'm not being paid to say that.)
• Wear comfortable footwear every day. I'm not the only teacher who wears Blunnies. And no, I'm not being paid to say that, either.
  
• Wear non-binding, soft, comfortable clothing every day.
• Ask for help when I need it, including from the students themselves.
• Ask maintenance crew to help me rearrange classroom furniture so that I once again have a desk of my own (instead of cramming my stuff onto one corner of the students' picnic-style tables).
• Ask administrative assistant for any and all supplies that will make teaching easier or will make it easier for me to stay organized.
• Go to bed on time, get up early, get to school well before class starts (I hate feeling rushed).
• Do not allow anyone--not students, not manager, not colleagues--to steal that before-class time from me. It's mine. Lock doors, be firm at the risk of appearing rude, but guard that time.
• Eat lunch in a quiet space and do not multi-task. Chew slowly. Do not rush.

So! I am happy to say that two months out I have stuck to all of these resolutions with only a few minor instances of relapse, quickly getting back on track when I slip. The result? I'm a different teacher. I'm smiling again, breathing again, teaching well again. 

Seniors are doing fine with my materials light-light-lighter approach and their new responsibilities. In fact, two of them wrote on a recent learning journal entry that they felt they had benefited from learning how to break down and simplify a difficult text. (Simplifying/grading an authentic text is one of the things I would have done for them using hours of my own time at home before PBLA.)

Other good news from the past week:

💚  I finally found an iPad app that looks promising for my student with low vision. I'll blog about that on a separate post after we've used it for a week or two.

💚  One of my literacy students, a super keen Syrian man who has taken charge of his own learning, asked about ordinal numbers while we were discussing the date. He wanted a list of them. I was able to direct him to the Language Companion's Helpful English section. He didn't take it home, but was very pleased and thanked me. So, yeah, LC came in handy in literacy for the first time. I hope it's not the last time.

💚  I had a week (in literacy) in which I can honestly say that PBLA had a positive effect on my teaching, at least on the organizational aspect. I managed to get every duck in a row: module objectives, dates of assessments, tasks and accompanying assessment tools typed up and ready to go well before assessment day. This means I was able to show students the checklists several times, reminding them of the expectations and practicing for success. The difference between the dry run and assessment was that they didn't know WHICH bus route they would get on test day, which time of day would be used in the role plays, etc. (No two students had the same route schedule = no cheating.) Best of all? With the exception of a very new student, they all achieved the task without assistance and ended up feeling VERY proud of themselves. (By the way, all the materials for these assessments are free to download from my site.)

So, yeah. Things are good. How about you? Are you doing good self care and minding your work-life balance? How important is that for you in staving off burnout?

An ESL Literacy Teaching Habit

This past two weeks I have had no choice but to turn my classes over to supply teachers. The first day I was able to leave a detailed lesson plan for the literacy class, but then fevers swept over me, robbing me of my mental clarity. The best I could do, rushing to get my email typed before the next fever hit, was send a link to one of the Bow Valley College readers along with my corresponding activity pack. The supply teacher would have to write her own lesson plans, but at least she would have more worksheets than my students could possibly need in one week.

I inserted little 8-point font notes on some pages. "Teacher, Ss should be ready for this by Thursday," and so on. I mentioned that we usually practice a given story multiple times throughout the week, sometimes even reading it together in 15-minute increments two or three times on the same day.

A strange thing happened. One of the supply teachers reported to me that the students, on Thursday, were completely mystified by the Yes / No quiz. They were not able to do it. They didn't understand all the words in the questions.

Now it could just be that the material I had chosen was too high for the group. Three new students joined the class while I was away and one moved up. So it could have been that. In any case, it got me to thinking about how I teach ESL literacy. Is there anything that I do that comes so naturally to me that I might not even think to mention it to a newer teacher whom I'm mentoring? Since Beth Beardall has just posed a question on the TESL Ontario Blog about literacy teaching tips, I have decided to try to put into words a teaching habit that I think benefits my learners and helps them get to fluency and mastery of one story by week's end.

Before I get to the tip, let's get some basics out of the way.  When introducing a new story, I not only activate prior knowledge of the schema but pre-teach the terms that are new to the learners.  I use pictures, realia, and also try to personalize a new term on the spot. So if a new vocabulary item is the word son, we will go around the room asking one another, "Do you have a son?" We'll talk about how many sons and daughters we each have. If a new word is bill, we will talk about the various bills we pay. I don't start the story until most students are getting at least 65-75% accuracy when I ask, "What's a bill?" "What's a dentist?"

So now we're looking at a week that we will spend learning to read, for example, Mark Goes to the Dentist. We'll spend the week going back and forth between the whole and the parts. We'll do activities involving the meaning of the language, such as: dialogues and role plays, sentence unscramble, paragraph unscramble, peer surveys, T/F quiz, and my verbally quizzing them on meaning. We'll do other activities that focus on the parts of language, such as: spelling dictation, word shapes worksheet, categorizing by sound, hidden word, etc.  I will usually also find space in the week to assess a real-world task, such as filling out a form, role playing with the receptionist, and so forth.

Okay, so here's the tip.  Never waste an opportunity to reinforce either ability to read aloud (and pronounce), the ability to spell a new term, or the ability to show comprehension. Below are some examples of what I mean.

• If a student comes up to the board to write the answer on a worksheet where meaning was the focus, never let her sit down until she has read the sentence aloud.
• If you are the scribe calling on students for the answers as you write them in the spaces, don't settle just for the word. Have the student spell it to you as you write it in.
• If you are taking up a worksheet where the focus is not on meaning, just on the spelling or shape of the word, before you erase the board, go back over all words--this time asking the class to say the word and give the meaning.
• Never erase anything without having students read aloud/pronounce the words one last time. If they can say it, you erase it.
• If you've been using sentence strips or flashcards with partners, don't let them just put the items back into the envelopes or paperclips. Make a new activity out of that: "Everybody show me 'The drink is cold.' Put 'The drink is cold' back in the envelope."

In this way, day by day, students build up their abilities to read all the words aloud, read the sentences aloud, spell all the words, define all the words. And don't think that I put students on the spot for these performances. Mine is a low risk, safe classroom. All are free to pass and know they will be encouraged when they are ready. However, I don't let strong students take easy questions! Those are reserved for the less confident students. With a quick glance in their direction, I give them the chance to signal me when they feel ready.

When we play Sentence Unscramble, I do not tell them if I think the sentence is right or not before I hit SUBMIT for them. I ask the class, "Everybody, is that right?" Through peer coaching, they eventually get the syntax right. I keep a poker face. Make the students do the work.

I fashion the end-of-week Yes/No quiz in such a way that most are easy and just one is tricky. One question requires the student to not only understand the new language, but also to be able to use it in a novel context.

Mark has a drink. 

The drink is hot. 

Mark has a toothache.

Mark gets a filling.

The bill is $1,999.

Kelly is a dentist.*

The same notion of cycling through ability to read aloud / ability to spell / ability to understand meaning can come into play in a simple game of BINGO. My students make me play it till I'm sick of it, so I jazz it up by switching from calling the words to calling out the spelling to making them guess the word. "This is what Mark gets. He can't pay it all today." They say, "BILL!" I say, "Yes, how do you spell bill?" Or, at other times, "What does B-I-L-L spell?" Also having a student play the teacher in this game allows peers to correct poor pronunciation. 

So to summarize my ESL literacy teaching tip: there should be no moment when the teacher is writing something and students are just sitting there staring. When the teacher is writing, the students have a job. When the teacher is erasing, the students have a job. When a student is at the board, the other students have a job. Chances to reinforce the language are EVERYWHERE. And keep your formative assessment feelers up at all times. 

How about you? Have you left a comment for Beth on her blog post?

That Summer Feeling

Camping and birding at Rondeau, summer 2015

As my colleagues and I greet each other in the halls the first day back after a ten-week school closure, we inevitably remark how RELAXED we all look. Some of us travelled, some had more time just to get down on hands and knees with their children or take them to the park every single day. Worry lines have disappeared from around our eyes. We are glowing with the renewed energy that comes from two straight months of far less stress in our lives.

"Do you think we can carry some summer forward into our whole year?" one new teacher muses at the copy machine.

"I sure plan to," I reply.

And I do.

A long break helped me see what a workaholic I can be. It showed me the value of taking time just to sit by the water with my icy beverage and library book. How can I carry a bit of that into my teaching year?

For a long time I've recognized in me the need to work smarter instead of working more. This year I hope to follow even more faithfully Martine's rule number one: whenever possible, have the students do the work.

So far, I'm on target. On the first day, instead of having spent any part of the prior evening dreaming up peer survey questions like, "Where did you go this summer," I had students brainstorm the questions they wished to ask one another. Instead of spending my prep time at the copy machine, I put a sample graphic organizer on the board and passed out notebook paper. The students made the peer survey grid.

I'm not sure I would ever go so far as to have students cut up pieces for info gap and unscrambling activities, but shy of that I believe there are many ways I could cut my prep time while simultaneously allowing students to take over jobs from me in ways that have value to them as language learners.

Outside the classroom, meanwhile, I intend to carry forward that summer feeling by taking more day trips, carving out weekend time for more bike rides, more walks in the woods, more live music in small venues, more open mic nights, more fiction, more movies and just in general more ME time.

By living a life with more balance, I trust my students will benefit by having a rested, relaxed, happy teacher in the classroom with them.

What about you? How do you work on a good work-life balance?