How to Avoid End of Year Burnout: Planning for the Future
End of school year burnout happens to the best of us. The end of the year can get a little crazy as both teachers and students are tired, squirrely and ready for school to be out for summer. How about some tips on keeping your students (and yourself) going strong until summer? In this weekly 4-part blog serieswe’ll discuss creative ideas for end of the year planning, how to bring more fun into the classroom, and ways to take care of yourself and make teaching more manageable to help you soar through to the end with success.
Let’s start with the prep that gets you through to the end of the year, plus the importance of planning for the future.
EdTech resident teacher Agustina says:
“My biggest thing as a teacher at the end of the year was planning for the future- that always helped me keep my head on straight. I liked planning for the end of the year. I would plan every single week up until the end of the year…and if it changes, you just change it. That’s okay!”
Take Time to Reflect on This Year
The best way to plan for the near and distant future in your classroom is to think about what worked in the past. Carve out some time before you break for summer to pull out your lesson plan from the year and answer the following questions:
- What went wrong this year?
- What went right this year?
- What could have gone better?
Make notes directly on your lesson plan so that you don’t forget them when planning for the next year. Then, set yourself up for success by creating an outline of next year’s lesson plan before you break for summer.
- Consider your answers to the questions above
- Write down a short objective for each week
- Write in a short snippet of the activity that you’ll be doing with students each day
Then, when you’re ready to sit down and create next year’s lesson plan in detail, you have a bird’s eye view of the school year and aren’t staring blankly at the lesson plan trying to figure out what you’re going to do. If your plans change or shift slightly, that’s okay, but at least you have a starting point.
Make Time to Plan for Next Year
Now that you have an outline of your lesson plan and you’re super fresh on what went right this year, what went wrong, and what could go better, you won’t be using brain calories to try and remember something that happened a full year ago. Continue your planningby answering the following question prompts:
- Which lessons did I love teaching the most that I could expand on?
- Which lessons did the students love learning the most?
- What projects did the students absolutely love?
- What projects would I like to do that we didn’t have time for?
- What project would I like to do that the previous set of students wouldn’t have enjoyed but future students may? (Depending on class personality)
- Which lessons fell flat and how could I change them?
- Which lessons did I not look forward to?
- How can I come up with better resources to enjoy teaching the lessons I didn’t look forward to?
Thinking about what you can or need to change, or how the things that you’ve done in the past could be improved on, is important because if your students can tell you enjoy teaching, they’re going to enjoy learning.
Check out our library of Teacher Training Webinars to discover more tips and tricks to maximize digital and classroom learning.
Related Articles:
Tasks for Digital Clean Up to Official End the School Year
Digital Learning Tips for Summer Break
EdTech Solutions leverages education technology to improve learning by making it easy and simple for schools and students to manage and access individualized digital content on any device. EdTech’s cutting-edge approach to schoolwide ebook implementation and our innovative online platform and tools give school administrators and teachers the controls they need while providing students and parents with access to all their content on one easy-to-use platform with a single login, in most cases.
When you work with us, we create a personalized bookstore for your school where students can access and purchase their ebooks and textbooks on Shelfit.com. We also help publishers make their content available digitally to students on our robust multi-publisher ebook reader platform. We strongly believe that knowledge and good education should be available to all, and we are committed to developing and providing the online learning tools and modern services that make it possible.