Angela Watson's Truth for Teachers

Have you ever wasted half the weekend worrying about the week ahead? Even if you love your job, you might still wake up on Sunday mornings with a feeling of dread and spend the evening in a total state of anxiety simply because there are so many pressures associated with teaching. Join me today for 7 tips to help you relax, enjoy your time off, AND be more productive.  Click here to read or share the transcript and audio or participate in the discussion. Want more resources for tackling the Sunday blues? Check out the Finally Free teacher toolkit for conquering anxiety and overwhelm.  

Almost everyone will experience the challenge of struggling with chronic pain and illness at some point in the career, whether it be from a difficult pregnancy, recovering from a surgery, or dealing with an issue that is more ongoing. On today's episode, I have four key productivity strategies and work/life balance advice that I think will be helpful for teachers with chronic pain or illness to maximize productivity. Click here to read or share the transcript and audio or participate in the discussion.

I’m talking today with New York Times best-selling author Gretchen Rubin. I’ve learned so much from Gretchen's research on happiness from her book The Happiness Project, and I’ve studied her work on habits from the book Better Than Before. Gretchen’s latest book is called The 4 Tendencies: The Indispensable Personality Profiles That Reveal How to Make Your Life Better (and Other People's Lives Better, Too). I invited her on the show because the four tendencies are not just another personality type: They’re about how people tend to respond to and meet expectations. When I first heard about the tendencies, I immediately saw the application to our work in the classroom, because it’s such a challenge to figure out how to get students to meet expectations.  Listen in as Gretchen and I talk about understanding students’ tendencies — as well as our own — so we can be more productive and accomplish the things that really matter. Click here to listen to the audio, or read or share the condensed transcript and participate in the discussion.

What do you do when you’re just not motivated to get things done? Many of us try to force ourselves to be productive and slog through the day.   Today, I'll discuss how I'm experimenting with a different approach. My #1 job — and yours — when we just don’t feel motivated to get anything done, is to GET ourselves motivated to get things done. And that means taking a break from the to-do list to focus on things that get us energized is PART of your work and productivity, not a break from it. Click here to listen in on the discussion, read summarized points, or participate in the discussion.     

One of the issues I’m most passionate about is making teaching more effective, efficient, and enjoyable, so I’ve gathered a group of educators to create a Productivity Roundtable. Joining me are five members of the 40 Hour Teacher Workweek Club’s graduate program. They have done a tremendous amount of work in experimenting with various productivity strategies in their classrooms and creating systems and routines that work well for them and their students. Since they teach at different grade levels and subject areas, in different types of school settings and communities, in a diverse set of locations throughout the United States, you’re going to hear what works with a variety of teaching contexts and teaching styles. The topic for our first productivity roundtable is streamlining the grading and assessment process. They’ll share their best hacks and time-saving tips related to grading and assessment! Click here to listen to the audio, or read or share the highlights from the roundtable session and participate in the discussion.  

Join me today for an interview with Regie Routman, as we discuss engagement, excellence, and equity in the classroom. Regie has over 40 years of experience teaching, coaching, and leading in diverse schools across the United States and Canada, and has been publishing books since 1988. Regie is among the top five people who have influenced my teaching practice and philosophy, and having her on the show was such an honor.  Click here to listen to the audio, or read or share the highlights from the interview and participate in the discussion.  

In this episode, I'm sharing one of the biggest mistakes I made as a teacher. I have a feeling it’s something you’ll be able to relate to, particularly if you have a couple of students who you just don’t feel like you are equipped to handle. The choices I made took a bad situation and made it worse. I'll share what I wish I'd done differently, how I ultimately changed my approach, and what YOU can do to prevent the same problem from happening to you. Want free resources to help you enjoy your work, even when it's super challenging?  Visit https://thecornerstoneforteachers.com/unshakeable and enter your email address. I'll send you a downloadable calendar with ONE simple, actionable step you can take each day to enjoy teaching more. I'll also send you a link to join the online book community for my book Unshakeable: 20 Ways to Enjoy Teaching Every Day...No Matter What. Join more than 9,000 teachers who are sharing ideas around how to infuse more joy into their teaching and stay connected to their purpose.

The biggest pitfall that most teachers face with report card comments is overcomplicating the task, which creates overwhelm. I want to help you keep this super simple, so I created a 5-step formula for generating report card comments for ANY student. The end result? A positive, empathetic, and truthful set of comments that will be helpful for parents and facilitate their cooperation as you work together to help their children succeed, with you spending half the time! Join me today as I discuss a new resource I created for my TeachersPayTeachers store, the Stress-Free System for Report Card Comments: Generate comments in half the time! It's available now to purchase or preview and at a discounted price through March 1, 2018.   Click here to read or share the transcript and audio or participate in the discussion. Click here to view my new report card system resource in my TpT store.

There are a lot of trendy phrases from popular culture and the positivity movement which have infiltrated our thinking and practices as educators. They are helpful with a great deal of truth to them. However, I think we’ve gotten a little bit out of balance with the positivity movement and the rallying cry to be supportive of one another as teachers. Join me today as I discuss three trends from the positivity movement, comparing their truths and how we can take them too far. I believe that we need to be having these critical conversations about the issues and challenging one another to do better. Moving past truisms and getting real is the only way we are going to shift school culture to truly be about what’s best for kids! Click here to read or share the transcript and audio, take a pledge or participate in the discussion.

There's a lot of talk about the importance of morning routines; however, it's not something that I commonly hear discussed in teaching circles. I think for most of the educators, having to be at school so early means that a morning routine is basically just getting yourself and your family out the door as quickly as possible and making sure you're in that classroom before your students are lined up outside your door waiting for you. Join me today in listening to why morning routines are so important for teachers, and how to create a morning routine that works for you through intentionality and new habits. Click here to read or share the transcript and audio, download a free morning planner, or participate in the discussion.