This post is a modified excerpt of Chapter 8 from Jess' book Planning to Stay: Burnout, Demoralization, Exploitation, and How to Reclaim Self-Care, Your Classroom, and Your Life... Anyway
Lesson Plans as Self-Care Plans
Often, we think of lesson planning from a purely intellectual standpoint.
We figure out what we want students to know, how they’ll show us that they know it, and how they’ll come to know it. Constructing learningepisodes this way is an intellectual puzzle for us educators that does, indeed, support our self-care. In focusing solely on this area, however, we’re missing opportunities to care for ourselves even amidst the “fog of war.”
Your lesson plan construction offers you more profound opportunities. If you can think of a lesson plan as a chance to expand your teacher burnout-battling self-care plan, you can convert some of the most challenging tasks and interactions into those which, if not enriching, can at least be less taxing.
First acknowledge that you are a whole person as you build and facilitate your lesson plans and then actively manage your physical, social, emotional, and spiritual selves within the lesson plan itself. This can look many different ways which you’ll discover as you play with what you need in your own planning process.
Let’s explore examples of how your self-care can live in a lesson plan. All of these examples require self-awareness. You’ll likely improve as you make this kind of planning conscious, and you’ll continue to make seamless, low energy, high-return improvements as you notice, learn, and adjust.
Physical Self-Care in the Classroom
You don’t stop having a body when you walk into your classroom, so you might as well care for it while you’re in there.
Anything that supports your body to be in healthy, comfortable functioning is physical self-care. An easy way to incorporate physical self-care into your lessons is to focus on times
that annoy you or that feel cumbersome. Is it distracting to explain instructions while handing out papers? Put the lesson’s printed materials somewhere (or multiple places) in the room so that students can grab them during a transition. Want to sign off on each students’ topic sentences before they continue on to write the body of the paragraph, but maneuvering around the room is tough? Sit or stand somewhere in the room and let students bring you their work, which you can approve quickly with a self-inking stamp.
Remember, movement is essential for our physical body. Work movement in wherever you can. When you point to a resource on the wall, do so with your whole arm outstretched, your torso twisting. While students complete their at-the-bell assignments, tuck your arms behind your back, holding your elbows, and stand up straighter.
Some physical self-care is lesson-dependent, like building in a plan to move around the room to visit student groups rather than sit at your desk. Some, like deep breathing and stretching, you’ll be able to incorporate as habits, no matter the lesson, over time.
Social Self-Care in the Classroom
Social self-care can show up in a lesson plan in a few ways. Before we explore those, let’s reiterate that relying on your students as social equals, is inappropriate.
Lesson-plan-embedded social self-care helps you to maintain caring, reciprocal relationships with your students which honor your hierarchically established roles and the rights and responsibilities that come with those roles. You’re the teacher; they’re the students. And you’re all also people.
Social self-care in a lesson plan can be strategic self-disclosure. “Instructional use of self ” guides sharing with students both authentically and appropriately. For example, as you introduce an activity requiring a certain skill, it might be useful to share an example of how you struggled with a similar skill in your own academic experience and a strategy that helped you overcome that struggle. It would be less useful to disclose that you were afraid that your grandad would hit you if you brought home bad grades.
When we are disclosing as an instructional tool to support a mentoring relationship, our feelings can’t dominate. We can do more harm than good if we share our own emotions such that students don’t know how to respond or feel concerned about us. Instructional use of self works when “instructional” is prioritized over “self.”
We know we’re caring for our social selves within our lesson plans if we are sharing authentic-but-neutral pieces of information about ourselves to increase connection with students.
Emotional Self-Care in the Classroom
Emotional self-care in a lesson plan requires more self-knowledge, and it involves students less than social self-care.
The first step to in-class emotional self-care happens before class begins. Acknowledge how you’re feeling about a lesson plan; what parts are you excited about, what parts scare you, which parts are you dreading? Depending upon how you’re feeling as you plan each learning
episode, intentionally build in ways for that feeling to exist in the room as you facilitate without needing to let your students know what’s happening.
For example, if I’m nervous about a new activity, naming my nervousness ahead of time allows me to build a backup plan in case the lesson doesn’t turn out, which feels better than potentially expressing frustration at students who aren’t experiencing the lesson as I hoped they might.
Responding to negative self-talk or fear isn’t always efficient or healthy. Another option is to acknowledge the emotion towards disempowering it. Your internal acknowledgement might sound something like, “I think my students have what they need to figure this assignment out, and if they express frustration, I’ll focus on the content of their request instead of taking their frustration to mean that the lesson failed.”
It’s okay to say these types of things out loud to our students, too; “I’m excited to try this activity, but it’s the first time I’ve done it with a class this size, so we’ll see how it goes.” The risk, however, when you acknowledge your emotions with your students, is that you then make them participatory. To retain sovereignty over your emotional realm, own it deeply—so that your emotions don’t seep out in harmful ways that make your students responsible for your feelings, nor are your feelings levers students can use to pry at your boundaries (as is their developmental obligation to attempt).
Spiritual Self-Care in the Classroom
Finally, building your spiritual self-care into your lesson plans sounds daunting, but it’s much easier than you think.
Remember, spiritual self-care connects us to something more important, bigger, and more meaningful than ourselves. Prayer, mantras, and meditation are all excellent tools to support our spiritually connected practice, and they are all privately accessible if our teaching contexts are more outwardly secular. For some of us, our spiritual self-care connects to our values. As long as our values are built into our lesson plans, we have opportunities to connect to meaning while we’re teaching.
If we’re having a hard time connecting to our values, we can play the “why” game to help us remember that our work matters even when we are asked to work in opposition to our values:
Why do these state tests matter? Because I want my students to succeed in navigating frustrating systems to increase their autonomy and choice.
Why do I have to teach this content? Because I value learning as a process, and I can focus on process if the content doesn’t inspire me.
Why do I have to give another benchmark quiz? Because metacognition is never wasted, and I can help students build healthy relationships to feedback processes.
Once I’ve gone through this exercise, I can ensure that my lesson plan prioritizes messages oriented to my values.
Educators who protect their values are inoculated against demoralization, just as educators who manage their energy can avoid burnout, and educators who are laser focused on priority-aligned boundaries can resist exploitation.
For concrete exercises to enact strategic self-care, see Planning to Stay: Burnout, Demoralization, Exploitation, and How to Reclaim Self-Care, Your Classroom, and Your Life... Anyway