This post is a modified excerpt of Chapter 7 from Jess' book Planning to Stay: Burnout, Demoralization, Exploitation, and How to Reclaim Self-Care, Your Classroom, and Your Life... Anyway
Reflexive Backward Planning
As educators, we know how important it is to identify how we’ll know they know; in other words, if our students are successful at mastery, how would they show us?
For many of us, the first step in building a learning progression to support the answer to that question in terms of student learning was “backward planning,” a central tenet of Wiggins’ and McTighe’s seminal Understanding By Design. If we start by designing the assessment that answers, “How will we know they know?” and then ask, “How will we build an instructional sequence to ensure that students can demonstrate mastery?” we’re more likely to be successful than if we string a bunch of activities together and cross our fingers before handing out last year’s multiple-choice exam.
To be successful in enacting empowered self-care to heal teacher burnout, we need to think about our own intended outcomes in the same way. In order for us to pull together our self-knowledge, self-care, values, and commitments (both inside and outside of the classroom), we need to know what we’re shooting for.
While you can do the self-care planning activities from Planning to Stay at any time, do honor the your planning by creating quiet, spacious time to focus deeply. For many of us,
the best time of year for “planning to stay” might be early August-ish.
Reflection vs. Reflexivity
Often, we describe meta-level work like this as “reflection.” Planning to stay, however,
is actually a reflexive task.
Excellent teachers are reflective practitioners. Reflection is an in-depth consideration of events or situations: the people involved, what they experienced, and how they felt about it. This involves reviewing or reliving an experience to bring it into focus and replaying it from different points of view.
Most educators get practice with reflecting on lessons and interactions in both our teacher prep programs and in collegial interactions, even if it’s just debriefing an experience informally over lunch. Reflection focuses on external circumstances, the who-did-what-and-why. Reflective conclusions can inform our external choices in instruction; reflection may change how we order a lesson, build a worksheet, or greet a student.
While reflection is essential for a vital teaching practice, it’s only half the battle.
For those of us facing burnout, demoralization, and exploitation (BD&E), it’s our internal experience that deserves some attention.
Reflexive practitioners attend to their internal experience -
and how their internal experience impacts others.
To be reflexive is to observe our internal worlds the same way reflection supports our external worlds. Reflexivity helps us become aware of the role our needs and desires play in motivating our choices. Reflexivity helps us see how our behavior is complicit in forming organizational practices which, for example, marginalize groups or exclude individuals.
Doing the deep, gruelingly honest self-examination required in order to address your BD&E will benefit the way you feel in and out of the classroom. More importantly, it will benefit the people in your classroom and in your world who feel better and better when spending time with you.
What Will Alignment Look Like for You?
A values-centered practice is one in which a practitioner can clearly identify how their guiding values motivate, impact, and support their instructional decisions.
Practicing in congruence with your values is your surest way to escape demoralization. Depending upon your interpretation of your values, sticking with them can also help you to combat burnout and exploitation.
As you build your vision for yourself in your reflexive examination, it helps to consider what you’ll want to know, feel, and be able to do. This will apply to four areas of your experience: your internal and external experiences in your classroom and your internal and external experiences in your personal life.
What you’d like to “know” are the ideas, stances, theoretical frameworks, or approaches that explain, specifically, how your values connect to your teaching practice. They are also the statements that serve as our “north stars.” They are perfect ideas that keep us focused when we are not perfect. They are an articulation of the practitioner we hope to be. You can think about this from four perspectives:
internal work you will do to align your teaching practice
external changes you will enact to change your practice
internal work you will do to honor yourself in your personal life
external changes you will enact to honor yourself in your personal life
Once you’ve named what you’d like to know in these four realms (internal and external, classroom and life), you can explore how you’d like to feel. It’s critical to consider how you’ll feel in your planning process for two reasons: to protect your professional integrity and to promote your personal wellbeing.
By articulating how you hope to feel, you’re acknowledging that you’re a person in the room, that you do, indeed, have feelings, and that these feelings impact both you and your students.
Enacting Change Towards Alignment Feels Good
Once you’ve identified what you hope to know and feel, you’re ready to think about what you will do, specifically, based on what you know and how you wish to feel. This seems simple, but the hinge between what we know and feel and what we do is where it’s easiest to get out of alignment.
For example, one educator I coached valued empowering her students to be advocates and activists within their community. Day after day, however, her instruction consisted of direct instruction and a couple of well-crafted discussion prompts by which students would confirm the information she had shared.
She was puzzled that she wasn’t feeling inspired and excited by her practice when she was so committed to her value of empowering students. When she was able to explain what she would look for if she were watching her class like a movie with the sound off, what student actions would tip her off that her students were being empowered as advocates and activists, she was able to shift her instruction to a more student-centered frame. Her enthusiasm peaked when she was able to serve as a “guide on the side” instead of a “sage on stage,” when she was able to act in alignment with her values by supporting students to ask and strive to answer their own questions.
When you think about what you’ll do, you’re also asking, “How will my students’ and my loved ones’ experiences of me change if I’m enacting my values?”
Here's an example:
Building actions in which your values are apparent, evident, embodied, and unmistakable in your teaching practice is the way you’ll change your internal experience and, consequently, how others experience you.
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