Quiet Quitting isn't happening, but this is...

Have you heard the phrase “quiet quitting” and wondered how it related to teaching?

Quiet quitting is a hot topic right now. It’s the idea that people are “giving up” or “quitting” on their jobs without actually resigning.

In this episode of Real Teacher Talk, I tackle this topic and whether or not I think it actually relates to teachers! I discuss what quiet quitting is, how to do more than the bare minimum and only work your contract hours, and how to set up systems to set yourself up for success!

Resources Mentioned:

Gallup Article about Quiet Quitting

Parent / Guardian Volunteer Resource

Episode About Dealing with Teacher Guilt

Episode about Saying No

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Kristen Donegan 00:00

Hey, everyone, and welcome back to this week's episode of Real teacher talk. This episode is definitely for you. If you've been hearing the phrase, if you've been hearing the phrase quiet quitting, and you're not sure if that relates to you, or what that means for education. So quick synopsis, I saw this on the Wall Street Journal and in The Guardian, essentially, quiet quitting is saying that you're not outright quitting your job. You're just doing the bare minimum. And I want to talk about how that relates to teaching and what I think that means for education as a whole.

Now, there is even a Gallup poll saying that 50% of workers in the United States right now are quiet quitting. And so, let's chat about that. And what that means for you as a teacher. Now, with the pandemic, I think everybody went through a lot, right? We're still in a pandemic, but I mean, it just kind of had you reevaluate life, friendships, relationships, and even your relationship with your job. Now, according to the Guardian, people's ways of relating to work has shifted or changed. And I have noticed this looking as an outsider who's not in the classroom right now, and seeing how unhappy so many teachers are, can you relate at all to that, you know, in the beginning of the pandemic, you were deemed, you know, an angel, and you were like, the best thing ever, and, and parents couldn't believe like, how great you were with your kids after their kids are home for a couple of weeks. And then like months later, you know, teachers were villainized. And there's all these new restrictions and expectations and things put on teachers, without a whole heck of a lot of things. And the big thing with quiet quitting is that.

I don't know if I believe the whole quiet quitting hype, maybe it's like this in other fields, but in education, by working your contract hours, or by doing the job you're supposed to be doing. That's not quiet quitting, that's being an employee that's doing what's expected of you. And actually, an education though, it's a little bit different. Because what's expected of you actually isn't to work your contract hours, you won't know this, right? You're expected to take on at so many extra tasks and work all hours and set up your classroom for free. Every day during summer. There's so much that you probably do at night and on the weekends, because there isn't enough time in the day. There's unrealistic demands. And you know, if you think about other careers, or even I just look at my husband, he has time during the day to actually do his job. And when you think about a teacher, teachers are teaching literally all day. And then they've got to do the other part of their job when they're not teaching. And it's kind of impossible.

So here's the problem, I think with quiet quitting. The education system, we know needs a lot of work. And it has, since the beginning of time, the education system relies on the unpaid labor of you. And not just the unpaid labor, but the unspoken rule at your school, you know, the teacher has given you the side eye because you're leaving at contract time. Or there's that teacher guilt, which we talked a lot about if you joined us in the 3pm teacher, and we talked about it inside easy organization tools. There's all of these things combined in the education space, that sometimes makes you feel like you have to go above and beyond most of the time. And what I mean by that is taking on extra committees doing extra tasks for free, attending IEP meetings after contract hours.

There's so much that's expected that maybe it doesn't say in your contract, that you need to be responding to parents at all hours, or inputting report card comments on the weekend because there's not enough time to do it during the day. Because as you know, you know, your staff meetings or PLC times are sometimes or most of the time filled with nonsense, where you should be given more time to prep and to plan but that's a whole another that's a whole another podcast episode. So like I said, I don't think teachers are quiet quitting I think teachers are just saying no, to continue working for free. I think teachers have had it, especially the last few years and seeing how they've been treated. And it's like, for what? So that kind of leads me to Okay, great.

So what's next? I feel like there's two options, right? The big option, I don't have a solution for I don't know what to do. Do you know what to do? Like? How can we as a whole, as educators, as parents, as voters, actually change? What the education space looks like? There's so much that just needs to be revamped and redone. So that's, that's the one option like, Hey, how can we actually treat teachers with respect, give them better working to working conditions, fund education, so it's not coming out of their paycheck anymore, and give them enough time to actually do what they got to do. And hey, why don't we trust them on top of that, that would be in a perfect world. But that's not where we're at right now. So I've got a couple of suggestions that I've been thinking about things that I did when I was in the classroom, in order to kind of take your power back, because right now, if you feel helpless, or frustrated, and you're like, This is just how it is, I don't know how to get it all done. I'm barely keeping my head above water. These are things that I did during my education career when I was on the verge of burnout. So if your insight easy organization tools you may have heard these before.

But here's what I would do. Because you can't control sometimes the the not great working conditions and the demands and all the things like that. And we've talked about this on the podcast as well. But number one, get clear on your values. What's really, really important to you. And what I mean by that is, is it time with your family? Is it working out? Is it eating healthy? Is it spending time with friends, or whatever it is make a list of your values come up with like three to five. Then from there, step two is create boundaries, to make sure that you're honoring those values. So what I mean is a family times really important to you then set a time to leave at contract time. And you're like, Well, how do I do that? You just do. You set that time, pick one day a week, start small. And just leave and get in the habit of doing that every week, one day, that's your day, just to test it out. They say what it takes 21 days to create a habit.

See what that feels like. And I think you'll be surprised when you realize you're leaving at the time you say you're going to do you're honoring what's important to you. And then you'll realize the classroom doesn't fall apart by you choosing to leave at contract time rather than staying two extra hours. So then you may be saying okay, cool, Kristen, love the idea. But I still have a stack of papers to grade, I still have all this work to do. When I come back tomorrow, I hear you, I totally get that. That's kind of where I had to look at what I was doing in my classroom. So step three is really to be creating some systems, some things to help your day, run smoothly. And they're small things, but it adds up to a lot of wasted time.

So like for me, I would make sure my lesson plans and whatever copies and things we needed were organized for the entire week, in the same spot so I could easily grab them. And I'm not wasting time looking for them. And by the end of the day, I could pull out my copies for tomorrow and I'm good to go that helped me not having to spend so much time looking for things around my classroom. Something else simple having systems for passing out and collecting student work and you probably have something like this. But that way I'm not missing papers and I'm not wasting time looking for it. I have a system for you know, when I would input grades, I hated grading. If you attended a 3pm teacher webinar, you know that grading was not my favorite thing. Like doing laundry, unloading the dishwasher, whatever it is, that's how I felt about grading. But I created a system to make grading quicker and more efficient.

So I got you know, help from the students. If you have awesome caregiver support parent volunteers, whatever that looks like maybe you can have them help you out. And then I would set a time every I want to say a week but it really wasn't set a time a couple of times a month. In my plan book, where I would stay, and I'd be like, Alright, I'm going to stay for 45 minutes. And I'm only going to grade. So those are little systems and things that really paid off. Because I was able to get the most important things done. So I'm prioritizing what's important, right. But I'm also using systems just to make the day flows more smoothly. So that I wasn't wasting time. And so that my students aren't wasting time. And the cool thing about this was that I was wasting less instructional time by doing this. And I was getting to enjoy teaching more, because I wasn't running around like a chicken with my head cut off. Now, the fourth thing, and I kind of touched on this is to get help, whatever that may look like.

Now, I don't know if you have caregiver help or volunteers in your classroom, if that's even allowed. I know, it all depends on where you're teaching. I had been at schools where there was zero help. And then I've been at schools where there was too much help, and I'm in in between. So if you can reach out for help, I have got a link will leave in the show notes of what I use for parent volunteers. It's a resource in my TPT store. And it made it really, really easy for volunteers to come in and help. A big thing I talked about, and I'm a big believer in is if you're looking for help from parents or caregivers, you don't want it to be extra work for you. It's not like you're just pulling random things, because they're here, you want it to be meaningful, and you want it to be helpful for you. And so I go all through that in that resource. So you can see what it looks like from start to finish.

So that I had different parents and caregivers come in, often at my last school and they knew exactly what to do without interrupting my teaching time. That was huge. Another way to get help is have former students come in if you know those sweet friends who visit you are knocking on your door asking for help. And you're like I don't really have anything, come up with something consistent, like I had two sweet girls who would come visit every day before school. So what I would have them do is pass out our student journals, they sharpen pencils, and they knew to change the date on the board. Those were like their three things they did every day without me having to tell them and it saved me some time. So if you have helpers like that, make the best use of it. Another really great one, if you have older students who are helpers is to help file papers, or to check for incomplete work, whatever it may be, whatever will save you time, so you can focus on the big tasks.

Now another way to get help is to enlist the help of your actual students and your classroom right now. And you can do that with classroom jobs, as many of you are probably dealing, what I found about classroom jobs, and from a lot of teachers I work with inside easy organization tools is that jobs can be a little chaotic. Here's how to make it so much simpler. Don't have them rotate jobs, I see teachers who do this daily or weekly, it will be chaotic. If you do that. I typically had my students rotate jobs about every six weeks. And it typically was when they reminded me, hey, it's time to switch jobs. Another really big tip that I learned is to have two students do a job. That way, if someone's absent, the job will still get done. And then the other great thing is that they'll be able to work together.

So maybe you have a student who maybe isn't as capable, they'll have a buddy or a partner who can show them how. And then what's really cool is they can train the next person who's taking over that job. And I found when I came up with my classroom jobs, or what are things that we need to do, every day that my students can do, that I either didn't want to do or didn't have to do. And that way, it's freeing up my time to respond to emails or was freeing up my time to grade or lesson plan or whatever it may be. So a couple of ideas. And like I said, you probably are doing this because you're an amazing teacher. But I had two students who were responsible for stacking chairs, students who were responsible for plugging in the Chromebooks and our iPad, students who picked up trash students who changed the schedule out, made sure literacy centers were organized, the library was organized, whatever it was, and then a trick I always had my students do when the timer went off, or before the timer went off and they finished their job early.

They'd go around and help like pick up trash on the ground. That was what everybody did if they finished early and it just made things a lot easier. So enlist help. And then finally, the fifth thing Say no to extra things, I realized that probably my I don't know eighth or ninth year in the classroom, I kept saying yes to taking on extra tasks. Now California, we have an amazing labor union. So we, you know, weren't working during lunch and things like that they really had our best interests in mind. But we still weren't asked to take on extra tasks like teaching an after school class or things like that. In California, you were paid. So it was an unpaid work. But it still was extra time. And so you have to look at what is your time worth. And I got to the point, like, oh, cool, I'm getting paid $30 to do this. But my time and my value is worth a heck of a lot more.

And so I started saying no to things that I didn't want to do. And you can go back a couple podcast, we'll link it below about saying no, and dealing with guilt, and all of that if you want a little refresh. But that also meant not just when I was asked to do extra things, but I think as teachers, we put extra pressure on ourselves to do you know, maybe a bigger or better lesson like during the holidays, I'd go above and beyond, I remember making reindeer food every year. And my last year when I was in the classroom I had just had this is a sensitive content alert about fertility and miscarriage. So you can skip through if you want, but I had just had a miscarriage. And so trying to plan all the extra things, I just wasn't feeling it. And so I was like, we're going to do the bare minimum, which was still great. But my kids didn't need reindeer food, and it was going to be okay. And they were still going to have a wonderful holiday for those who celebrated. And they don't even know we're not doing reindeer food, because they weren't in my class last year to even tell the difference is that extra pressure, I think, as teachers that we put on ourselves.

So to recap real quick, to kind of help with this quiet quitting issue, which I don't think it's an issue in education, I think teachers are just tired of being taken advantage of is to get clear on your values, set your boundaries around those values. Third, create systems for ask for help. And five, say no to the extra things. So I'd love to know your thoughts and what you think about quiet quitting, if it's something you're experiencing, or heck, even if you're just like, No, I'm just I know my worth. And I know I'm worth more and being taken advantage of. And my hope. And I don't know what this will look like. But my hope is that more teachers who do this, and that's why I do the work that I do inside easy organization tools to show teachers how to create systems and routines, so that they can leave at contract time and actually enjoy their life outside of the classroom, which will help them avoid burnout, and just love their life again, I do that because my hope is that more teachers will get on board.

More teachers will not only recognize their worth, because I think you will know it right? But then it's like, okay, great. What next? So I think if more teachers take these steps and use these five different strategies or things to do in your life, that maybe the education system will get a little bit better. Or maybe teachers will stop being taken advantage of. I don't know, fingers crossed. That's my hope. If more teachers do this and band together, I think it could only be better for everyone's mental well being right, and their happiness. All right, everyone. Thanks again for tuning in this week. I really appreciate it. Go take some time for yourself. Feel free to share out this episode with your teacher friends, and let them know they're not alone. All right, see you next week.

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