Episode 323: What to Focus On This Summer to Set Yourself Up for a Stress-Free Fall

In this episode of the Teaching Middle School ELA podcast, Caitlin shares how you can make the most of your summer without letting school take over. Learn which planning tasks are truly worth your time, what you can skip, and how batch planning can set you up for a smooth fall—while still enjoying your well-deserved break! 

Join me for my June workshop focused on the EB Batch Planning Approach! This is a workshop you do NOT want to miss. Reserve your free spot here: ebteacher.com/workshop

YouTube Links Mentioned: 

The Perfect Classroom Management Strategy for Middle School: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZkdeEZL8rw&t=13s

How to Improve Student Behaviors in Middle School: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBzAqEiOsgk&t=53s

To stay connected with us about promotions, freebies, events, and professional development opportunities, Please join our EB Teacher's ELA Portal Priority List: ebteacher.com/portal

Transcript

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Well, hello, teachers, and welcome back to another episode of the Teaching Middle School ELA podcast. Caitlin Mulchell here, and I am your host. Oh, let's talk about summer. Yay! For so many of us, summer is that time that we can finally breathe, right? We get to rest, we get to recharge, maybe even read a book that has nothing to do with school. But if you're anything like me, that work brain just doesn't know how to shut off. I'm always in work mode in some capacity. And I just want you to think about this summer as not spending your whole summer planning in order to have a successful school year. In fact, I'm gonna argue that doing less can actually set you up for a much smoother fall. So in today's episode, what I'm going to do is I'm gonna walk you through high-leverage planning moves that are absolutely worth your time in the summer, but we don't want to take over your whole break, right? So we'll talk about what's really gonna move the needle that you can do in the summer, preferably in like June, um, that's gonna move the needle in August and the things that you can just kind of like let go of completely that are not worth your two cents right now. Plus, I'm gonna share how some of our EB teachers plan their entire first semester, sometimes even their entire school year before summer ends by learning key strategies within our EB batch planning framework. And in fact, I'm hosting a free workshop in June all about this. If you go to ebteacher.com forward slash workshop, make sure that you sign up. I'm teaching all of the foundations of our EB batch planning framework. I'm gonna set you up for success so that you know how to plan quickly, easily. So all of these high-leverage planning moves that I'm gonna talk about in this episode, you'll be able to execute on without issue. Okay, so if you are ready to prep with purpose and protect your peace, this episode is for you. So let's go ahead and dive in. Hi there, ELA teachers. Caitlin here, CEO and co-founder of EB Academics. I'm so excited you're choosing to tune into the Teaching Middle School ELA podcast. Our mission here is simple to help middle school ELA teachers take back their time outside of the classroom by providing them with engaging lessons, planning frameworks, and genuine support so that they can become the best version of themselves, both inside and outside of the classroom. And we do this every single day inside the EB Teachers ELA portal. This is a special place we've developed uniquely for ELA teachers to access every single piece of our engaging, fun, and rigorous curriculum so that they have everything they need to batch plan their lessons using our EB Teacher digital planner that's built right into the app. Over the years, we've watched as thousands of teachers from around the world have found success in and out of the classroom after using EB Academics programs. And we're determined to help thousands more. If you're interested in learning more, simply click the link in the podcast description. And in the meantime, we look forward to serving you right here on the podcast every single week. All right, so you might already be thinking about all of the things that you need to do to prep for the upcoming school year, which is crazy, but I know that we do that. But I want to be real with you. If you try to do everything over the summer, you are gonna end up feeling burnt out before the fall even starts. So it's really important that we set you up with identifying high-leverage summer planning priorities, right? These are the things that you can focus on that will set you up for a stress-free fall, but we don't want you to sacrifice your well-deserved time off. Okay. So that's what we're really going for is this nice, happy medium. It's really um kind of like living life in harmony. We're not trying to, oh gosh, I don't even remember the term anymore. Um, have a work-life balance. I don't like that term. I like more this concept of harmony, right? Of the yin and the yang, of just like this harmonious way of going about our lives. Okay. So high-leverage stuff so that you can actually rest this summer. All right, we've all heard this phrase. You need to prep everything for next school year over the summer. I don't know about you, but in my first few years of teaching, I cannot tell you how many teacher mentors told me that, but then like didn't tell me how to do that in a you know, constructive capacity in any way whatsoever. And if someone tells you that, it's like, get everything ready for next school year, right? The idea of getting ahead on every single thing can feel extremely overwhelming. And quite frankly, it's not necessary. So, yes, I want you to hear this. It is important to plan and prepare. However, you do not need to spend your entire summer creating every single last lesson plan or organizing every single little file or even redoing your entire classroom. I mean, you can if you want to, and it makes you happy and you love doing that, but if that's gonna stress you out, forget it. Instead, what I want you to focus on are high-leverage tasks that will make a real impact on your fall without leaving you feeling like you never got a summer break. Because let's be real, you really need to unplug at some point during the summer. Okay. And everything that I'm gonna talk to you about is kind of the tip of the iceberg because I go way in depth in this, and it's way easier for me to articulate and share like with slides and like in a live capacity and answering questions in my free workshop in June. So I'm gonna talk to you all about our eB batch planning framework. My workshop is free. Go register at ebteacher.com forward slash workshop. And what we're gonna do in that workshop is I'm gonna go more in depth with a lot of these high-leverage tasks, especially the first one that I'm gonna mention in today's episode. But what I love to have my teachers do in our eB Teachers ELA portal, our teachers inside of our membership, is I like to help them plan and prepare for their entire first semester, sometimes even their entire school year, in June. So we do that in June so that come July and that first part of August, they're literally not thinking about school at all. So you get out of school, you have a week or two, maybe three weeks off, we spend an entire week together doing this workshop. I teach you all of our framework of the EV batch planning framework, and you know everything that you need to do in order to batch plan now in June, so that you really truly like go on vacation in July. And there's not a thought in your mind, there is no white space that is being taken up by thinking about school. Okay. So that's why it's so important. That's why I hosted in June, is for that reason. So make sure that you register, it's gonna be the best thing that you do this summer. ebteacher.com forward slash workshop. Now, I will say when I said to some of you that our EB teachers can plan an entire first semester, sometimes an entire school year in the course of a day or two in the summer. I want you to know that that just takes practice. It's an art, it's a skill. It's called batch planning, but it is entirely possible. And what I love so much about learning this skill and being able to do this is that it makes your summer so relaxing. And also your back to school time so much easier because you've literally prepped nearly everything you can in order to have a successful school year. So your summertime really is time off. You are not thinking about school at all. So, today's episode, I want to give you those high-leverage ideas to get started with and definitely make sure that you sign up for my summer June workshop where I teach you all about our EB batch planning framework. Again, it's ebteacher.com forward slash workshop. I'll put that in the show notes for you too. Okay, so the first thing I want to talk about is identifying your priorities. The first step to setting yourself up for a stress-free fall is figuring out what your summer priorities are. So high-leverage tasks are the ones that will save you the most time and energy once school starts. And they should be simple, they should be strategic, and they should be practical. So organizing your Google Drive files with like color-coded cute things, like, and you're not type A and that's not your jam, probably not a high-leverage task. If that is your jam and that brings you joy and like you love it and it makes you happy, like some of the people on TEB, some of our colleagues would love to do that, that would be such a waste of my time. That is so not worth my time to me. So you want to think about like what are your priorities? Okay. What I'm gonna recommend focusing on are three things. And I'm gonna give you a bunch of resources to kind of uh set yourself up for success with this. So here's what I would recommend focusing on. Number one, and most important, is your big picture curriculum mapping. So spend a couple of hours over the summer. We teach our teachers how to do this at our batch planning live events. That is different than the workshop that I'm hosting. The workshop I'm hosting is free. We're gonna talk about this too. But over the summer, you're gonna spend a couple of hours mapping out your big picture for next school year. What units do you wanna cover? What are your key goals for the first few months? You don't need to plan necessarily every single lesson in detail right now, but having a roadmap is gonna help you start the year with a clear sense of direction. So I just got off the phone yesterday with a school district that I'm working with for PD for back to school. And we had this conversation around okay, well, when we go back to school, what are your sixth, seventh, and eighth grade teachers focusing on for writing? And it was all over the place. Everyone was doing something different for some other reason and all this stuff. And I'm like, that doesn't really make sense. I'm like, what if we took a step back and what if everybody started the year with our foundational EBW approach, which is evidence-based writing? That way students are learning terms like claim, evidence, premise, justification. And they're learning how to have discussions through writing with this lens and this language and this foundational understanding of evidence-based writing or evidence-based discussions. What if we taught all of our students, sixth, seventh, and eighth grade, that across all of your schools in your district at the beginning of the year? So everybody now, when we go to into reading and we're reading for literature, reading for informational text, now students have the language to have those conversations in an intellectual, deeply critical analysis way, right? Whereas opposed to if some of us are starting with narrative and others are starting with expository or descriptive, we don't all have this common language. It doesn't make sense, right? And so this is where I really want you to think about like what are your key goals in those first few months? My argument to you is teaching evidence-based writing to your students at the beginning of the school year. Yes, narrative writing for some of us, especially, you know, when narrative writing is a huge part of our state standards, it's going to be on the state tests or whatever it might be, or specific um grade levels, right? It's an easier introduction to writing. But I would still kind of argue that if you can teach evidence-based writing to your students at the beginning of the school year, you are now setting them up for set success in every other aspect of your ELA class. And that makes a huge difference. So that's what I'm talking about, like big picture curriculum mapping. Why would I do that at the beginning of the year? Is the how is that a key goal, right? Well, then what's my next key goal? What's my next unit going to focus on? And maybe this is an opportunity for you to think about you know what? I've been teaching X, Y, and Z for 15 years. I'm ready to try something different, right? And this is when you can think about that. Not in the middle of the school year, not a week before you're supposed to teach the unit, now in the summer, when you have the space and the time to think about it. So, like I said, you don't need to plan every lesson in detail here. But when you have a roadmap that's gonna help you start the year, you have a clear sense of direction for where you're going for even at least those first six weeks of school. Okay. And again, this is actually what I'm gonna cover at my free workshop series that I'm hosting at the end of June. So reserve your free spot, go to ebteacher.com forward slash workshop. I would highly, highly, highly suggest you join me for that workshop so that I can teach you how to do this successfully and with ease. Big picture curriculum mapping. That is absolutely as I like to say, that juice is worth the squeeze. Okay. Next thing that I want you to focus on this summer are your classroom systems and routines. So summer is the perfect time to reflect on on these two things. What worked well last year, what didn't? You don't need to necessarily overhaul everything, but making small tweaks or planning new systems now is gonna save you a ton of headaches when the school year starts. So whether that's a new classroom management strategy or a streamlined grading system, getting clear on these things now is gonna pay off big time in the fall. So I actually have the two best YouTube videos that I've recorded for you guys to watch on classroom routines and systems. So I'm going to link my must-watch ones for you in the show notes. They are absolutely worth 15 minutes of your time this summer to go watch these videos because I want you to see how easy and effective these routines are. So I'm gonna include links to number one, my 15-minute classroom management strategy, which some of you have likely heard me talk about for years. And if you haven't implemented yet, I am telling you next year is the year to do it. Like just do it, just try it. It is the best. And then the second YouTube video I'm gonna link for you is called How to Improve Student Behavior in Middle School. So this YouTube video has very simple strategies that don't take a ton of time and effort on your part. I know that there is a lot that goes into student behavior, right? Psychology, relationships, who we are as people, right? Like literally our personality impacts that. So I want to share why the structure of your class period matters. So I could go on and on about this, but I want to share a personal story with you to make this land. I was recovering from a cerebral spinal fluid leak for seven weeks from January 21st when I got injured until I was able to actually start walking, was at the beginning of March. So for about seven weeks, my seven-year-old did not have structure in his life. Mind you, I'm going through a divorce. So he was sometimes with his dad. I had to come recover at my parents' house because I couldn't walk or take care of myself for a month. So he was at my house, or I'm sorry, at my parents' house when I had him. So when I was able to finally walk again and I was back in my home again with my son again, all of our routines and structure had been forgotten about. And so I had to spend time re-establishing the routines and norms in my household with him so that he wouldn't get in trouble. Because when I we first came back, it's like he wouldn't brush his teeth, he wouldn't take a shower. We were getting into arguments about getting ready for school and all of this stuff that was never an issue beforehand. And I sat down with him and I said, Will, you know, I think what's happening is because I was sick for so long, all of our normal structure and routines kind of got thrown off. I said, wouldn't it be helpful for you if we sat down together and went back through our routines and expectations together? And he was like, Yes, mom, that would be so awesome. So we sat down and it was like, teeth get brushed at 7:10. The moment I come home from school, I take a shower and change out of my school clothes, bedtime lights out at eight o'clock, right? So we and we wrote it all down and we came to an agreement. I will tell you right now, I do not have arguments with my son anymore about asking him to do anything that's a part of his structure and his routine. And the same thing goes with our students. And that's what that YouTube video is going to be all about. And it's so important for you as a teacher to have those structures and routines in your class because nothing will derail your plans and your well-intentioned lessons, then student behavior and students not doing what they're supposed to do, or 15 minutes to get your students situated in a class. Classroom management was one of my strongest areas of teaching when I was in the classroom. And I have observed so many teachers over the years that I am sitting there watching, like dying inside, because I'm like, if you just had a structure, this would be a non-issue and you would be able to teach. And so I really want you to think about this. Is this something that you really get to work on this upcoming school year? Those two videos are going to be hugely, hugely helpful. And also, total side note, your belief that it's possible because who you are and how you show up and the energy that you bring to command the room of like this is our classroom, and these are the rules that are set forth, and these are the structures, and I'm going to follow through on them, kids pay attention. You know, I could walk into almost any classroom and I would be able to command the room at this point simply because of the energy that I hold. We all know those speakers that we've gone and listened to. The speakers who command the room and the speakers who don't, right? So, how do you step into the confidence of commanding the room? Your students are listening to you, they respect you, right? So these two things are more strategy-based. That's more like energetics based. But I just want you to think about that. Like, who are you being when you walk into your classroom? And I go speak at the local high school a couple times a year to their entrepreneurship program. And I walk in and those kids listen to me. And the teacher always tells me, he's like, I love watching you come speak to them because he the teacher wasn't a teacher in his earlier lifetime. He was in business in some capacity, which is why he teaches now the entrepreneurship class. And he's like, I pick up on so many nuances of how you carry yourself and the way that you pace yourself and the way that you, your cadence of your voice and all of that stuff. All of that comes into play in our classroom systems and routines, right? It is very interesting. Maybe that's a whole other episode of the psychology of all of that. I find it fascinating. But those two YouTube videos are gonna be really, really helpful for you. Okay, so so far we've talked about big picture curriculum mapping, then classroom systems and routine. Last thing I want to focus on here is resource organization. So you might, this is not one of those like juices worth the squeeze necessarily depending on your personality situations, but you might want to take the time to organize your resources. So whether that's your physical materials or your digital files, this does not have to be a huge task. Just a few hours of decluttering and sorting is going to help you feel so much more organized and reduce that, like, oh no, where did I put that resource or where did I put that thing when you get to the school year? Big tip here, and I know this is gonna be so hard for so many of you. Throw things away that you don't use. If you do not follow the decluttered mom on Instagram, Diana, she's a very good friend of mine. She has this whole course on decluttering. I bought her course, I decluttered my entire house. My house is always clean. I spend 15 minutes every night before I go to bed putting things away, and my house is always organized. I never have crap just sitting anywhere. And that is just junk and garbage. It steals your energy, right? It's an energy vampire. So seriously, like detach from the stuff and toss it. If you can become a minimalist when it comes to your resources, the stuff that's in your classroom, it's not just gonna be better for you, but it's gonna be better for your students as well. Okay. So resource organization is so important. And if you are an EB Teachers ELA portal member and you're listening to this episode, you're able to organize your resources very easily in the portal if you use the built-in digital planner that's a part of the portal. So if you haven't used the portal planner yet, this is the time that the juice is worth the squeeze. Go figure out how to learn that. It's gonna make it so much easier for you to keep track of all of your files, anything when you go to teach. It's like two link, two link clicks to find the activity that you're doing with your students that week or that day or whatever it might be. Okay. All right, so that was that. Now I want to talk about setting yourself up for a smooth start. So once you've identified your priorities, now we wanna set you up for a smooth fall. So there are a few additional things for you to consider as you plan your summer. So, number one is prepping those first week activities. So, yes, we teach our teachers to plan big picture curriculum mapping for a large chunks of time, but we also teach our teachers to have those first few weeks of activities prepped and ready to go. That might even be like printing your syllabus, right? Some of you might not be able to get away with that because I know some last-minute changes happen for some of us, but for a lot of us, like we work in schools that we've been doing the same thing for a long time, get those first week of school activities all prepped and ready to go. Because it's gonna make you feel ready. Even if you don't have the rest of your planning done, even if that's not perfect yet, and these activities don't even necessarily have to be perfect. We just kind of wanna know what we're doing that first week or two of school. And that's why you're gonna wanna come to my join, my June workshop, because I'm going to talk about exactly this, and I'm actually gonna give you the perfect resource for that first week of school because it's going to address evidence-based writing, it's gonna engage your students, it's fantastic, and I'll give it to you for free. I'm gonna walk you through how to use it when you come to the workshop. The other thing that I want you to do is I want you to set personal boundaries. So remember that the summer is meant to be a break. It is important to plan. Yes, some things are are worth, are worth doing now or high-leverage activities worth doing now, but it's also essential to rest and recharge. Really, I want you to set clear boundaries for when you're working, when you're taking time off, and that's gonna help you avoid burnout. Like literally put it on your calendar. Because if you're anything like me, I find myself getting sucked back into work because I love, like I love it. To me, it gives me energy, it gives me fulfillment and joy and purpose, and I also gotta relax every now and then. I also go gotta get a manicure and pedicure every now and then, right? And so do you. So make sure that you put that on your calendar. Last thing, PD, professional development. So if you are interested in developing new skills, summer is a great time to take an online course, listen to a podcast about teaching strategies or classroom management, but really keep it light or focused on just one or two things that you want to improve on. So don't go crazy and be like, I'm gonna learn all the things this summer, right? But if you pick any one thing, I will always argue, and this is a hill that I will die on, well, this and evidence-based writing, but one of those things should absolutely be learning the art of batch planning. Seriously, if there's nothing else that you can do for your own teaching sanity, it is learning how to do this. It is such a game-changing teacher skill. Okay, last but not least, let yourself rest. Remember that this is your summer. You cannot do your best work if you are running on empty. Give yourself the gift of downtime, make you know, plans with friends, put it on the calendar, pick up a new hobby, do some puzzles. I don't know what else do I do? Puzzles, read books, right? Things that give you joy, okay? All right, so there you have it. This summer, focus on those high-leverage tasks, big picture mapping, classroom systems, and classroom management, and then resource organization, and leave the rest behind you. Like whatever else there is, I can't even think of what could be as important as those. Like, those are the ones that are worth the squeeze. So you're gonna set yourself up for a stress-free fall and actually have time to enjoy your summer. So thanks for tuning in today. If you found this episode helpful, I would love for you to share it with your teacher friends, share the workshop with them too, bring a buddy, it'll make it more fun. And as always, feel free to reach out to me with any questions or feedback. You can reach my team and likewise me at hello at ebacademics.com. All right, I will be neck back next week with two more episodes. Actually, this is a what day of the week is this one, Arian? This is a Tuesday episode. So I will see you on Thursday. All right, you guys, have a wonderful rest of your day.