Hey teacher friends, here we go. This week, oh, I started off something a bit controversial with an email a couple of weeks ago. Gonna tell you, it offended some people. You know what? I still stand by it. So it's what we're going to dive into this week, especially as summer is just getting started. As I record this, I I am going to give you really my best advice on what I think you should be doing to get ready for next year.
I know you just got out but I want to encourage you. Really what I'm saying is you need less curriculum team and curriculum coaching and more life coaching. You need less professional development and more life coaching. personal development to make you have a better experience of teaching next year and to have a better experience of life.
I absolutely 100 percent believe that. I'm going to dive all into the details and tell you about the little controversy that I sparked. And uh, yeah, here's what I have to say. Sorry, not sorry. All right. See you on the inside. Welcome to the Balance Your Teacher Life podcast, where we talk all things avoiding educator burnout, setting healthy boundaries, and achieving better work life balance.
If you're passionate about education, but tired of it consuming your whole life, You have found your home in the podcast universe. I'm your host, Grace Stevens, and let's get going with today's show.
All right. So let's get into it. So a couple of weeks ago, I sent an email to my list. Now I have quite a big list. Uh, list of people, subscribers if you will, and I think part of the reason is most of them, I would say 90 percent of those people on my list came to me via my book Positive Mindset Habits for Teachers.
I offer, it's a really good free workbook. book. Um, and in order to do that, you need to, you know, send me a request, whatever. So I have people's names on email and you know, I let them know every week, Hey, this is what happened on the podcast, send them free information, let them know when new books are coming out, all that kind of stuff.
So I had written an email a couple of weeks back and I had made the subject line and yeah, it was a little click bae. You know what, looking to, you know, it's hard to get attention inside of people's email boxes, right? Some people get so many emails. And it was titled FPD this summer. Now, for those of them who read on and didn't just automatically get offended, um, it was actually forget personal PD this summer, do this instead.
So some people, just a few didn't get past that. Um, but one person was very upset at the idea that I said professional development was a waste of time. And that wasn't what I was saying. I had told a story of how in my two decades in the classroom, there were some things that I regretted, and one of them was the two summers that I went, two consecutive summers.
I went for one week in the summer. It was actually mandated by the district. We were paid a poultry sum to go do it. Um, to be trained in the new curriculum that they had purchased. And so, one of the problems was that, you know, my kids were out of school. And, and I, you know, some of you may know, for a lot of time that I was teaching, I was a single parent.
And. Also, what happened was the place where this training was, my school district office, was actually more than 50 miles from my home. So for me to do this training, I had to find them a sit and make alternate arrangements, leave really early in the morning, come back really late at night, actually longer than a regular school day.
So first off, you know. Bummer for the kids. They were upset about it. Um, caused stress, just all kinds of things and I honestly didn't feel that it was worth a week of my time to be taught how to use this curriculum because this was curriculum, let's be honest, you know what your teacher's editions look like these days.
It was right at the time that they were turning these um, Teacher's editions, they came with scripts that my district and many districts required us to read verbatim. I used to say you could get a trained monkey to teach this because it said on this page, on this line, say this, say that. Why do I need a week long training on that?
Okay, do I need to know how to differentiate? Absolutely, guess what? It came with all of those resources. Okay, it came with leveled readers. You know, all the things had to do that, all for, you know, it's the best program ever. And then guess what, like two years later, new program got to go ahead and do that again.
So I didn't feel that was a good use of my time. Okay, am I saying that I've never had a good professional development? Yes, I have. Over summer when I moved to a new district, I had two days which was all about the way that this particular district did things. Um, that. Was differentiated, you went into different breakouts based on what you felt you needed to know the most.
Um, it was put on by the district's curriculum coaches, right? So not by coaches who were paid by the publisher. You see what I'm saying? And we knocked out so much in two days. Okay, so that was really worthwhile. I took a lot of units. Myself, I have taken units, postgraduate units. I don't know, 70 plus something.
I never went ahead and got a master's degree. I always just picked the units that I wanted to learn on trauma informed teaching, teaching gifted and talented. I felt I needed some more classroom management skills, right? I chose the things that I felt I needed, and then I went, found the resources, learned.
for it over summer, took the classes. Yes. Did it help me advance up the pay scale? Yes, it did. But I'm about to tell you what I'm suggesting instead. What I am really noticing and what I have noticed the last 10 15 years in teaching is we spend a lot of time with curriculum coaches. What we really need a little bit more of, now stay with me, is life coaching.
We need less P. D. Professional development and more personal development. Okay, you know, I have, I don't know if you're aware of my background, whatever. You know, I did a deep dive into all things personal development. I'm a bit of a personal development junkie. I'm trying to fix myself. I had a lot of anxiety.
I had a lot of stress. I had a lot of overwhelm. I I did a terrible job of setting boundaries. I burnt out from a really high paying, high profile corporate career. I thought that being a public school teacher would, would fix all those issues. And you know what? It was magical for a while. Magical. And then within two years, I had recreated those same circumstances for myself.
Except for a lot less money. I mean, there's the me just being honest. Still working too much, still being stressed, still not separating work from home, still equating my worth to my work, still being easily triggered by students because I hadn't dealt with my own emotional baggage and was taking stuff way too seriously, personally.
Like, these are not good looks on a teacher. Okay, so I went through, in fact the other day for funsies. I went through and tried to decide to see, I was trying to do this equation, right, like this is like the logical part of my brain that likes science and likes data is like, did I spend more money on professional development or personal development?
I can tell you, wow, I stopped counting after a while because, um, you know, I started off with all the books I've read in the last 20 years. Okay, so I was like, yeah, what, maybe 5, 000. 500 bucks, let's say, a very conservative estimate. Um, and then I looked at, you know, I started with Centerpoint Institute, I want to say almost 20 years ago, doing a deep dive into neurolinguistic programming, other things there, you know, that was a good, I don't know, 5, 000 maybe chunk of change.
I mean, 20 years ago, that was a lot of money. Um, if I look at all the other seminars, Courses, um, a retreat I went on, let's not even go into therapy, let's not, because that was very helpful too. I, I mean that the, the number is pretty astronomical. I regret none of it, none of it. And I like to tell people, because I just like, let's just round it up to like maybe 35, 000, um, that's where I stopped counting.
You know, I like to tell people, listen, I spent 35, 000 learning this stuff, so you wouldn't have to. Okay, you know where I take great pride is is taking all of that knowledge and that personal growth and all of those skills that I learned to put into exercises and frameworks that are proven and scientifically validated and packaging that as personal development with a like life coaching kind of component for teachers and That they can see amazing results.
My Balance Your Teacher Life program that this podcast was named after, I ran the last two summers, uh, for six weeks with six weekly coaching calls. And I got feedback from people, some, it was, it was, uh, I tripped the content every week for six weeks. Well, a lot of people traveled over summer, you know, they, they, They wanted a different schedule for the course.
They wanted the ability to to do the self study on the course whenever they wanted to have the coaching longer than the six weeks. So anyway, I've repackaged all of that. I have now made it a monthly membership and I'm telling you it's a laughable price. It is a laughable price. My peers. Not only laugh at me, they're mad at me.
Like stop offering it for that cheap. It's making everybody else look bad. It's not sustainable long term. It isn't sustainable long term. I do know that, but you know, my passion is still with teachers. So if you want to go check that out. Um, I'm gonna, there might have been a promo for it and that I recorded that shows up before this, um, episode.
I'm not sure, um, they change, um, that's called dynamic content. It changes regularly. So, um, just go to gracestephens. com forward slash. Elevate. And I don't know how much it is at the time that you're going to listen to it because the price I'm running at right now at time of recording, I can't continue to do it much longer.
But anyway, go check it out. Go see. But I want to tell you that the, what I really learned with all my deep dive into neurolinguistic programming, cognitive behavior therapy, all the things, okay, it really. Did it improve my teaching a hundred percent? A hundred percent because it did. It changed how I showed up.
Okay. It changed how I show up. You know my big thing is your energy teaches more than your lesson plans. It changed my energy and it changed how I felt about myself and how I showed up in my life and it really was, you know, it wasn't like flipping a light switch, but it wasn't this ongoing journey.
Right? My life really did change when I realized and understood and proved to myself, right? I had to prove to myself reading about something does nothing, right? It's when you take what you've learned and put it into action. So proving to myself that I had way more control over what was happening in my life, right?
The minute I started empower, asking myself empowering questions like, you know, what was my part in that? How can I avoid that happening in the future? Right? Empowering questions, right? And I could focus on what I could control, not get all bundled up, you know, to the point of paralysis, worrying about the things I couldn't control.
Right? Even when things were really not going well, and trust me, there are plenty of days in the classroom, weeks, months, that things are not going well. We know this. But, you know, training myself to say, what's the next best decision? Don't just get paralyzed and be invictive mode. Ask myself, what is the next best decision?
I trained myself to stop hanging around people who were just, you know, admiring the problem in just being toxically negative, right? I started hanging out with the people who seemed to be having more fun, who seemed to be willing and optimistic to look for solutions, right? Learning to set healthy boundaries.
Learning to separate my worth from my work. Learning better communication skills that fostered collaboration, deeper understanding, right? Learning to move past my limiting beliefs about teaching and about myself. All of that came from personal growth, personal development. Not from, you know, a curriculum coach.
That's not their job. And not from a mentor at school. A mentor, you know, Yes, a mental relationship was wonderful. You could learn from their experience. But part of what I coach people in is having your own experience. So you don't take my word for it. Um, the balance, your teacher life program is kind of structured, structured because I'm a nerd, um, like this, um, You know, like Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey, right?
I was so used to teaching that in the fourth grade. And so like, I'm your guide. I'm not the hero of the story. You're the hero of the story. You're going to figure it out for yourself. You have to prove it to yourself, but I'm your guide, right? And all of this. learning that I did that I took on for myself, um, and took responsibility for learning, it made me a better teacher, yes it did, but it made me a better parent, a better partner, a better friend, and honestly just a more loving version of myself, just a, just a better advocate for myself, okay?
So I really do feel that if you have time this summer and an inclination and just a little bit more, Of, you know, invest some time and invest just a little bit of money. You know, I'm telling you, a lot of you spend more money on your nails than you do on personal development. I'm just putting it out there.
And for me, you know, those times where I did spend large amounts of money, I had to ask myself, what trade off do I have to make? Okay, well, maybe I can't do this, or maybe I can't go there. But I always used to ask myself, what's going to have a bigger impact in my life a year from now? 10 years from now.
And I always came back to investing in myself and learning these skills. So. I stand by my statement, less professional development, more personal development. That's what I think teachers need, okay? Now, that's not to say, if you have some specific skill deficits that are holding you back in the classroom, yeah, you gotta take responsibility for learning those.
I had, um, not enough experience in trauma informed teaching. I knew that. Um, and I was very overwhelmed with what to do with some specific, um, students I ended up with. One had PTSD, some other stuff like that. So I went and found the courses myself, got the units, you know, spent time over summer. Um, so if there are, you know, if there are skills that you think you're missing from a professional level, then I would absolutely encourage you to do that if there's a skill deficit.
But don't just go take some units just because like, that's what I should be doing over summer or you know, the district said this or the district's suggesting that. Like if they feel it's that important for you to know that, they should be teaching you that during the school year, not during your summer.
Set a boundary. Summertime is your time. Summertime is your time with your family, with yourself. It's time to rest and reflect. It's all those beautiful things. Okay, so that's it. This week was a shorter episode because I just, you know, I know a lot of things. Are you right now are looking at your summer planning out your summer and wondering?
Oh gosh should I take this should I do this? Should I take this class? You know again. I there was always value in me getting units one because I always chose my own I'm paid for my own And so that was kind of expensive, but I felt I would rather spend time doing what I felt I needed to learn than what a district mandated.
And of course, getting CEUs, um, you know, you get most districts let you, that's how you move up the pay scale. So it wasn't, again, a total I'm never going to say it was a total waste of time, but to move the trajectory of your life in a more positive direction, um, I'm going to suggest personal development over professional development.
Okay, that's it. Shorty won this week because some of you, oh my god, are wrapping up school and I know how crazy that is. I want to thank everybody for their feedback on last week's episode, which was fire, right? We talked to Jason Bader, uh, really discussing this how on earth did we get here that many schools have taken away this foundational support of progressive discipline and actually quite a few administrators reached out to me and thanked me for introducing them to him because I'm telling you his Um, website, go back and look at the show notes from last week.
He gives away all his information, webinars, trainings, and PDFs on progressive discipline. He gives it away for free, for free. So, um, he's a good guy. So if you didn't listen to that whole episode yet, listen in, definitely go back and look at the show notes. Um, cause off the top of my head, I do not. have in front of me what that, um, the URL to get his information is.
Okay, so you have made it. Some of you are out. Yay, you made it. Um, some of you are nearly there. I promise you, you will make it and either way, please remember you can create your own path, bring your own sunshine and I look forward to talking to you again next
