Body | By Yuxin Cheng, CASLS Fellow
This activity is designed to help teachers identify job-related factors that negatively impact their emotional health and set boundaries related to those job factors.
Learning Objectives: Teachers will be able to:
- Identify areas of their work lives to simplify and streamline
- Establish clear expectations for stakeholders related to job expectations
Materials Needed: Clear policy handout
Procedures:
- Identify a work-related responsibility about which you have some autonomy that feels overwhelming at times. This responsibility might be grading, answering emails, or any other task related to teaching that happens before/after the regular school day and assigned monitoring hours.
- Brainstorm a few classroom policies to manage the responsibility so that you may experience increased energy and emotional health.
- Pick one of the policies to implement. If this policy will require increased learner autonomy, collect resources to create a handout for students.
- Write a clear synopsis of your policy into your course syllabus. For example, if you only answer emails received before 5:00 PM on the same day, be sure to mention it so that all stakeholders have clear expectations.
- Discuss the policy with students and parents beginning the first day of class.
- Try out your policy. If it doesn’t work, give one of the other policies a shot or consider what modifications you might need to make. Don’t give up though! Your wellbeing is very important to you and to your students.
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