back to school Archives - Samantha Mosher

I had an education professor when I was an undergrad who told us that going into the classroom should always make one a little nervous or even a little scared.

Not anxious and ready to throw up.

Not hyperventilating.

Just butterflies. A little tickle in your stomach. A hint of something new and exciting. A desire to make sure that you don’t fail the learners in front of you.

I don’t know when it happened, but at some point over the last two years, I lost the butterflies. I loved my job. My kids made me smile and amazed me every day. My colleagues were great. But it was all starting to feel routine.

Knowing It’s Time for a Change

I love teaching special ed and being a learning specialist because there are always interesting problems to solve. Looking for the how all aspects of who a student is and how they learn come together, and figuring out how to support the areas of challenge and leverage areas of strength in order to support the student in the classroom. How do we bridge the skills that the student does have with the skills they need to engage in what’s happening in the classroom? But it started to feel like the same problems over and over again. Even the novel problems started to feel like rote. They were variations on puzzles I had solved before.

I was doing my job (and I’d go so far as to say doing my job pretty well), but I was just doing my job. I wasn’t phoning it in. But I wasn’t growing as an educator in the way I wanted to. I was trying new things with my students, but doing new things didn’t spark my curiosity and imagination the way they once did. I’d read articles about burn-out. Burn-out wasn’t the problem. It was absolutely, without a doubt time for a change.

Making the Change

With the exception of two years as a K-6 Literacy Coach, I’ve done the same job almost my entire career: Middle School Learning Specialist. I’ve almost always focused on pull-out instruction with a smattering of push-in and coaching. It’s been primarily focused on reading and writing, with some executive functioning and math thrown in. I liked what I was doing, but as much as I loved teaching reading and writing, the math and executive functioning pieces were the most interesting.

A lot of my time last school year was spent figuring out what my next step would be.

Would it be:

Leadership?
Would it be to stay where I was and try to create new ways to work and new ways to grow?
The same thing somewhere else?
Teaching something new?
Leaving teaching entirely and go into ed tech?
Trying to find a Clinical Professor position and throw myself into teacher ed?

Honestly, that’s part of why I didn’t blog much last year. That type of self-reflection was better suited to non-public writing and thinking. And I was lucky that an opportunity appeared that was the change I was looking for–new grade-level, new challenges, new subject matter, and an administrator I knew I wanted to work with. It doesn’t always work out that way. I’m excited to be starting work in a few weeks as the K-4 Learning Specialist at my school’s lower school, developing their math intervention (RtI) program. I’m definitely excited for the change and I have absolutely found my butterflies (even if some of those butterflies are a little bit of worry that I’ll miss Middle School).

So, if you’re going back to school this fall and you’re realizing that you don’t feel those butterflies in your stomach, here are some things you can do.

1. Self-reflection is key

Self-reflection is one of the best ways that we have as educators to check in on our own practice.

I was in a good position. I liked my job and I didn’t need a change, but I wanted one and knew things would be better for me professionally if I had new challenges. That meant I could apply to jobs and carefully consider what I was doing. If I hadn’t been checking in with my own thoughts and feelings about my work, I might have been in a place where I absolutely needed to leave or had become burned out.

2. Take stock of your strengths, areas for growth, and goals

Really think about them. Journal. Make lists. Answer the questions honestly.

What are the things that still excite you about your job?
Where do you know you need to grow and how do you want to make those changes?
What new challenges would you like to embrace?

Knowing the answers to these questions will help you find the right position, make the changes you need to make in your current position, and have conversations about your next steps.

3. Talk to trusted colleagues, administrators, and mentors

Talk to people.

If you have administrators that will be supportive, talking to them can be very helpful. I was able to talk to my principal and assistant principal. They are definitely administrators who want to support their teachers’ growth and helped me to make that happen, even if their school wasn’t the right place to do it. I also talked options over with a mentor from graduate school and a few trusted colleagues. Talking to people who know you and know your field well can help you figure out what kind of change is the right kind of change.

4. Look at what’s out there

Looking isn’t the same as choosing to leave or deciding that change is a definite outcome. Looking at job options as they start to appear in late January and as the continue to pop up through the winter, and then sifting through the many options in the spring can help you to see what’s out there. It can also help you negotiate new responsibilities and duties that might be that challenge that you’re looking for.

5. Be kind to yourself

It’s easy to look at Education Twitter or education blogs or (especially) Teacher Instagram and think that everything is perfect for everyone else. We’re encouraged to share the victories and not always encouraged to share the struggles. Even in this post while I’m striving to be as honest as possible, there are still parts of the decision making process that I glossed over because they weren’t things I wanted to share publicly (and that’s OK–not everything needs to be published).

Everyone has times when they question where they are.

Everyone has been in a position where a teaching position just wasn’t working for them any more.

It’s OK. You’ll figure it out.

Are you feeling the butterflies as you prepare to go back to school? What challenges are you excited to embrace this year?

When I started my job a year ago, I went to look at my room–which is tiny and has no windows to the outside–and saw six student desks with chairs piled in the middle of the room, a giant teacher’s desk, one wall that felt like it was made of cardboard that was covered in deep scratches, the box for an active board, the cords for the yet-to-be-installed projector dangling from the ceiling, and what I now affectionately refer to as my “window to nowhere”. I’m not ashamed to admit it–I burst into tears. Ordering appropriate furniture, I was told, was out of the question. Thankfully, I had some wonderful colleagues who scavenged bookshelves and better furniture for me from around the school while I was in new staff orientation. I worked with what I had. I made it better, but never really succeeded in finding something I was happy with. Part of it is the size of the room, part of it is the furniture, and part of it was having trouble figuring out what I wanted learning support to look like for me and my students. And, if I’m totally honest, part of it was being overwhelmed by being new and frustrated with what I had. Classroom design was the furthest thing from my mind most of the year.

This year I decided to start setting up the Friday before staff had to be back. I started by trying to track down the IKEA cube shelf that I had ordered for manipulative storage. Nope. Never ordered. I found some boxes to pack the materials in and then got started on fixing the window to nowhere. Last year one of my adorable M1s suggested that I put up a poster of the Brooklyn Bridge so I could have a view just like Ms. Other Learning Specialist. While it was an adorable suggestion, I could see how it could maybe, possibly, be misconstrued by adults and might seem passive aggressive. Just a bit, right?

So I turned this:

My window to nowhere. Complete with a sequined bracelet, lost eternally behind all of the lockers.

Into this:

I decided that black and white letters would really pop on my newly pained, extremely bright green door. So I picked these up from Staples. And voila!

Classroom design: My new door — My new classroom door

I covered my icky wall in purple paper and set up sections for Essential Questions, Problem Solving, and Writing.

Here’s a close up of my EQs:

A trip to the Container Store and I had storage bins for manipulatives–I can’t recommend these bins highly enough. They have smaller containers inside where I was able to sort things by type. If I had manipulatives for more that my groups of 5 or 6, I would probably use the trays to make sets of just enough per table and have students come up and take a tray back to their group.

I also decided the solution to my lack of shelving for storage lay in my magnetic walls–the magnetic pencil holders that kids use in their lockers. And I printed out some cute labels from TPT that continued the green, purple, chevrons & polkadots theme. I need to pick up a few more this weekend. I’m hoping to have bins for highlighers, pencils, pens, markers, scissors, and Expo markers. For the Expo markers I’m going to pick up one of the divided containers so I can put the markers and eraser in the same bin.

IMG_20140829_074821 — Obviously, I need a better way to affix these…magnets?

I also got a few of the same magnetic containers I use to store my spices and turned them into storage for paper clips, tacks, and…something else…not sure what goes in the middle one yet.

As far as furniture goes, after much consideration, I decided to pass my comfy red chair along to one of my colleagues in the English department who has more space, and is looking into setting up an independent reading program for her 7th graders. As much as I love the idea of having a comfortable space for students to do independent work, who got to sit in the chair became a constant source of argument amongst the students–even when I set a schedule for who got to sit in the chair when. And for many of the students, this was the first time in middle school that they had a chair like that to sit in, so it was really difficult to shift their thinking from “this is a place to relax” to “this is a comfortable place to do work”.

After much shifting of tables and staring at the room hoping that a good plan would reveal itself, I finally decided to put the tables along the wall, and one desk opposite. The students would be able to do both independent and collaborative work at the tables, and I could use the desk for either a student who needed some extra space around her to focus or to work with students 1:1. The one comfy touch I kept were the cube footstools that students often sit on to do work. They’re soft enough to be a bit bouncy for kids that need to fidget, but just the right height to put at the tables or the desk. They’re also great for sitting on when using laptops, a small whiteboard, or writing on a clipboard.

How did you set up your room this year? For those of you who do intervention, what types of furniture/configuration have you found best for working with students?

Tag: back to school

Finding the Butterflies: 5 Things to Do If You Think It’s Time for a Change