Pennington Publishing Blog

Teacher Hygge

Everyone could use a little more hygge, especially teachers. You’ve heard about it and searched how to spell it, but what is it?

Essentially, hygge is the Danish (and some claim Norwegian) term for that moment in life when you sigh, smile, and say, “Life is good.” It’s the cozy, comfortable, and fun lifestyle. Some say that it derives from hugge, the old Norse word for hug. Hygge is not solely introspective; it is also other-focused. Hygge is about the individual fitting into the community. That’s my version of mindfulness. I call it “Summer Teacher Mindfulness.”

To achieve hygge, teachers need to recognize and take advantage of the rhythms of our teaching lives. Summer is the perfect time to play (not work) toward this goal with the five strategies of “Summer Teacher Mindfulness.” Now, put aside all the stuff you’ve heard about mindfulness training. No one has the copyright or monopoly on this term. It need not have a religious connotation, but it can and does so in a variety of religious practices: some Eastern and some Western. My concept of mindfulness is simple: Take time to decompress and restore a proper work-life balance. Take time to enjoy our profession and be re-encouraged about the importance of our career paths.

My five “Summer Teacher Mindfulness” strategies are simple to understand and implement: Relax, Re-group, Re-connect, Re-commit, and Re-train. No, I’m not writing a self-help book on these strategies; I’m no expert. These strategies are nothing new. Take them as reminders of what you already know to be true as a teacher. Notice, I don’t claim that these will work for every profession; I only know what I know as a teacher. Check out the article detailing these strategies here.

Summer Teacher Mindfulness

Note that the sequence is important. It moves from an inward focus to an outward goal, taking care of yourself so that you can do so for others. Teaching is a sacrificial profession: we do give up some personal prerogatives for the benefit of our students. No need to list them here. But, learn the wisdom from Jesus’ words: “Love your neighbor as yourself (Matthew 22:39 New International Version). You can only sacrifice what you have to offer.

So let’s get practical here and talk about what teachers do during summer vacation. Yes, I know the term is an oxymoron. No teacher I know has the summer off. Some of us have other jobs to pay the bills. Most teachers spend some (or a lot) of their summer taking graduate coursework to expand their knowledge base (and improve their position on the salary schedule), or they attend professional development training. Most teachers also use the summer months for grade-level team or individual planning. Think curricular maps and lesson plans. My experience is that this process involves the latter three strategies: Re-connect, Re-commit, and Re-train. It’s the cart before the horse. How much better to learn and plan after the first two strategies: Relax and Re-group?

Beginning the summer in the right place makes the rest of our “vacation” go so much better. We re-connect with our friends, families, and colleagues in a relaxed state of mind with an openness to new ideas and fresh, out-of-the-box approaches. We are in the proper mental state to re-commit to the love of our lives: teaching and our students, and we can prepare for the newness of our fresh start to the school year by re-training with new things to try. Following the process is simply rejuvenating. That’s the feeling of teacher hygge.

After relaxing and re-grouping, want to re-connect, re-commit, and re-train without re-inventing the wheel? Check out these grade-level English-language arts curricular maps for you summer team and individual planning.

Summer Plannin’ for Grades 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

Summer plannin’ made easy! Day by day grammar, mechanics, spelling, and vocabulary plans for next year! A FREE curricular map completely aligned to the CCSS and ready to write in your planner. Want the grade-level CCSS alignment documents? They’re in there!

No need to re-invent the wheel this summer by applying the Common Core State Standards to your grade-level curricular mapping. For those “other than reading and writing” subjects we all need to teach (think grammar, mechanics, spelling, and vocabulary), check out these twice-per week curricular listings:

PREVIEW and DOWNLOAD the GRADE 4  CURRICULAR MAP HERE.

PREVIEW and DOWNLOAD the GRADE 5  CURRICULAR MAP HERE.

PREVIEW and DOWNLOAD the GRADE 6  CURRICULAR MAP HERE.

PREVIEW and DOWNLOAD the GRADE 7  CURRICULAR MAP HERE.

PREVIEW and DOWNLOAD the GRADE 8  CURRICULAR MAP HERE.

Following each curricular map are sample lessons from my own program (designed to teach each lesson in the curricular map), followed by the CCSS alignment documents.

Grammar/Mechanics, Literacy Centers, Reading, Spelling/Vocabulary, Study Skills, Writing assessment-based individualized instruction. Pennington Publishing, Danish hygge, how to practice mindfulness, hygge, Mark Pennington, mindfulness, professional development, summer break, summer school, summer vacation, teacher attrition, teacher burn-out, teacher mindfulness, teacher mindset, teacher PTSD, teacher stress, teacher tips, teacher training, teaching careers

Summer Teacher Mindfulness

It sometimes seemed as if it never would arrive, and then it showed up so surprisingly soon: summer! Built into every teacher is a certain life cycle, even if the teacher is teaching year-round, or (God-forbid) summer school. The anticipation of the weekends, holidays, breaks, and summer vacation is often more rewarding than the thing in-it-of-itself. This summer, let’s make the thing better than the lead-up.

I’m Mark Pennington, a teacher publisher and ELA teacher/reading specialist. Of course I want to sell you books, but I also care about my profession. Teaching is the love of my life, as it is for many of you. However, the research (with which I will not bore you) shows that more and more teachers are entering the profession with idealistic high hopes of truly making a difference in others’ lives, but crashing and burning within a few years. Even for veteran teachers, a 7, 17, or 27 year itch or even PTSD can threaten a meaningful career.

I’m not self-help guru, but I recently read an article in the Washington Post by Megan McDonough in which she highlights some of the thoughts of Finnish author, Miska Rantanen in his book, Pantsdrunk. Read that title again; you can’t make this stuff up.

I like people from Finland because one of my lifelong friends was a Finnish foreign exchange student back in high school and because everyone has heard that the Finnish educational system is the best in the world. My friend, Mika, says it isn’t, but that’s beside the point. Anyway, I saw the Finnish name, Miska, and decided to read the article. It’s about different cultural approaches to the latest American pop craze: mindfulness. The article confirms a few practices which I and some of my happiest colleagues have been doing during the summer to re-energize and re-charge.

All foreign language terms come from the Washington Post article.

One of the points of the article is that mindfulness means different things to different cultures. It’s purposes and practices can be completely different. It can also be religious or purely secular. If you are studying Zen Buddhism or the early Christian meditation practices, you will get different approaches and purposes. (The former’s goal is emptiness, while the latter’s goal is filling.) If you are a secular type, you may beg, borrow, and steal from either, any, or none. (My wife and teaching colleagues would agree that I’m an equal opportunity annoyer.) Anyway, the author’s purpose and mine is not to harmonize these different ideas of mindfulness and pretend that they are all the same. My purpose is to describe a few practices that seem to work for me and other teachers.

Since anyone with access to the Internet and a blog can coin a term these days, I’ll call it “Summer Teacher Mindfulness.” Since “Summer Teacher Mindfulness” is my own term, I get to make up my own ideas and practice. Join in if it makes sense to you. Teachers only. This is an exclusive club 🙂 like the staff-only bathroom.

Please feel free to add on your own ideas for each of these five steps in the comments section.

Summer Teacher Mindfulness? My take is that teachers need summer to Relax, Re-group, Re-connect, Re-commit, and Re-train.

Relax

It’s been a long year and you’ve worked hard. Perhaps no other profession is as emotionally draining. Non-teachers don’t understand how much students, colleagues, administrators, and parents take from you. Just like your phone, you have to re-charge your batteries. I say it’s okay to focus on yourself a bit. Didn’t Jesus say, “Love your neighbor as yourself” (Matthew 22:39 New International Version)? We focus on the first part, but can only do that well if we take care of the last part.

The Danes call their approach to a relaxed lifestyle, hygge (HOO-ga). They emphasize simple, cozy, comfortable living. Check out my related article, “Teacher Hygge” and learn how to take concrete steps toward living the good life. Nothing you don’t already know, but an encouragement to restore FUN in your life. Also, download my free grammar, usage, mechanics, spelling, and vocabulary curriculum maps in that same article to make your summer plannin’ easy.

Re-group

Relaxing allows us to take stock of our lives, to put things in perspective, and to see ourselves as we really are (warts and all). I’m a reading specialist and so I think about a technique to improve comprehension called metacognition. Essentially, metacognition means to think about thinking. That’s re-grouping. It’s deliberate and may take a portion of your summer, but my view is that we often skip this step and move from a week’s vacation (Relax) to re-connect to0 quickly with others and our profession. If you’re doing lesson planning on your Hawaiian vacation, you are are not relaxing nor re-grouping.

For me, two practical steps of re-grouping are walking and reading. I jump full-throttle into these summer disciplines as soon as I’ve relaxed a bit. These recreational

Ikigai for Teachers

disciplines do just that: they re-create. The Japanese re-group with nature through movement. They call it ikigai (Ee-KEY-guy), or “reason for being.” The Norewegians re-group by embracing nature and use the term, friluftsliv (FREE-loofts-liv), to describe open-air living. I imagine Norwegians really have to make use of their summers for this practice, given the gloom they live in for much of the year. As soon as I’m done with this article, I’m going on a short hike.

Re-connect

We can’t lead self-focused lives forever, nor should we. We are teachers. Our focus in the teaching profession is giving the who and what plus how. We give of ourselves to students. If you haven’t figured this out yet, you won’t last long in our profession. Teaching is all about relationships. But in the summer we need to practice building (and re-building) relationships. A teacher’s positive relationships with family, friends, and community statistically correlates with positive professional relationships. So call your mom; hang with friends; get to know an unknown neighbor and do some volunteer work.

The Dutch practice these social re-connections and term it gezellig (Heh-SELL-ick). I don’t think the Dutch have Facebook or Instagram in mind. It’s all about re-connecting in person.

Of course we do have to (let’s go with “get to”) re-connect with what we teach and how we teach it.

Re-commit

Before you re-connect with work planning, take time to re-commit. I’m serious. Every teacher needs a solemn ceremony (it may need only last until you finish reading this article) to re-affirm our contract. It’s like reciting wedding vows in a re-commitment ceremony.

Recently, I attended my niece’s graduation from nursing school. The graduation involves a group recital of the The Nightingale Pledge, named in honor of Florence Nightingale. It’s a modified version of the Hippocratic Oath. The recitation is followed by a pinning ceremony in which registered nurses receive a specially designed pin bearing the name of their nursing school. It’s a tangible reminder of their professional commitment.

My summer re-commitment involves taking out and contemplating a simple framed pencil drawing, completed long ago by a friend upon receiving my teaching credential from U.C.L.A. It’s a simple drawing of a classroom scene in which I’m sitting among my students. You have your own re-commitment ceremony, but do it. Remind yourself of the privilege it is to teach and your idealist commitment to do so when you first began your teaching career. You didn’t get into this profession for the money; although, the vacations are not too bad 🙂

Part of a teacher’s re-commitment should include a commitment to a balanced work and home life. The Swedish practice this balance, “not too much and not too little” in their cultural philosophy called lagom (lah-GOM). One practice of lagom, which I plan to incorporate in my “Summer Teacher Mindfulness” is a daily break involving either a hot beverage or a treat. Yes to both.

Re-train

My strong advice is to do something new. Intentionally abandon some of what has proven to work for you and your students and try something different. For me, I’ve loved the flexibility of change within our profession. I’ve changed subject areas (history to reading to ELA), grade levels (I’ve taught elementary, middle school, high school, and community college), and schools. In the last few years I’ve tried literacy centers, interactive notebooks, Socratic seminars, and more. I’ve taken on new committee assignments and served on different district task forces. You get the idea. Change is good. We teachers love to learn and so re-training fills that need.

I will make one suggestion for re-training. Consider re-training your mindset from teaching to learning. Be about what and how students learn, not only about what and how you teach. There is not a distinction without a difference.

One way to focus on learning is to shift from a class to an individual student mindset. Here we go back to the relational component of our profession which I’ve already discussed. The best way to re-focus on the individual student’s needs? Assessment-based individualized instruction. That’s what my Pennington Publishing ELA and reading intervention resources are all about. Of course, we also teach grade-level Standards, but quick, accurate, whole-class assessments can determine what and how you teach to individual students. Want the assessments (absolutely free) that I use? Grammar and Usage, Mechanics, Spelling, Phonemic Awareness, Phonics, Sight Words and Syllables, Reading Fluency. Click below and I’ll send the assessment downloads with recording matrices to your email address. What a great way to re-train this summer!

Get the Diagnostic ELA and Reading Assessments FREE Resource:

Grammar/Mechanics, Literacy Centers, Reading, Spelling/Vocabulary, Study Skills, Writing assessment-based individualized instruction. Pennington Publishing, how to practice mindfulness, Mark Pennington, mindfulness, professional development, summer break, summer school, summer vacation, teacher attrition, teacher burn-out, teacher mindfulness, teacher mindset, teacher PTSD, teacher stress, teacher tips, teacher training, teaching careers

ELA Teacher Burn-out

Teacher burn-out is real. We begin with high expectations of ourselves and idealism; however, after a few years the drudgery sets in. ELA teachers seem to burn-out more often than their colleagues in other disciplines. What causes burn-out and how can we work through this phase in our teaching careers?

None of us gets into the teaching profession with the hopes of being mediocre. All ELA/reading teachers want to do their best for their students. But how can we give our best when so many impediments stand in our way? I’m not talking about the usual ones we discuss in the staff room: discipline problems, overbearing administrators, bothersome parents, lack of materials. I’m talking about the all of the stuff that reductively minimizes our opportunity to be our best. In other words, if we could just rid ourselves (and our students) of… XXXX, we could truly be the teachers we want to be. So, let’s explore the impediments many ELA/reading teachers that keep us from teaching how and what we need to teach, the solutions as to how to reduce or get rid of these in our teaching repertoire, and most importantly what to teach now that the impediments have been removed.

10 Causes of ELA Teacher Burn-out and Solutions

1. Standards

Impediments: Although most teachers support the notion of an instructional scope and sequence, district-state-national standards were not delivered at Mt. Sinai. Some ELA/reading standards are more important than others and we ultimately and practically teach our students, not the standards. Our students are an unruly lot, refusing to progress at exactly the same rates and generally making a mess of our year-to-year academic standards.

Solutions: Establish priorities in terms of instructional time. Does anyone think that an identifying author’s purpose standard merits the same amount of attention as a reading comprehension standard? Develop a balance between teaching grade-level and review standards, according to the needs of your students indicated by diagnostic data.

2. School Culture and Interruptions

Impediments: At the middle or high school level, the ELA classes check out all books in the library, get student identification pictures, get picture re-takes, listen to counselor career presentations, and attend discipline assemblies. Daily announcements, spirit assemblies, guest speakers, phone calls interrupt all teachers. Not to mention the usual bathroom/counselor/nurse passes.

Solutions: Be assertive and learn to say “No.” Get other colleagues on board, work through the appropriate channels, and be willing to compromise; but guard “time on task” and re-visit these impediments regularly—they have a habit of sneaking back in.

3. Traditions

Impediments: 3^rd grade silkworms and the reading incentive program, 4^th grade dioramas and animal reports, 5^th grade sugar cube castles and state reports, 6^th grade science projects and PowerPoint® presentations, 7^th grade African masks and oral reports, Martin Luther King, Jr. essay contest and 8^th grade U.S. Constitution graduation requirement. You get the idea.

Solutions: Develop the mindset that any instructional activity that can achieve the same objectives in a more efficient manner than another instructional activity should be the one you choose. Don’t confuse content and process objectives.

4. Colleagues

Impediments: “We all teach XXXX. It’s a team decision—there is no I in team.” Disagreement is perceived as personal attack. Gossip, friendship, even romance. And colleagues tend to prey upon our good natures to get us to follow their agendas.

Solutions: Affirm your colleagues’ agendas, but don’t get sucked in. Always run a cost-benefit analysis when changing instruction. Being a team player doesn’t mean sacrificing your autonomy. Do what makes sense for you and your students.

5. Scheduling

Impediments: Advanced band is only offered this period, the special education pull-out study skills program, the reading intervention program, the remedial-basic-advanced-honors ELA classes, and the computer lab. And others.

Solutions: The needs of the students should dictate schedules; however, well-intended interventions, pull-out programs, and tracking can reduce the amount of core instructional time each student receives and/or change a teacher’s instructional plans. Insist upon differentiating instruction within the scope of the core ELA curricula and the confines of the regular classroom to address student needs.

6. Pigeonholing

Impediments: Shouldn’t the ELA teachers teach XXXX? Reading (literature and reading skills and SSR), writing, listening, speaking. Note-taking. Critical thinking. Problem-solving skills. Study skills. Career exploration. And let’s add on basic parenting.

Solutions: Preach “all teachers are teachers of reading, writing, and thinking.” Get to know the process-oriented standards of your math, social studies, arts, foreign language, physical education, and science teachers for ammunition and encourage everyone to share the load.

7. Educational Fads

Impediments: Learning styles, rigor and relevance, multiple intelligences, small learning communities, tribes, Cornell notes, reading fads, levels of questioning. And a few hundred more.

Solutions: Before jumping onto bandwagons, talk to veteran teachers for their “what comes around, goes around” perspectives, search the Internet for the real research on any educational fad, and take all professors’ and presenters’ information with grains of salt. Stick to the basics when in doubt.

8. Bureaucracy and Paperwork

Impediments: Progress monitoring charts, skills documentation, reading logs, independent learning goals, student evaluations. Staff meetings. Department meetings. Grade-level team meetings. Cross-disciplinary meetings. Vertical articulation. The mind boggles.

Solutions: Veteran teachers know how to cut corners when they need cutting. Ask them. Insist upon written agendas with time allocations and a time-keeper for meetings. Push to get everything in writing that can be written on an agenda and e-mailed in advance. Hold colleagues accountable for “birdwalking.” Keep business meetings all-business, and schedule personal hang-out/discussion time prior to or after meetings.

9. Testing

Impediments: State testing, district testing, diagnostic assessments, formative assessments, summative assessments. Standardized test preparation. Unit test review.

Solutions: Select colleagues committed to protecting teacher instructional time as district representatives on testing committees. Minimize isolated test preparation. The best test preparation is good teaching in the core ELA instructional components.

10. Ourselves

Impediments: I love to share my personal life with my students. My students love my stories. My students love my jokes. I just enjoy talking with students. I go with the “teachable moments.” I teach more of this because I like it better. I hate teaching, never liked, or I’m bad at XXXX… so I don’t teach it.

Solutions: We are often our own worst enemies. Ask a trusted colleague to observe you, your personal idiosyncrasies, and how you waste instructional time. Video-tape yourself. Don’t confuse your own teaching style with poor time management. Teach all the core curricular components and work on those in which you are weak.

Instructional Priorities

There are curricular priorities that most ELA teachers would agree to teach “if only they had the time.” To be practical as possible, here are the specific “Big Six” ELA instructional components with percentages of instructional time that make sense to allocate to each. Having taught at the upper elementary, middle school, high school, and community college levels, I believe that the core instructional components and allocations of instructional time should remain constant across those levels. Take stock of what you teach and how much time you allocate to each instructional component. And feel free to disagree.

The Big Six

Time Allocations for the Common Core Standards

1. Word Study (Vocabulary and Spelling) 16%

2. Grammar and Mechanics 16%

3. Reading Strategies 16%

4. Literary Analysis 16%

5, Writing Strategies 16%

6. Writing Process Papers 16%

That leaves 4% for the impediments that you cannot remove. Such is life.

*****

Teaching Grammar and Mechanics

I’m Mark Pennington, author of the full-year interactive grammar notebooks,  grammar literacy centers, the traditional grade-level 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and high school Teaching Grammar and Mechanics programs, and the value-packed Grammar, Mechanics, Spelling, and Vocabulary BUNDLES.

Teaching Grammar and Mechanics includes 56 (64 for high school) interactive language conventions lessons,  designed for twice-per-week direct instruction in the grade-level grammar, usage, and mechanics standards. The scripted lessons (perfect for the grammatically-challenged teacher) are formatted for classroom display. Standards review, definitions and examples, practice and error analysis, simple sentence diagrams, mentor texts with writing applications, and formative assessments are woven into every 25-minute lesson. The program also includes the Diagnostic Grammar, Usage, and Mechanics Assessments with corresponding worksheets to help students catch up, while they keep up with grade-level, standards-aligned instruction.

Here’s a great example of how to manage time and avoid teacher-burn out with this full-year grammar and mechanics instructional plan:

Get the Grammar and Mechanics Grades 4-8 Instructional Scope and Sequence FREE Resource:

Grammar/Mechanics, Reading, Spelling/Vocabulary, Study Skills, Writing ELA, ELA in-service, ELA instruction, ELA scope and sequence, ELA standards, ELA teaching tips, ELA time management, English curriculum, English grammar, English standards, English-language arts, English-language Arts standards, grammar, grammar standards, how to teach ELA standards, listening and speaking standards, Mark Pennington, mechanics, national ELA standards, national standards, reading standards, RTI, standards-based, teacher burn-out, teaching English, teaching literature, Teaching Reading Strategies, teaching spelling, vocabulary standards, word analysis, word study, writing standards, writing strategies