EP 254 - 5 Ways to End the Year on a Positive Note With Your Students

Today we're diving into a topic that's close to every teacher's heart: ending the year on a positive note with your students.

As we all know, this year has been filled with challenges, from behavior issues to a lack of support from admin and parents. It's no wonder we're feeling exhausted. But despite the chaos, we're determined to finish the year strong and leave a lasting positive impact on our students.

In this episode, we'll explore strategies to end the year on a high note without falling into the trap of toxic positivity. We'll discuss how to reflect on your growth as a teacher and celebrate the progress you've made, even if it feels overshadowed by the challenges you've faced.

In today's episode, we will talk about the following:

• Recognizing Student Progress
• Balancing Success and Failure
• Recognizing Unseen Impact
• Encouraging Student Reflection
• Acknowledging Challenges and Gratitude

Tune in!

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Patti Firth: Hello, teachers, and welcome to another episode of Ignite Your Teaching. My name is Patti, and I'll be your host for today. All right. This year has been chaos. It has been a roller coaster of emotions with the ups and the downs. We have had behavior, we have had lack of support from admin, from parents, and we are just plain exhausted. But we also really just want to end the year on a positive note. So what are some things that you can do to try to end your year in the most positive way possible without entering into the realm of toxic positivity? So let's look at some of the things that you can do to end a year on a positive note.

[00:00:46] Welcome to the Ignite Your Teaching video podcast, a show to inspire teachers to level up how they teach using simple systems and time saving tools for their classroom. I'm your host, Patti Firth, mom of three, wife and a teacher who has spent the last ten years transforming my love of teaching into helping other teachers learn how to fit it all together through innovative resources and solutions for elementary classrooms over at madlylearning.com. So, are you ready to ignite your teaching?

[00:01:17] First, I want you to give yourself a pat on the back. The reality is that you have grown this year as a teacher. We all have. There has been things that have happened. We are a different person from September than we are to now. We are a different person than we were three or four years ago in our teaching career. Every year we teach, we grow, and we learn. There is something that we have learned and changed in how we do things.

[00:01:44] Whether we learn from failure or we learned from something positive or it just developed over time, we have to give ourselves a pat on the back for making these gains in the growth that we have. If we only sit and focus on the negative, if the negative thoughts are what is consuming us all of the time, then we often then choose the behaviors and choose the actions that correspond with those negative thoughts.

[00:02:09] The negativity is happening, there is no doubt about that. But sometimes if we focus on some good that has happened without ignoring the bad, but focus on some of the good things that had resulted this year, that is a way to go and approach how we can end the year on a positive note, reflecting on the fact that we have grown and changed the idea that we kept showing up even though it was hard. We persevered, we didn't get up and we made it through. We have learned those lessons and we're going to take those lessons forward with us into the next year and the years over and over beyond into the rest of our career.

[00:02:48] We also have to acknowledge that we made progress this year. Think of all of your students. Now, for many of us, myself included, we often like to dwell on the couple of students that we just really wanted to reach and couldn't. Because there's part of us as teachers that we just want to have this success for every student in our classroom. But sometimes we forget to acknowledge that there's two people in that relationship and that sometimes a student comes into your room and things are happening outside of your control and they're not ready yet to learn from you. But if you did your best and made the environment as positive as possible, you don't know the impact that that's going to have. Maybe you were just a safe place to go to. Maybe you were just a safe outlet to express their frustrations and fears when they didn't have something else.

[00:03:41] But instead of focusing on. On the failures or the things we perceive as failures. Focus on those students that did grow, that did change, that did develop strengths inside our room as a result of our teaching. We have to actually look at the fraction the fraction of students who succeeded versus students we failed to reach and look at the scale. And if our balance is tipping towards the positive, then we have to focus on that.

[00:04:12] We have to remember that it wasn't all just a lost cause because one or two students did not learn from us or we had a terrible year with those students. We can realize that in a class of 25, not all 25 students learned nothing. They did learn things, and we made success with them. We made progress with them. So we need to focus on that as well. We need to wake ourselves up to the idea that not all 25 students in our classroom had a miserable, dismal year and learned absolutely nothing. They did learn things. They did have moments. They did appreciate the things that you did. But we can't always get 100%, and that's okay. 70% is good too.

[00:04:57] So if we actually look at the percentage if we look at the fraction of how many students had a positive experience in our room, how many students were we able to see the progress from where they were in September to where they are now? That's a testament of your teaching. You did that. Was it easy? Probably not. Did you want to pull your hair out a million times? Yes. That's sort of the job of being a teacher. Maybe not to the extremes that we're seeing it, but we do have to help our students through that struggle to make that progress. So celebrate the progress that you did make. Instead of focusing on the progress, you didn't focus on the progress you did make with your students and set your standards realistic for what is realistic to expect of one human being over 196 days to be able to accomplish.

[00:05:56] We also have to recognize that within these last 196 days, we have built a community, a community of individuals from different backgrounds, from different experiences. And they all came into our classroom and we worked together.Certainly it was chaos many days, but it probably wasn't chaos every single day. And you probably had moments throughout the year where it was great. Your kids are going to miss you. And that's a testament of all of the hard work that you have done to build relationships with them, to build meaningful connections with them that is special. And sometimes we forget. And we only focus on the students we couldn't reach and the students we couldn't be successful with and the students we didn't quite see the progress for. But there are students in your room that you built meaningful connections with. You are that person.

[00:06:53] And remember, we can't always see the impact of what happens. Even if we feel that we didn't make a connection with some students, it doesn't actually mean we didn't. Sometimes you might not see the results of the impact you had on a student for a few years where they come back and say, "hey, thanks for holding me accountable. Thanks for pushing me." You see, the next year, a student comes back and they're not struggling with the same things that they struggled with when they started with you. That shows some growth.

[00:07:53] And it's interesting for me teaching grade six because they come in as pretty much a grade five and they leave as a grade seven. And the growth that happens from grade five to grade seven is astronomical, really. And they change so much over that time. And when I see them walk in in September as their grade seven self and we're not I'm not seeing them struggle with the same kind of things that they did when they were the beginning grade six and their little grade five self.

[00:08:10] I have to think that something that we did over the year, even though I struggled through that entire year with that student and wanted to pull my hair out. But I see them the next year having less struggles. It makes me think, well, I felt unsuccessful, but maybe that wasn't the same experience for that student. Maybe the struggles that I went through with that student that made me want to pull my hair out actually had an impact I wasn't even aware of. Or maybe it didn't. Maybe it had no impact whatsoever and just things in their life have changed.

[00:08:43] But the reality is we can't control the reactions of others, even of others that are our students. We can't decide that just because we feel like we've been unsuccessful, that that is the experience that somebody else has had. So we have to reflect on that and realize that we did our best and we built the community, we built connections. We tried to get our students to make those progress. And that's a big deal. That's not easy to do to make connections. I think it's also an important experience to ask our students to do some reflection themselves because again, things that you might see, things that you might perceive as the teacher, it might be different for students.

[00:09:30] They might have a memory of something you did in your classroom that was insignificant to you but meant a lot to them. So ask them. Build in these last couple of weeks of school. Build in some time for students to reflect and share. What were their memories, what did they like, what did they not like? And you're probably going to have kids that say, I hated everything and you're the worst teacher ever. Okay, come back in 15 years and see if you still think that. Who knows? Maybe you do. But the reality is that I'm not going to reach every student I teach. I'm not going to be that person for everyone. And I really hope that the students I can't reach, I can't reach out to and help and support to make the progress that I know they're capable of, that if I am not that person, I have to be okay with that.

[00:10:24] And I have to hope that sometime in the future, or even in the past, that that student did have someone they connected to. And it's okay to realize that it might not be me, and I'm okay with that. I still provided them a safe environment in which they could choose to learn if they wanted to.

[00:10:45] So ask your students to reflect. You can reflect on yourself. What were your favorite moments, but also ask your students to reflect because it might give you some perspective into what was meaningful for them. And then you can take that information, learn from it, grow, and try something different the next time, or do the same thing and put it on repeat because clearly it worked. But asking for that reflection piece and really focusing on the reflection from a positive standpoint and what their memories were helps to focus on the good things that happened instead of dwelling only on the negative.

[00:11:21] It's not that we can't acknowledge that negative stuff has happened because the reality is it probably has. You have probably had. Parents that have been super critical. You've probably had horrible emails coming into your inbox. You've probably had a lack of resources, a lack of admin support, co teachers that maybe were not the greatest. Whatever it happens to be, you can reflect on the idea that you did something, you learned, you made a choice, you stuck with it, and don't regret it.

[00:11:58] The final point here is gratitude. Gratitude for the idea that we have the privilege of getting to impact these students lives. I know we all had teachers. We all had teachers that impacted our lives. And I don't want to perpetuate this idea of teacher as the martyr that we can't have boundaries because you can be gracious. You can have gratitude for the fact that you said no to things that didn't serve you any longer, that you set boundaries. That's personally what I'm grateful for. This year, I learned how to set even more boundaries. I learned how to say no. And when a teaching situation wasn't great, I could say no, and I could prioritize myself and my own mental health over the job.

[00:12:57] And I've learned that's the learning that I have gathered and I've reflected on. But we can share our grad attitude. We can say thank you to those students that were always helpful. We can show appreciation for the colleagues that have always been there to support us. We can say thank you to the amazing admin that we might have. So some of us don't have amazing admin. Some of us do. But to say thank you to an admin that helped clear the path, that supported you in an issue that was there for you.

[00:13:37] Parents who were appreciative of you. Say thank you. Say thank you to those students that helped out, that volunteered, that made that progress. Tell them you're proud of them. And it means the world to a student to hear that somebody they hold on a pedestal us, that they're that we are proud of them because we're not like their parents.

[00:14:06] When your parents cheer for you, you know in the back of your mind that, yes, they love you, but they have to cheer for you. A teacher doesn't have to cheer for you. So when a teacher says, I'm proud of you, it has a different set of weight. So we can share that with our students. And it helps us to just end the year on a positive note. It helps us focus on positive things so we don't dwell on the negative. We have to deal with the negative. We have to acknowledge that it's there. We can't just ignore it and be like, well, think positive. We have to acknowledge that it's happening, but also focus on the thoughts and the feelings that we are having and asking ourselves whether or not those thoughts are true and are they real.

[00:14:58] What's your fraction? It's the fraction of students you have impacted. What's the fraction of students that did participate in your community? What is the fraction of students that enjoyed and made lasting impacts in your classroom? You can look at those students. I bet for most of us, the number of students that we impacted, outweighs the number of students that we didn't. So we can reflect on that and ask ourselves if the thoughts that we're having in our head are true all the time. End your year on a positive note and go into the summer with the ability to feel refreshed and relaxed and get yourself ready for the next year.