301. 3 Things That Actually Matter Before the School Year Ends

Hey teachers, and welcome to another episode of the Seller Teacher Podcast. I'm Tammy, one of the Seller Teacher Team members, and I am so excited to be here with you today to talk about three things that actually matter before the school year ends. Before we talk about those things, I want you to ask yourself a question, and I want you to be brutally honest.

As you think about the end of the school year, are you spending your final weeks teaching, or are you just surviving? And if you're just surviving, that's okay. I promise you're not alone.

I know that the end of the school year can be so exhausting and there is a lot of pressure to get everything done, to cover everything and to fit in all of those fun activities that we usually have scheduled

at the end of the school year. Today I am going to give you some tips and some ideas to hopefully limit that exhaustion and to focus on what's really important

as the school year comes to a close. So let's talk about our big idea number one, which is I want you to let go of the coverage myth. So we have this idea in our heads

that we need to cover everything before the end of the school year. And this is not totally our fault. We have these long lists of standards.

We get pacing guides that come from above and we fill this pressure that we have to get to everything and we have to cover it before that last day of school.

But I think it's important to remember that coverage is really not the same thing as learn. And honestly, students probably forget about 80% of what we teach them.

And so when we think about what is that 20% that we really want to stick, that can help us decide what is most important to include as a school year comes to an end.

So I want you to take this permission slip that I'm giving you and it tells you it is totally okay to skip something, to condense something, or to cut it all together. That is part of your professional judgment. You know what the students need at the end of the school year and

it's okay if you didn't make it through everything. So that myth, that good teachers cover everything before the end of the school year. We are going to to let that go because we want this school year to end with joy and happiness and kids who still want to learn.

Before we jump back into the episode, I wanna invite you to join us for our Stellar Teacher Summer Learning Series starting June 1st.

This summer, we're hosting a book study along with additional literacy trainings designed specifically for upper elementary teachers who wanna strengthen their literacy instruction.

If you're looking for meaningful professional learning this summer, you can learn more at stellarteacher.com slash summer. And that brings me to our second idea, and that is it's okay to not finish everything.

And so for this idea, I'm not just talking about covering standards or covering skills. I want you to know that it's okay to abandon a book, abandon a project, or whatever it may be that you have always felt like has to be finished before the school year ends. We know that it is just so busy.

And sometimes we put this pressure on ourselves to get everything done when it's just not feasible. Or if we are able to get it done, it was with a lot of stress for both us and our students.

And I think about this as something that I went through in the classroom every year we did this published book and it was something that the students loved. I loved it, but to be honest,

it was also a really stressful thing for me and even for them because although we started working on it early, early in the semester, when it came to crunch time towards the end of the year, there was a lot of pressure for all of us to be able to get it done.

And eventually I realized that all of the pressure was not worth it. I ended up dropping that project from my end of the year plans and I was able to do other things instead and nobody was the wiser. So just because it's something that you've always done doesn't mean that you have to

do it every school year. You can really base that on your energy, your student's energy, and what else is going on in the classroom. I think it's also okay to remember that you can abandon a book.

I actually was famous for this. I would, you know, grab a new novel and think, oh yeah, we have plenty of time to get this novel done before the end of the school year. And then more and more things came up because of course the schedule changes 15 times.

This award ceremony was added and this party was added. And I found myself trying to cram in all of these chapters and none of us were actually enjoying the book. So we didn't finish it.

I told the students, you can check this out from the library. You can come borrow it from me next school year, whatever it might be. If you really are interested in this book, you know that it will be available. And just letting go of that took so much pressure off of me and reminded me that I don't have

to finish everything. I think it's also something to think about even with just the general writing process. You know, we all have this idea that writing includes publishing at the very end. And so you may be working on a writing project with your students and you may not make

it to the publishing part of writing, which actually is fine all school year long. piece of writing doesn't have to be published. It's totally okay. So the third thing that I want to talk about that actually matters before the school year ends. So we talked about two things that we can kind of let go, right?

We can let go of that myth that we have to cover everything. We can let go of the idea that every single thing has to be finished. So this is the thing that I do want you to focus on

and that is finishing the school year strong means finishing connected. So it's not going to be super powerful for you to squeeze in one more standard

or one more activity or one more project. But what is powerful is those relationships and those connections that you've built all school year long. Taking time at the end of the school year to really build on those meaningful connections