Providing flexible seating.
Selecting literature featuring diverse characters.
Learning about suspension alternatives.
Creating meaningful social-emotional activities.
Setting up opportunities for productive failures.
These are just a few of the things that we’re faced with everyday — things that teachers are expected to not only learn about but also implement for their students. (And of course, it’s just the beginning.)
RELATED: ONE BIOLOGY TEACHER’S EXPERIENCE: HOW INCORPORATING LABS ACTUALLY SAVED TIME
In addition to all this, there’s the lessons to plan, the field trips to go on, the college recommendation letters to write, the parents to call, the clubs to sponsor, the emails to respond to. Oh yeah, and the students to teach. For many of us, the constant feeling of being overwhelmed (and never having enough time to get to everything) is too much.
But what if we started bringing our own hobbies, interests, and passions into the classroom? What if it became a space we truly loved to spend time, rather than just somewhere we had to go every day? Something we looked forward to instead of just standards that have to be taught? Somewhere that our favorite things were incorporated and not just a place where the checklist is never completely checked off?
For me, my mindset completely changed when I started incorporating my favorite things into my classroom, into my lesson plans, and talking about them with my students. Here are some simple ways to bring your passions into your classroom:
- If you’re a Star Wars fanatic, create a review game where your students use lightsabers to buzz in when they’re ready to answer a question
- Love hockey? Break your class up into three separate periods — setup a clock counting down, a buzzer, and incorporate a short break in between each period. Every day is a hockey game!
- Is music your jam? Play it while your students work. If your school blocks Pandora and Spotify there’s nothing wrong with an old school CD player.
RELATED: INCORPORATING CREATIVE WRITING INTO YOUR SCIENCE CURRICULUM
I discovered that if your students can feel your passion, they feed off of it. And it helps them to see me as more than their teacher. It helps them to see me as a complete human being. Someone who has interests and a family and a life outside of the classroom. Whatever your interests are, you can find a way to bring them into the classroom!
Follow LearnEd Notebooks on social media! Pinterest // Facebook // Instagram // Twitter // YouTube
________________________
LearnEd Notebooks provides teachers and students with an innovative notebooking solution. We specialize in providing educators with a unique curriculum that allows you to break free from conventional methods of instruction and spend more time on labs and inquiry-based science. We provide the framework of an interactive notebook with the flexibility of teaching strategies that seamlessly integrate with each teacher’s own methods of instruction. Our complete programs include printed student notebooks, digital presentations, and access to teacher resources — each focusing on diverse learning styles and engaging instructional strategies.
Click here to get LearnEd Notebooks in your classroom!
________________________
