DAY 1: Setting Wise Intentions & Goals

(Monday, August 2, 12-1pm Eastern USA Time)

Designing a desirable, sustainable teacher-life starts with careful attention and intention.

The exercises in this session will help you identify and organize your needs, goals, hopes, and intentions for the year—both as a teacher and as a person—and begin to see how these relate to each other.

Note: Even though you may develop new intentions & goals over the course of the week, we also want to do the work of identifying “baseline” intentions and goals first. This way, you can decide whether any future intentions and goals are subordinate to your baseline goals or should modify or even replace your baseline goals.
 

DAY 2: Planning for Justice

(Tuesday, August 3, 12-1pm Eastern USA Time)

If you want to do right by people—both the students in your class and anyone students might form opinions about based on what happens in your class—you need to plan for it.

Doing right by people includes everything from shunning stereotypes to ensuring that students see themselves positively represented in materials (in stories, in word problems, in prompts), everything from using inclusive language to countering ways in which assignments might set students who don’t have a lot of money or free time or prior educational opportunities up for failure.

Planning means actually spending time and energy consciously thinking about how you will pursue the justice I just described in your practice as a teacher, and making the results of that thought a core part of designing lessons, assignments, and assessments.

This session is a place for doing that very thinking and planning. It may call for facing some fears; it will call for being honest with yourself about areas you need to focus on.

We will also consider how to train students to plan for justice as they grow as humans, and how to plan for justice in the larger systems of our departments, schools, districts, and communities.
 

DAY 3: Conscious Growth—that Actually Happens

(Wednesday, August 4, 12-1pm Eastern USA Time)

While it is possible simply to grow a little bit every day, the kind of conscious, healthy growth we are aiming for is served by well-defined intervals that (a) make the actions that lead to growth more manageable and (b) allow us to evaluate our growth and make adjustments accordingly.

In this session, we will take your desired goals and intentions, identify habits that support them, and establish different cycles of growth according to the nature of each goal.
 

DAY 4: How to Work Less

(Thursday, August 5, 12-1pm Eastern USA Time)

You’ve heard “Work smarter, not harder.” How about “Work less”?

Teachers tend to do an incredible amount of work. An alarming amount of this work doesn’t necessarily need to be done by you, and some may not need to be done at all. Still more of it is work you’ve actually already done, but may not realize is applicable in the moment.

In this session, we will discuss seven specific ways to work less as a teacher, so that you have more time and energy for other things.
 

DAY 5: Accountability & Sustainability

(Thursday, August 5, 12-1pm Eastern USA Time)

Long-term growth as a teacher and a person requires sustainable practices and is served by accountability to others and/or to a system.

In this session, we will focus on how to sustain healthy growth in the long term, and identify ways of holding ourselves accountable for healthy growth. We will also discuss how to hold the larger systems that we are part of responsible for steady improvement.