A Runner’s Guide to Teaching: How to Pace Yourself As the Semester Ramps Up
You’ve probably heard the old adage, “It’s a marathon, not a sprint.” This is definitely true when it comes to the school year. If we think of the school year as a marathon, then we can also take some guidance from the art of running to help us pace the year.
Now that school has been back on for more than a few weeks, you might start to see signs that your pace needs to shift. Maybe you ran out at the starting line with full force. You wanted to start strong, and your students and families thank you for this sprint. You’re starting to notice that you aren’t able to get your second wind after lunch as easily or the pain in your shoulder has been persisting longer than usual. You are realizing, even if only in the back of your mind, that if you keep going this fast all year long, you won’t have anything left in the tank to get you across the finish line.
It can be easy to keep in sprint mode, even when your body is telling you to slow down or stop altogether.
If this were a real race, you’d have a pacer help you set a steady clip that you can sustain, not just in the first semester but all year. But school isn’t a real race. Moving faster won’t get you to summer break before the rest of your students and colleagues.
Here are some ideas to help you shift and sustain your pace:
#1 Find Your Pacer: This is someone in your building who has fine-tuned their practice to stay steady and not burn out. Observe them and consider what systems and structures they use that allow them to work this way. If you are comfortable, you might even ask them for direct guidance and support. You aren’t trying to be them, but maybe understanding what they do can help you find a version of it for your own set of circumstances.
#2 Determine Your Goal: What are you racing towards? Picture it. Keep it as your focus. The more specific you are with your goal the better. This will help you know when you actually do need to sprint and when it’s okay to speed walk or even sit down for a rest. Let’s take the goal of providing the most impactful feedback on student assignments.
Walking at a steady pace toward this goal might mean that you are only grading priority assignments or standards.
Running towards this goal, you are grading most things and offering detailed feedback on priority assignments.
Sprinting towards this goal, you are grading and giving detailed feedback on everything.
Knowing the goal helps you budget your energy!
#3 Budget Your Energy: Now that you’ve identified your goal, you can identify the times during the semester when you will need more energy or when you’ll need to dedicate more time to the work. The week of Parent-Teacher Conferences might require more time on site and the extra energetic push of meeting all of the families. Anticipating this, you can make sure you give yourself time to rest up the weekend before and rejuvenate the weekend after.
With these three tips in mind, what shifts might you make for the month of October to ensure you can sustain your pace?
