How to Stay Inspired in Your Teaching Practice
Ever feel bored by the content you’re teaching, activities you’ve planned out, or projects you’re having your students complete? Even though our job stays novel due to our students changing year after year, our day-to-day can sometimes feel a bit boring if we have been teaching the same content in the same way year after year. It’s easy to feel like we’re stagnating professionally if we are just changing the dates on our lesson plans, printing out the same photocopies, and presenting the same lessons in the same way we have been for the past five years.
Now, let me be clear: there is a huge benefit to getting your teaching practice to a place where you can essentially function on “auto-pilot.” Teaching on auto-pilot means that you’ve done the work, tested what works and what doesn’t, found what styles and practices align with your personality and pedagogical philosophy, and reached a place where you’ve curated high-quality resources and solidified your assessment practices. Your classroom can pretty much run itself.
But once you’ve hit that special place in your teaching career where you can essentially teach this year’s students the same way you’ve taught last year’s students, you may find after a few years that you start feeling stuck in your teaching practice. This blog post will help you freshen up what you already do, because…
I do think that professional stagnation can be a leading contributing factor to burnout.
We do NOT want to reinvent the wheel! What you’re doing is already fantastic, so we just need to tweak things so that you’re feeling fulfilled and inspired. We don’t want to relegate you to the status of a first-year teacher!
Start Small, and Work Your Way Up
The two tips I’m about to share should be approached with caution. I’m not suggesting you throw out all of your plans and start from scratch — when we’re feeling stuck, we want to innovate, we don’t want to recreate the wheel. Start with just one lesson for one of your courses, and consider giving it some attention to improve its quality. You may find that updating one lesson per marking period is enough to keep you creatively and professionally engaged, or you may find that you have the bandwidth to do a couple of lesson refreshes per marking period!
Find your Weakest Link Lesson
Next quarter, you’ll probably have to teach between 20 and 40 different lessons for each level you teach. Take a minute to look through your lesson plans and find the lesson that you feel has been your Weakest Link Lesson. This is the lesson that has been least effective based on your experience implementing it over the last year or several years. Here are a few lessons that might be considered Weakest Link Lessons:
A lesson that your students just didn’t vibe with. You could tell your students weren’t receptive to some element(s) of the lesson.
A lesson that your students found to be too easy or too challenging.
A lesson that your students finished too early or that took students too long to complete.
A lesson for which you received negative feedback on a formal or informal observation.
And to be honest, maybe it’s not a whole lesson—maybe it’s just one or two activities the Google Slides you used to present the content or the assessment modality you used at the end of the lesson.
Consider ways to improve your Weakest Link Lesson. You can be radical, scrap it completely, and start from scratch… OR, you can identify the elements that have made it your weakest link and work on improving them.
There have been times when I completely threw out a lesson because I knew it didn’t go the way I intended for it to go, and I started from scratch. I asked myself, “What type of lesson do my students need at this particular point in the marking period?” and I designed my new lesson accordingly. There have been other times when I thought, “Overall, the lesson went okay, but this one particular activity I had my students do just completely flopped. What other ways can I have my students practice this content in a meaningful way that will ultimately be more successful?”
Find the Lesson You’re Just Not Excited to Teach
Sometimes, we have perfectly effective lessons that fulfill curricular objectives, are a hit with our students, have garnered us accolades from our supervisors, and yet… we just don’t feel excited to teach them the following year!
I think this is a pretty normal experience. Think of it this way… just like how a song can be a complete hit, smash records worldwide, and be loved by all of our friends and family members, but to us? It’s just not our jam. I think the same thing can happen with lesson planning and implementation. Another explanation is that our tastes just change over time! When I was a novice teacher, I did a TON of Scoot Activities to practice grammar. But now? I do a few throughout the year because I know my students love them, but for me? They’re not my favorite activities!
Go through your lesson plans and find the lesson that you’re just not all that excited about anymore. Consider removing it, or replacing the parts that you’re least excited about. I’d recommend starting conservatively: try modifying just one or two elements of the lesson, and see how it feels. You can always go back next year and decide you want to scrap it altogether and start from the beginning, or you might find that just by tweaking a few things, the lesson feels good to teach again!
Freshen up your resources!
As someone who has created over 350 resources in my TpT Shop, I’d be remiss to not mention how reinvigorating it can be to implement newly acquired resources from other teachers! Whether you’re looking for an individual lesson to use next Wednesday or looking to freshen up an entire unit, I’ve got engaging and comprehensive resources that will help keep you feeling creatively engaged and inspired in the instructional design component of your teaching craft while saving you countless hours and mental bandwidth! Check out my French, Spanish, and Italian resources by clicking the images below!
If you’ve been feeling stagnant in your teaching practice lately, perhaps it’s time to consider modifying some of the lessons you already use so that you start to feel more excited about the content you’re presenting, the activities you’re assigning, and the projects/assessments students are completing to show their learning.
I try to update one lesson per course every marking period so that, over time, my lessons continue to develop and so that I continue to feel professionally engaged and inspired by the materials I’m using. Let me know if any of these tips have resonated with you - I’d love to hear where you’re at in your teaching journey.
Happy language teaching,
~ Michael
