The Best Boundaries to Set Heading into the Second Half of the School Year

Hey, Teachers!

The best boundaries to set are the ones that preserve yourself and your integrity. Now that we're past the holidays and revving up to return to the classroom, we might be questioning how we're going to make it through the next six months.

How will you stay energized?

How will you prevent negativity from ruining your goals and diminishing your performance on the job?

And what should you prioritize this January?

The answers to these questions center on your personal teaching philosophy, your unique circumstances at work, and how you invest in human capital (all of your relationships, including your relationship to yourself).

Following is a quick "debrief" on how to increase your resilience and productivity by being intentional about your mindset in this new year.

🎉 Setting boundaries should be easily digestible and include a smooth actionable plan.

1. Revisit your personal teaching philosophy. If you haven't penned one, now's the time to identify what matters to you most as a teacher and steward of young minds (even if you're faced with brutal policies or severe limitations and fewer liberties these days). Your personal teaching philosophy will ground you because it contains two essential pillars of your motivation: beliefs and values. Your beliefs and values drive everything you do on the job.

Setting boundaries through your personal teaching philosophy means:

⭐️ Identifying and sticking to your non-negotiables with colleagues and students (being a team player doesn't mean giving up everything that uniquely defines you as a teacher)...The more you know where you stand, the easier it is to recognize conflict and develop conflict-resolution strategies.

⭐️ Underscoring what you would like to see your students excel in (such as durable skills or social-emotional learning concepts)...Right alongside the curriculum must-have's, students deserve time and space to discover and practice skills that will help them be stronger individuals in a global economy.

⭐️ Recognizing and accepting where there is disconnect between your core beliefs and values and the school site, colleagues, parents, and administrators (emphasize what you CAN control while celebrating that your beliefs and values are inherently your own, knowing you'll include those values to the best of your ability while remaining compliant within the limitations you might face)...When you more completely define your teacher self-image, you'll be clearer about how to navigate adversity.

2. Reflect upon your unique circumstances at work. If you're having a wonderful school year, your unique circumstances may be desirable and ideal, and you should absolutely emphasize everything that is going well for you and in your favor, including ample support and opportunity for on-the-job reflection. But if you're struggling with self-efficacy, difficult personalities, being targeted by administration, or battling classroom challenges, make a list of the top problems so you can meet them head-on with determination to succeed, and diplomacy. 

Setting boundaries to address your unique circumstances at work means:

⭐️ Identifying the hardships with a real and realistic game plan (finding supportive personnel, putting a plan in place for careful documentation of a situation, changing how you approach your students or their parents, looking inward at how others see you, and getting to administrators before a few sparks become a blazing wildfire)...Avoid going into the second half of the school year ruminating, cowering in fear, or feeling like a victim. Your professional outcomes are often about mindset.

⭐️ Protecting yourself emotionally and physically (what needs to change so you can do this? are your class contracts effective? are you having trouble getting student buy-in? who thinks you're not doing a good job?)...You want to address all of these factors at the get-go of this calendar year before it's too late and you're stressed and overwhelmed about your final teaching evaluation.

⭐️ Intensifying and simplifying what you're doing each day so you aren't trying to do everything at 100%... Your students are your top priority because you're there to ensure a quality teaching and learning dynamic (but where are the problems most prevalent? do you need to work on relationship-building? classroom management strategies? lesson planning? your tone? timeliness? and how will you set boundaries so you are tackling the most important challenges first?) "Intensify" means hone in on the most important structural deficiencies. "Simplify" means make a supreme effort to goal-set and accomplish what you've set out to do in those areas until you've met or exceeded those standards.

3. Invest in human capital. "Investing in human capital" is a researched term that more simply phrased means working on building your relationships. These relationships include the ones you have with students, parents, colleagues, administrators, support staff, and of course, the relationships you have off-the-clock. The one relationship we tend to neglect the most is accountability to ourselves. As teachers, we're often last on the list, and for justifiable reasons. Time is both what we need the most and have the least.

Setting boundaries by investing in human capital means:

⭐️ Avoiding gossip and downplaying the severity of broken relationships at work with students, parents, colleagues, administrators, and support staff (are you assuming things are going well? have you alienated someone? do your intentions and decisions result in negative outcomes? do students respect you? are you seen as credible? do you feel credible?) Consider posing questions to yourself along these lines so you can investigate what might be hampering the development of quality interpersonal relationships. Change behaviors that aren't working for you or in your connections with others.

⭐️ Acknowledging and celebrating the worth of others (who deserves some recognition in your personal or professional spaces? do you owe anyone an apology? how well do you interact with your colleagues? are you gracious when others make observations and suggestions? are you open-minded when reflecting upon what your students need?) Investing in human capital requires both inquiry and humility. Set boundaries with yourself that promote greater positive relationship-building.

⭐️ Putting yourself on the calendar (and this is often the HARDEST boundary for us to create). We may feel like we're trying to get to ourselves but there's just one more thing, one more request, one more to-do, one more pull. We're not perfect. We'll miss marks and we won't get to everything we hoped both in curriculum and in our personal lives). But we can be more intentional and purposeful about time that is reserved for us. Scheduling yourself on the calendar is one step toward investing in yourself.

This could simply mean: closing the classroom door at lunch; blocking off a couple hours on the weekend for recreation; leaving something at work even though you wanted to get it done that day; allowing yourself only so much time to contemplate and ruminate over the "wow's", those unbelievable incidences at work; closing the lesson plan book for the weekend; limiting your commitments; guarding time with loved ones; turning off digital devices; investing 10 minutes a night on something you've been putting off; or creating a new weekly grid that includes yourself in the 168 hours per week we each have.

Setting boundaries helps us to reframe our thinking and move forward with greater purpose and organization. Success as teachers requires consistent reflection about best practices...and also about how we approach our lives.

This January take the pressure off of yourself. Maybe you love new year's resolutions and can't wait to move through your new list of goals.

Maybe you feel more stressed at the start of a new year, like the universe expects you to list a bunch of goals and make all these changes just because it's a new year.

Or maybe you really are looking for a few ways to truly transform yourself so you can can continue becoming the teacher you were meant to be.

Wherever you are as a teacher related to mindset, whether you're feeling empowered or beaten down, efficacious or confused, in control or threatened, setting boundaries that will help to preserve yourself and your integrity are the only boundaries to implement. 

When we look at a broad spectrum of teaching challenges in today's time, and when we reflect upon our roles within those challenges, including our failures and triumphs over the years, we must put ourselves at the helm of all of those outcomes. There are many things that are imposed upon us and many circumstances over which we have little control.

But we always have control of our own thinking and choices.