Stop overthinking it! Only ONE thing matters...

YAYY! You're here! I am so glad! In this episode I'll give you 4 criteria to consider as you think about your first 6 weeks back to school! This is a juicy preview of the workshop I'm offering this weekend "Cultivating Connections: 5 Strategies for Building and Sustaining a Thriving Classroom Community " I hope you can join me! Click here to save your seat!

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Dr. Sims Bishop
Cultivating Connections Workshop

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Join me on August 11th for a free Masterclass!  Cultivating Connections: 5 Strategies for Building and Sustaining a Thriving Classroom Community! I want you AND your students to thrive this year! Click here to save your seat!

- Transcript -

It’s time for Back to School!

It's back to school season. Are you so ready? It's okay if you're not, most people are not ready. That is why I am hosting a free master class on Sunday, August 11, called cultivating connections, where I'm going to share five strategies for building and sustaining a thriving classroom community. And that's not just for your students. Yes, we want to build and sustain thriving classroom communities for students to learn and acquire throughout the year. However, this year, I want you to focus on building those classroom communities for you to thrive as well. So, join me on the 11th. The link to register is in the show notes. I would love to have you. It's free. Go ahead and spread the word. Invite other people. If you can come live, you'll walk away with some resources. My hope is that at the end of the workshop, you'll walk away feeling a little bit more ready and a lot surer of how to start building community at the beginning of the school year, I hope to see you there.

Welcome! 

Welcome back to my podcast, teaching la vida loca for season two. I'm Annabelle, you're maestra loca, and I am ready to kick off season two with even more enthusiasm, magic and tips and tricks for your classroom. Get set for a ride of inspiration, unapologetic authenticity, and ideas to spark more joy in your teaching journey. I'm turning up the excitement and elated to have you right here with me. I'm not just your host, I'm your cheerleader, and I am thrilled you're tuning in. Buckle up and let's do this. Let's tackle teaching la vida loca together. Hello and welcome to episode 13 of teaching la vida loca. I'm so glad you're here. Episode 13, season two. I really shouldn't have done season two. I mean, what am I doing? You know, it's gonna be so confusing later to like, I don't know. Maybe I should if you're listening to this, email me and tell me if you think it would be a total disaster to just go back to listing it by number and drop the season, I mean, or maybe I just go from here, I don't know. Does it matter? Oh my gosh. Why am I hashing this out with you? So silly.

Start of School

Anyways, ADHD, hi, I am here to tell you to stop stressing about what you're doing in your lesson plans the first few weeks of school. I'm here to tell you to stop everything. Stop overthinking it, and just focus on getting your mindset in the framework of, how am I going to build and foster community today? How is this activity, that I am choosing, going to build and foster community? How am I focused on community first? Because literally, nothing else matters. The language will come, like you're going to be teaching language. You're going to be facilitating acquisition. Before you know it, you're gonna be 90 - 95% in the target language, no problem. And if you're new to acquisition driven instruction, that's okay. It might be a struggle. It might not be no problem, but all of that can wait. The only thing that matters right now is establishing strong community in all your classes, and it's going to look a little different in every single classroom, right? Every classroom community looks different, but that is our number one priority at the beginning of the year. How are we setting ourselves up for success? How are we setting our students up for success, to thrive in a classroom all year round? It starts with community. We must start there. And this podcast episode is just a juicy little prequel to the workshop I'm hosting this Sunday, August 11. It's called cultivating connections, and I'm going to share five strategies for building and sustaining a thriving classroom community.

Ask Yourself…

Okay, so each week, I want you to ask yourself, "How does this week create opportunities for student contribution, especially the first week, how are you ensuring that the content that you are teaching allows students to contribute and shape your classroom environment?" How are you providing them an opportunity to have a voice in the way that the classroom runs and functions? How are you giving them an opportunity to be such an integral part of that community that it doesn’t function well without them. Okay? So that's the first one. Create opportunities for student contribution, make sure that their voices are validated and heard, and that they know that they feel that. Okay. Number two, and you can ask yourself about the lesson, you can say in this week, how am I establishing a sense of belonging? How are your lessons or your content or your slides, or whatever it is your activity? How is it fostering a sense of belonging for every child in your room and making them feel seen, heard, valued, cared for and empowered with this criterion in mind. We can think of Dr Sims Bishop and the windows, mirrors, sliding glass doors. How in your content, are students seeing themselves? How are they seeing themselves represented? Are they seeing themselves represented? Is every child seeing themselves represented? Are they seeing people who don't look like them represented of different abilities, of different races, of different cultures, of different body types? So, as you are creating content, how are you fostering a sense of belonging through that? Right? So, ask yourself that question each week. 

Your Success 

From day one, I'll be sharing different activities you can do, different ways to just set yourself up for success for the entire year. If you just heard my baby, she's wrapped up on me. It was not successful with daddy, so I put her to sleep on my chest, and we're just rocking and recording, you know, mom, and feeling like a badass mom right now. Okay, so come on Sunday, it's gonna be great. I'm excited, and I'm giving away resources, some really incredible resources, to the teachers that attend live that you can use in your first few weeks of school. So, today I want to share with you four different criteria that you can, you know, you can write these down to put them on your desk. You can put these on your desktop just to reference. And I want you to think about how each lesson or each week, you are meeting these four criteria. So, the first week, really focusing on the first criteria and then the other three. It's like a daily or weekly thing that I want you checking in and asking yourself, especially in the first six weeks of school. Now, beyond that, I think you should be constantly referring to these, but in the first six weeks of school, this is it. This is all that matters, right? Community, community, community.

Connections

Okay. Number three, how is this lesson or this content this week, fostering connections? How is this lesson going to help me get to know my students better and vice versa? How is this lesson going to foster connections and find commonalities between my students? How am I providing opportunities for my students to find something in common with somebody else in the room today, even if it's me? How am I planning activities that promote positive interactions between my students and help reduce potential conflicts? Okay? And the final criteria that I want you to ask is, how does this lesson this week, this content, provide platforms for expression for my students? How am I creating a space, a classroom, space for students to be able to freely express their feelings and opinions openly and safely, and this is the thing that like taking building community where students feel that they can express their feelings and opinions openly and safely, can take a long time, especially if you teach high school and upper middle it can take a long time, but that is why it is essential that we are starting with this first that is why it is essential. In those first six weeks, you are thinking, how am I creating opportunities for students to contribute their voice in this classroom? How am I establishing a sense of belonging for every single child here? How am I fostering connections between me and the students and between the students and each other, and how am I providing platforms for them to safely express their opinions openly?

Community 

Okay, so if we're if we're coming at it from that angle of community is the number one most important thing to me, the content will come and it will be so much easier to speak in the target language, because you have prioritized community. You have prioritized putting your students first and letting them know that they are the number one. You know that building a community and establishing relationships with them is your number one goal. It will be so much easier to do all the rest of the things if you focus on this first, I hope that you hear the cute little baby noises that keep on happening. She's like on her side and her sleep, and it's the best thing ever. Okay, so this weekend, on Sunday, I'm going to be sharing exactly how I take these four criteria and apply them to real life in my classroom, and exactly what I do to to create opportunities for contribution, establish a sense of belonging, foster connections, and provide those platforms for expression. I'm going to be sharing from day one how I am getting their voices involved in building our classroom environment from day one exactly the exact activities I do to foster connections and establish a sense of belonging for students to where they get to that point where they can freely express their opinions in a safe environment. I'll be sharing not just the activities, but the resources to do them yourself as well.

Join Me! 

So, I really hope that you can join me. We will absolutely go over those questions again and criteria, but I really want to dig into the Okay, this is how now you have those criteria. This is how you do it. This is what you do. This is what I do. And I think it's going to be really, powerful. I am going to give you the tools that you need to, from the very beginning, start building that community that you want all year round, so that not just your students can thrive, but you can thrive with them. Because that's really, important. This year you should be thriving with your students. This year you should be feeling extreme joy in and pleasure in what you do, because what you do is so incredible, and we are so lucky to have the jobs that we do, and it's making me smile so like, if we aren't finding joy in the day to day, like it's not sustainable, we spend so much time working and at our jobs. We should enjoy it. We should be really, really feeling joy every single day. And I believe that the key to finding that joy and keeping that joy year-round is starting strong with community. So, all that is to say, I hope that I see you on Sunday. You can grab your seat in my show notes. If you already have something planned for Sunday and you know you can't make it, or you're on vacation or something like that, still register anyways. It'll send you the recording, but you I won't be able to provide the resources. The resources are just going to the people who can attend live. I am so stinking excited. I hope you're doing well. I hope you're having a strong back to school season. If you were still on summer break, lavish it. Hang on to it. Enjoy and I appreciate you. And I'll talk to you soon. Okay, until then, I'll be lavishing my maternity leave with this beautiful little baby, I'll talk to you real soon. Take care. Bye, bye.