Teacher Wellness: Tools & Tips For Build Your Teacher Wellness Toolkit

What’s Your Teacher Wellness Toolkit Look Like?

New Year’s Eve is here and to cap off 2024 and this month’s theme of Teacher Wellness we are going to be looking at the importance of building a teacher wellness toolkit. And more importantly, give you some insight into how to go about creating a toolkit that you will ‘hopefully use.’ 

You’ll notice the ‘and hopefully’ from the preceding paragraph. It is a phrase I know I am very familiar with in multiple aspects of my teaching life. Whether it be in reference to where I want my class to get to by the end of the week. Or the overhaul of a number of my unit plans over the summer. 

Some of which will get done…

But for all of the apps, and good intentions out there being reflective, actually being able to build some measures, metrics and accountability (MMA) into your daily teaching practice, is tricky.  

Tricky in terms of finding the time to: create, consistently use, derive information from, make plans for, and from while in the midst of the teaching inertia which inevitably builds up. 

With all of this in mind, the aim of today’s blog entry is to give you a free example of a teacher wellness tool and some principles in either finding or creating your own. 

Teacher Wellness Tools Defined

A teacher wellness tool can come in many forms. It can be an app, a worksheet, or a support group. The use or attendance of which can be built into a consistent MMA compliant habit. Which can be used to help you as a teacher to determine your mental state, energy level, or relative level of exhaustion in a way that lets you know when you need to make a change or ask for help. Preferably, before you burnout. 

3 Principles For Teacher Tool, Use, Creation, Acquisition & Implementation

Here are three principles to consider when it comes to creating, acquiring, and implementing the use of potential teacher wellness tools. 

• Make sure your tool accounts for the variability of your lived teaching experience.

Any tool that is worth using needs to account for your lived experience as a teacher. It needs to leverage what you already know about yourself and how you deal with different kinds of stressors over time. 

However, knowing yourself as a teacher isn’t always a given. Whether that be due to time constraints, lack of time in the field, not knowing what metrics or measures to track, or some other mixture of variables. 

If you don’t have the personal data or lived experience to draw on, then look for tools that will help you start collecting this information. Because the best teacher wellness tools are informed teacher wellness tools. 

• Make sure that it is easy to use, and keeps track of information over time. 

You may have heard of the acronym TLDR. Otherwise known as the ‘too long didn’t read’ phenomenon. Good wellness tools account for this by being easy to use, relatively concise, and have some mechanism for tracking over time. 

The best tools, whether they be an app or a worksheet, help you to identify what you are feeling and why this is the case with as little pre-reading as possible.  

• Make sure that it is easily accessible and built into your calendar at regular intervals.

As odd as it might sound, the best way to ensure that you make good use, or get any use out of your teacher wellness tool is to make them easy to access and stupidly hard to avoid. 

In this case, ‘easy to access’ means ‘in as few clicks as possible,’ or in a location ‘as easy to reach as possible.’ But the act of making things easy doesn’t correlate with something being made use of when done by itself.

This is why you need to make your tools stupidly hard to avoid. Meaning you go to the effort of presetting reminders in your calendar, make the scheduled use of the tool a reoccuring prompt on your to-do-list. Or, by finding an accountability buddy who you setup a regular check in, meetup, or collaboration time with. 

Taking Control Over Your Teacher Wellness Requires Both Intentionality, Accountability & Action

Ultimately, getting the best use out of teacher wellness tools requires intentionality, accountability, and action. Intentionality, when it comes to identifying the ‘why’ behind the tools you create or find for yourself. Accountability, in terms of building systems that will help you to actually make use of your tools. And most importantly, taking action and actually making use of them in a way that can produce data that can provide real insight, and real value to you. 

An Example Of A Wellness Tool You Can Use

If you click [here] you’ll find a link to a free wellness tracker that I created for myself after a particularly bad stretch of my teaching career. 

At its most basic, it serves as a scatter plot diagram that leverages what I know about my positive and negative tendencies as a teacher to help me determine when I might be doing too many things, or when I might be falling behind. As well as giving me some clues as to when I might be approaching burnout and overwhelm. 

If you like it, feel free to use it and pass it along to other teachers looking to add tools to their teacher wellness toolkit.

If not, then consider how you can make use of the three principles when it comes to developing, finding, and making use of your own teacher wellness tools!

Happy New Year’s everyone!