10 Worst Teaching Mistakes I've Made (Honest and Vulnerable)

[Music] hello there and welcome back to my channel if you are new here my name is michelle emerson and i love helping teachers with all things technology organization and productivity in today's video i'm going to be sharing the top 10 teaching mistakes i have made throughout my career so that hopefully you don't have to make the same ones [Music] now i have been documenting my life as a teacher on instagram for almost eight years and on youtube for over five as you know social media tends to be a highlight reel and as humans we love to compare ourselves to people so that leaves us feeling like what we are doing is not enough even though the reality is we all make mistakes so today's video is meant to be vulnerable with you and show you that i'm nowhere near perfect and neither are you and that's okay making mistakes is what helps us be able to learn and grow and become better versions of ourselves so let's jump into it but i would like to preface this by saying these 10 mistakes are not ranked it's just a list of 10 mistakes that i know i've made mistake number one is i spent too much time working when i think back to especially within the first few years of my teaching career there were nights where i was staying at school until 10 11 pm i distinctly remember one night where the custodian came in my room and was like hey you gotta go because we're done cleaning and we have to lock up the school and thinking back on it i felt like i always had to be doing more which meant i had to spend more and more time working but over the years i've realized it's not about doing more it's just about prioritizing the tasks that you choose to complete so a mistake within the mistake is that i never had boundaries i would get home from work even when i left at a decent hour and i would spend several hours at home still working which just led to me feeling very burnt out which then meant i was not being the best teacher i could be for my students i was exhausted mentally physically emotionally all of the things so for me cutting back the amount of time i spent working forced me to really figure out what has to be done versus what would i like to have done what's going to actually impact my instruction as a teacher or what's just kind of like the icing on the cake that isn't fully necessary during my i think it was sixth year of teaching i started working just contract hours and that was a complete game changer in terms of my happiness my stress levels were much lower and i felt like a better teacher because when i was in the classroom or online i could give my full self to my students mistake number two is that i tried to do it all myself i remember my first year of teaching suddenly it was time to take my students to art and i had no idea where the art room was because as a new teacher i was too scared to ask anyone in the school for a tour so i had to walk around aimlessly and hopefully find the art room i went to where i thought the art room was like it even said art outside but um nope that room had been converted to a classroom and art was out in the portables and it was a highly embarrassing situation zero out of ten do not recommend but i felt like i had to know it all and now i've come to realize even several years in i still don't know it all i never will know it all and that's okay even veteran teachers who have been teaching for 30 plus years are still learning they're still growing they still have questions now within that i also would have this really heavy workload you know feeling like the weight of the world is on your shoulders you have so much to do and i was never willing to ask for help i would just try to find a way to get it all done which going back to the first mistake just meant working excessive hours but one of the biggest changes i started making was collaborating with my team teachers more and that once again took off so much stress and made my responsibilities feel a lot more doable if that makes sense when i changed grade levels during my fourth year of teaching one of the first things i started doing was collaborating with my team teacher who also taught math and we would basically split up the lessons so i would plan a week and i would share everything with her she would plan a week and share everything with me which meant i was really only lesson planning every other week that was like a good stepping stone into reaching out and asking for help after that i started collaborating more with like science and social studies and then i went on to teach reading and i really depended on my team teachers for help because i had not taught reading for upper elementary and it's a totally different ball game than teaching reading in the primary grades the more that i started asking for help and being willing to like split responsibilities with my team teachers the more successful i felt because i didn't feel like i was being pulled in a million different directions the third mistake is that i did not plan ahead i remember my first year of teaching i was literally planning everything the night before i could never get ahead and i would hear teachers talk about being planned a week or two in advance and i could not grasp or wrap my brain around how that was even possible because every single night i was just trying to plan what i was doing the next day in fact i remember doing a paleontology unit in science and driving to the dollar store at like 9 00 p.m to get hats because i was only figuring out what i was doing for the next day so one of the biggest changes i created for myself was actually establishing a planning routine if my goal was to have the entire next week full of lesson plans done by friday i had to break up that work monday through friday in order to get it done for me batching is something that really helped me be more efficient with my time so batching is completing similar tasks all at one time i really enjoyed batching my lessons by the subject so most years i taught two to three subjects it just depended now again i was upper elementary we were departmentalized i know that's always not always the case for primary but again reach out to your team teachers for help and i would for example plan out all of the math lessons on monday and tuesday so maybe monday i was coming up with that scope and sequence for my lessons and i was deciding what activities i wanted to do and then tuesday i was maybe creating all of the slides that i would use to teach from then wednesday thursday i would plan all of my science lessons or all of my social studies depending on what i was teaching that year and then maybe friday was all about making copies or getting caught up on grading a lot of times i was able to have someone like a parent volunteer actually take care of my copies for me or i started planning lessons that didn't need as many copies in order to take that off of my plate if you are still convinced that the amount of planning you have to do cannot get done in the amount of time that you have recruit help get parent volunteers ask for help from your team teachers even if you don't have team teachers partner up with another teacher in a school within your district that teaches the same grade level or the same subjects so that you can kind of alleviate some of that workload the fourth mistake is that i planned my lessons forward instead of backward what i mean by that is when i first started lesson planning i would sit down typically the night before and i would first decide how i was going to intro the lesson and then figure out what activity my students were going to do and then at the end figure out some way to assess their learning but the result of this was i wasn't teaching effectively i would get to the end of the lesson and realize ooh my students really didn't even learn what they needed to learn based on this standard so for me switching to a backward style planning really allowed me to narrow in on what is the standard and what does that mean in kid-friendly language like what do my students need to be able to do at the end of this lesson from there figuring out how am i going to assess that my students can actually do that and then what activities do i need to plan leading up to that assessment so that my students can be successful to me this is a lot like setting goals or you know establishing habits if come january 1st i'm like hey i really want to accomplish this in the next year i have to kind of backwards plan it and figure out okay if i want this i need to take steps z y v to yeah i'm going backwards in alphabet because you really have to kind of think backwards it's like in order to do this i first need to do this so another thing that helped with that in terms of the backwards planning is a lot of times that objective was something more application based so i want my students to take this skill and apply it to a real life situation but in order to do that they're going to need practice with the actual skill so i would know that one of my last lessons would be application based before that i would have some practice or like fluency-based lessons but then prior to that my students need to actually learn the skills so i would have something more like computation based more mini lessons things like that so this backwards planning allowed me to better get my students from point a to point b i don't know if i explained that well but hopefully it makes sense mistake number five is that i was inconsistent and i was inconsistent in pretty much every area of teaching i was inconsistent with classroom management i was inconsistent with my lesson planning style i was inconsistent with tracking data and i think a lot of this has to do with us always believing there's something better right it's that whole the grass is greener on the other side and so we're always chasing something new when in reality what we're doing could work if we just did it consistently i feel like this is very similar to like different diets that people will go on i use diet and quotation because technically a diet is just what you eat but people are always chasing oh well if i try this new trendy diet it's going to work better whereas pretty much any diet would work if you just did it consistently i can't go to taco bell i'm on an all-carb diet if you're in a caloric deficit but again that gets complicated hopefully you understand the connection i'm trying to make within classroom management i was always trying the new trendy thing that i saw on instagram or pinterest and as a result my students were confused because every other week i was changing whatever incentive system we were doing and they were getting conflicting you know information from me in terms of my lesson planning i started with a very basic paper lesson planner and then it was no i need a fancy like erin condren planner so i switched to that and then it was no i want to try digital planning and once i switched to digital planning i was like michelle you just got to stick with it and thankfully that was a style that i was able to stay consistent with and again that's during that time when i was able to actually get my lesson planning done ahead of time and i think a lot of that is attributed to the fact that i was sticking with one lesson planning style and not trying to change it up every single week mistake number six is that i did not have a deep understanding of the content honestly i don't know if this one is my fault not that i'm not trying to take ownership but i strongly believe that college education programs do not prepare you for the realities of teaching they focus a lot on different teaching methods or instructional methods or strategies that you can use but they don't focus a lot on content now i did have like an elementary math course and an elementary science course and all of those but we never dove deep into actually understanding the content and understanding the standards and how they progress between grade levels and i think this is especially a struggle for elementary teachers because you know how to do the skills right like i know how to add i know how to multiply and as a result you think that you can teach it and you may be able to but what i found is that even though i knew how to perform the skills actually teaching that content in a way that's going to build off of what my students already know from the prior grade level and get them to have the knowledge and the skills that they need to be able to complete what they have to complete in the next grade level right like it's a ladder so getting them from one rung to the next i did not have a deep understanding of how the skills progressed and what students should know at certain times and what prior knowledge they had to have in order to build on i did not have a deep understanding of that and it's difficult to admit because like that makes me feel like a failure of a teacher right that's literally my job is to know the content but it's important to recognize that i did not have that deep understanding so that i could take steps to fix it and for me that was a lot of pd a lot of times on my own not necessarily school-based pd because i don't think schools give enough pd on the actual content but that's another story for another day one book that really helped me was called making sense of mathematics there is one for like primary grades upper elementary and there's also one for small groups highly recommend those books i will link them down below obviously for the past four years i taught math primarily as my subject so that's the area where i was doing the most growing i'm sure there are other books similar for other subject areas but i would not be the best person to recommend those but another suggestion i can make is to spend as much time as possible collaborating with teachers the grade level below you and the grade level above you so that you have a better understanding of how those skills progress i don't think schools give teachers enough time to do that type of planning so that they can have a better understanding again of how the skills are connected and what they need to do to better prepare students for the next grade mistake number seven is i spent too much time leading instead of facilitating now this is talking specifically about like my teaching style when i first started teaching i felt like i had to be the boss i had to be the one imparting my wisdom and knowledge on my students and over the years i found that it was much better to really give the control to my students and just act as a facilitator within their learning if you are spending a majority of the lesson talking or lecturing or teaching which a lot of time really just means you're talking or lecturing but okay um your students will end up being very disengaged because they are not actually a active learner they're not a part of the lesson and as a result your students will not have as deep of an understanding of the content so i started making small shifts that would allow my students to take more ownership over their learning i specifically remember this one day where i was very overwhelmed i was trying to plan my lesson for the next day and i did not have the mental capacity to like plan a lesson where i had to do a bulk of the teaching so i decided you know what i'm gonna let my students create anchor charts i'm gonna let them show everything they know on this topic everything that they've learned so far on this particular strategy and i'm gonna let them put it down on paper i was amazed by how engaged my students were by the anchor charts that they actually created like they were amazing and it's because i gave my students control over their learning those super easy little fixes can make a huge difference in terms of student engagement and the retention of the content i also started giving my students more control in our discussions so especially in math let's say i gave my students a problem and i wanted them just to kind of work through it as best as they could kind of have that productive struggle so like it's difficult but they can get there if that makes sense rather than me going over the solution i would pick out several students answers and i'd put them under the document camera i'd have them explain what they did and i would just facilitate the discussion so i would ask the class you know can someone explain how so and so use a strategy or how this strategy is connected to this other strategy and it was my students really doing the teaching like they were teaching each other i was just there facilitating it and once again that's going to lead to a deeper understanding when my students are the ones actually doing the teaching and then they can learn from each other there's just something about kids like if a child shows another kid in the class how to do something versus if i show them they don't listen to me but they will listen to you know their friend who's showing them mistake number eight i did not give specific feedback now again this is in pretty much all areas of teaching it was during independent work it was during class discussions it was during guided reading groups i would hear a student give an answer and my response would be like great answer great job but i want to tell them what was great about it and even more importantly i wouldn't give them direction to continue to challenge themselves and continue to grow so one of the big changes i started making is i would be very very specific with what they did that was good and then still giving them an area to grow this is kind of like the glows and grows like what they did that glowed and then what they can still do to grow so for example if a student solved a math problem correctly using fraction towers i wouldn't just say great job i would say something along the lines of i love how you used fraction towers to model your thinking in a concrete way next time i'd love to see you write an equation that matches your thinking i'm highlighting what they did that was great they used manipulatives and they were able to model their thinking but i want to see them push themselves to also write an equation i know sometimes it's difficult to come up with that area to grow especially if everything they did was perfectly correct but again this goes back to having a better understanding of what's coming in the next grade level for especially math again that's where my area of expertise was i love to challenge my students to show their thinking with another strategy because the more flexible they can be in their thinking the better that's going to serve them as they move on to more complex skills i also would invite them to come up with another problem that would have the same equation so this was particularly true if we were working on word problems they solved the word problem they get it correct okay can you come up with another problem that would have that same solution that same equation that would always get my students to think in a more creative way mistake number nine i let pacing guides control my lessons as teachers we tend to feel a lot of pressure to continually be moving on because there's never enough time in the year especially now with everything going on it's this pressure of i have to get my students caught up whatever that means because technically everyone has been behind and those meters for being behind are really just things that we have imposed but anyway going on some tangents i am sad to admit i would move my students on hello lady where's that light switch i would move my students on to a new lesson even if i knew they weren't fully ready for it like they hadn't mastered the prior skill and that's because again i felt that pressure i had a document saying you need to be on this lesson on this day otherwise you're behind and you're never going to get caught up but i realized this was not benefiting my students and ultimately that is my number one goal right that is what is most important to me my students and doing what is best for them and even though yes i felt this pressure and i was almost worried of like getting in trouble if i wasn't where i needed to be i realized that ultimately if someone came to me and said you're behind what's going on if i can justify it by saying i'm doing what's best for my students who is going to argue with that ultimately if they do argue with that that's not a school i want to be at because obviously we are not on the same page in terms of education so once i switched my mindset to i am going to do what's best for my students i no longer felt that pressure because i knew that i was giving them what they needed and that's all that mattered and finally mistake number 10 i made teaching my identity this is probably the hardest one for me to admit i wanted to be a teacher for so long like since i was in second grade i used to hold school for all the neighborhood kids on my front porch i loved everything there was to love about teaching and when i got into teaching it was my dream career obviously it was a lot harder than i ever anticipated even though i heard that in college right like you hear teaching is hard and then you get into it and you're like oh now i understand but because i was so passionate for it i let it take over my life and i made it my everything and i've already highlighted some of the ways in which i did that the number of hours i spent and not having boundaries and even though i felt like that was the best thing for me to do i started to lose those other parts of me because when you pour all of you into one area it's like you create this mold of like i can only be this and once i started stepping back and allowing myself to pursue other passions especially in the area of fitness or like business aspirations that i had or even things as simple as just spending time with my friends and family like being the girlfriend the fiance the wife that i wanted to be i realized i was so much happier and even though i still struggled with feeling guilty that i wasn't giving my all to teaching i knew deep down that that was the best option for me i was actually unhappy when i was pouring everything into teaching even though i tried to convince myself that that was making me happy so i've come to realize you know teaching and education it's a career it's not my identity i am a teacher but i'm also an athlete i'm also a wife i'm also a daughter i'm also i wish i could say like artist or musician but i'm not artsy or musically inclined but i am all of these things outside of just teacher that is one hat that i wear but there's plenty more in my closet for me to try on and i can even go get a new hat if i want you know pick up a new hobby yes new hobbies all right that is it those are the top 10 teaching mistakes i have made hopefully some of this resonated with you and it's relatable to you because i do think we struggle with a lot of the same things people just don't talk about it as much as they should but also hopefully you heard one or two things that maybe you didn't realize were mistakes that you're making and maybe this can help you kind of avoid going down that same path that i went down if you did identify with this video in any way or get some wisdom from it please give it a thumbs up i would love for you to share it out with your teacher friends and if you have not already subscribed to my channel go ahead and hit the subscribe button and notification bell so you do not miss any future videos as always thank you for watching i love you all so much don't forget to put your positive pants on and i will catch you in the next one [Music] you

Channel: Pocketful of Primary

Views: 42,585

Keywords: teacher, classroom, vlog, 4th grade, pocketful of primary, tips for new teachers, tips for teachers, new teacher tips, teacher tips, classroom vlog, vlogger, teacher vlog, teacher vlogger, michelle ferre, michelle emerson, teaching mistakes, mistakes as a teacher, mistakes to avoid

Id: 2avhky5hXVg

Length: 24min 26sec (1466 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 14 2021