Khristen Massic is a middle school administrator and former high school engineering teacher turned CTE strategist. She helps career and technical educators improve their teaching practices with principles from education and industry so that they can stay in the classroom and impact our future workforce
• I'm really tired because the school year's ending, but I get really excited about next year, so that's why this is a great time to get excited, get some stuff off your plate while you're still at the school, you're still in your contract hours, you're not worrying about what you're doing over the summer. And just get some stuff done. Now, so I've got three tips, and my very first one is to de-clutter, and you've got a few different ways that you can de-clutter, so there's declaring stuff, you may have accumulated some projects that students have done this year, and you may wanna save a few but my biggest recommendation would be, look at the classes that you are going to be teaching next year and de-clutter any resources that you are using for classes that you won't be teaching next year. (9:14)
• My second tip is to look at your current routines and systems that you're using, so whether it's how students are turning in their work or what you are doing for your clean up, and seeing like what works and what doesn't work, because right now it's a good time to take a step back, will you still have students and see what needs tweaking for next year, and make notes of those now, and you don't need to restructure those over the summer, but taking notes of those now will actually help you remember what it's truly like rather than kind of having this honeymoon phase at the beginning of next school year and like, Oh yeah, that worked really well, when really it didn't. Maybe you're checking to see if there are certain supplies that are constantly being left out, like the scissors that are never being put away, so you'll wanna come up with some sort of solution for scissors next year. So this is an opportune time to do that, and the key is, is that you still have students so you can still observe how those are functioning and what needs to change. (13:22)
• My third tip is to map out next year from a large bird's-eye view, and you're going to do it for each of the courses that you're taking because you want to have an idea of the units you're going to be teaching, but then you also want to schedule, decide how long you wanna spend on each of those units, then the really critical part is you're going to then compare that to your calendars. You need to look at your school calendar and see if you have a winter break or different holidays, and where does that land, because you don't necessarily want to have one day be after the break of your unit, you wanna have them all before the break, and then you want to look at it too when you're calendaring it, comparing it, all your classes to one another, because you wanna save yourself time, and if you end up having a whole bunch of projects or unit ending all on the day, and that could mean that there's a lot of work for you on one particular day, so try to spread it out- be intentional. (21:02 )
• When you're in the thick of planning and doing your teaching and you've got your lessons and your activities and you're going shopping so that you make sure that you have your food for your kitchens and all of that, you're not worried about whether or not you assigned 12 different projects to all be due on the day before homecoming. It's a great way to think about that now, and I think that's the key thing, think about it now so you don't have to think about it over the summer at all. You've already done the leg work, that way, when you come back in August, all you have to actually do is plan your lessons. So enjoy your lessons! (22:16)
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