Angela Watson's Truth for Teachers

I decided to scrap the topic I had planned for this week and speak to the teachers who feel like they’re drowning. I know what's expected right now of many kids, families, and teachers is not humanly possible on a long-term basis. And in this episode, I want to counter the system-wide gaslighting that is occurring.

What many (most?) of you are being asked to do right now is NOT, in fact, reasonable ... and the solution is not for you to simply work harder.

We are still in a pandemic. This is still crisis distance learning. This is emergency hybrid teaching. Regardless of how much districts want to pretend we can replicate normal, we cannot.

Resist the pressure to perform at optimal levels when we are not working in optimal conditions. Pushing yourself to work harder when your body's calling for rest will not help you get ahead. That approach is part of the old paradigm which has to fall away and be replaced with a way of working, teaching, and learning that is humanized and centered on well-being rather than accomplishment.

You deserve grace and compassion. Give those things to yourself when no one is giving it to you. Rest tonight. Rest this weekend. Rest is necessary for your survival and you don't need to apologize for it.

Click here to read the transcript and participate in the discussion or, join our podcast Facebook group here to connect with other teachers and discuss the Truth for Teachers' podcast episodes.

Are you working harder than your students? Learn practical strategies for making the learning really matter to kids so they’re self-motivated in the classroom. You’ll discover how to inspire kids to give as much energy and effort in the classroom as you do!

Welcome to my new weekly podcast, designed to speak life, encouragement, and truth into the minds and hearts of educators and get you energized for the week ahead. In this episode, I'll share more about who I am and how I hope to use Truth for Teachers to support and empower you in your work.

Get an early bird discount by July 1st when you join the 40 Hour Teacher Workweek Full Year program! The full transcript of this announcement is below.

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Hey there, it’s Angela, I just wanted to release a quick announcement letting you know that our 40 Hour Workweek programs are now open for early bird access for the 2024-2025 school year!

I’m going to share the updates first for those who are already familiar with 40 Hour or have enrolled in the past. If you’re brand new and have no idea what 40 Hour is, keep listening to the end, and I’ll fill you in.

We’re releasing a brand new membership called 40 Hour AI, which is designed to help you integrate artificial intelligence tools into your workflows to make teaching more effective and efficient.

It’s for folks who are worried about the ethics of generative AI and don’t want to just dive in and hope everything works out.

And it’s for folks who have tried GPT, but felt like they had to rework the output so much they might as well have written from scratch. (I get that–if you don’t know how to use AI well, it can actually take more time than writing something yourself.)

It’s also designed for teachers who like using AI but feel overwhelmed with all the possibilities. I get emails from all the Ai tools designed for educators and it feels like they release 10 new features every single week. If you’re working full-time in the classroom, there’s no possible way to keep up with all of that on top of everything else.

The curation piece is where I come in. It’s my job to shorten that steep learning curve, so AI can become like your own personal teaching assistant right away.

40 Hour AI is a brand new (and ever-growing) collection of video trainings to help you feel confident about using artificial intelligence to streamline your workload in an ethical, responsible way:

✅ Watch the on-demand trainings that show you only what you NEED to know to trim hours off your workweek. The foundational videos have no fluff or filler, and will help you quickly learn the basics of AI, an overview of the free AI tools available to teachers, and the ethical considerations.

✅ Learn to incorporate AI into your existing work habits so it's your go-to tool instead of an afterthought (without having to completely change systems that already work well for you).

✅ Utilize the ever-growing collection of 5 minute timesaver how-to’s anytime you feel stuck on how to complete a teaching task with AI. You'll know exactly which AI tool to use and how to get the results you want. The downloadable prompt resources will help you phrase your request for great AI output on rubrics, SMART goals, lesson plan ideas, text differentiation, and more.

✅ Discover new AI tools and uses that have been vetted by knowledgeable educators so you don’t have to spend hours on trial-and-error. You won't have to look anywhere else to feel up-to-date: new video trainings are added on a monthly basis so you always have the most recent information. I’m creating some of these myself, and others will be shared with you directly from our 40 Hour graduates who are current classroom teachers. They’ll show you exactly how they’re using AI everyday to save time.

✅ Use the private discussion community to stay updated even if you don’t have time to watch training videos. It’s held within the membership site (not on social media), and you can stay in the loop and ask questions there anytime.

As always with my resources, the goal is to help you avoid overwhelm and cut through the noise.

You don't need to know EVERYTHING that's possible with AI up front. (Who has time for that?)

You just need the MOST impactful ways to streamline your teaching workload now, and a way to quickly get answers when you need help with a task.

A free year’s unlimited access pass to 40 Hour AI is included when you enroll in the 40 Hour Full year program. I made the decision to do this because I’m going to be talking a lot about AI tools in the coming school year with the current 40 Hour Full Year cohort, and I didn’t want some of the cohort to have access to the AI recommendations and some not have it.

If you’re not ready to explore AI tools like MagicSchool, Eduade, Brisk Teaching, and so on, you can just utilize the core 40 Hour Full Year materials, which don’t discuss AI at all. I know some folks are apprehensive or just not interested in artificial intelligence, so I made the choice not to change the Full Year program, which doesn’t mention AI. Full Year is focused on classic productivity and organizaitonal systems which generally stand the test of time.

The awesome thing about keeping the AI materials in a separate membership is that I can update them frequently. The AI trainings are short videos around 5 minutes ...

This episode features a sneak peek from one of the upcoming 40 Hour Teacher Workweek Online Summit sessions. You’ll hear from a teacher named June Link, whose session is called, “Clock out confidently: 5 tips to get out the door at contract time.”

In this episode, June shares some helpful principles and mindset shifts, along with the exact process she used to carve out time for a new demand in her workload. June and her colleagues were supposed to implement a new socio-emotional learning curriculum, but needed to find time to explore it, write lesson plans, and figure out how to integrate the new materials into everything else they were doing.

June shares how she estimated how much preparation time she’d realistically need in order to implement this new curriculum, which was 10 hours. Then she explains how she made time for that work during her contractual hours, instead of taking the new curriculum home to figure out on the evenings or weekends.

Listen in to learn about that experiment and more.

Then, save your spot for the 40 Hour Teacher Workweek Online Summit:

✅ 30+ presentations

✅ Opening and closing keynotes by 40 Hour founder Angela Watson

✅ All presenters are current K-12 classroom teachers

✅ No fluff, filler, or pitches: each session is just 15-20 minutes long

✅ Chat with other teachers during the live sessions and get personalized advice

Sign up for the free live Elementary Summit April 5th-6th

Sign up for the free live Secondary Summit April 12th-13th

If you can’t attend live or the event has already passed by the time you see this, you can purchase forever-access to all the sessions (both elementary and secondary), plus get time-stamped transcripts, note-taking guides, and all the presentation links and templates in one document so that you can reference them easily. Forever-access is just $19, and helps cover the cost of running this event and compensating the teachers who share their ideas.

Thank you for your support, and for spreading the word about this event!