SUMMER BLAST #9 – Change, Passion, and Self-Care with Halee Sikorski

Hello everyone and welcome to Teach Me, Teacher's SUMMER BLAST of inspiration! I cannot express how excited, pumped, and inspired I am right now for next year, and I want you to join me and my AMAZING guests in our quest to bring some positivity into the teaching world. Today I am talking with my good friend and teacher extraordinaire, Halee Sikorski! In this episode, we discuss: how she is handling changes in her life with moving states, changing schools, and changing grade-levels how she is keeping her passion for teaching alive how she is focusing on self-care ...and much much more! Halee has the most appearances on this podcast for a reason, and this episode is no different! It is filled with honesty, insight, and a few laughs along the way. You can catch Halee on MORE episodes of Teach Me, Teacher too! Halee discusses going from year one to two here and here.  We discuss Get Your Teach On here and here.    If you love this episode, consider becoming a Patron of the show and get MORE episodes, exclusive to Patreon.      This episode is sponsored by Heinemann and their book, Classroom management. After decades of teaching, Nancy Steineke passionately believes this much to be true: a collaborative classroom environment is essential for student learning, and for teachers' well -being. In this guide for every teacher, Nancy makes a powerful argument that we can dramatically reduce the stress of classroom management and improve student achievement when we cultivate classroom communities built on student-centered collaboration. Laying out a plan for collaborative classroom management across a semester or a whole school year, Nancy offers teaching moves and student activities that: build strong relationships between students and teachers, and between each other help students develop, invest in, and uphold positive classroom norms show students the importance and real-life value of soft skills, including what those skills look and sound like in action. Nancy's strategies can easily be integrated into your classes as you teach required content. "By threading community-building work through your schedule," Nancy explains, "you show your students that they matter as individuals, and that social skills are intertwined with academic success." If you're wasting precious class time addressing classroom management issues and want to foster a more meaningful, productive place to learn, give Nancy's time-tested moves and activities a try. There's never been a more important time to create collaborative classroom communities where every student is seen, heard, and believed in. Get it now.