*Please note that these episodes are designed to be listened to.  I encourage you to tune in on your favorite podcast app or by clicking play above.

Holy moly! I recorded this episode in mid-January and am not publishing it until mid-February - woah!  But here’s the thing, at Teach On A Mission, we are nothing but #reallife, and sometimes deadlines aren’t met and life takes over.  So when you hear me say it’s mid-January, just know that I am completely wrong, but hopefully what I share still resonates with you.

In this episode we get super practical! Share this episode with a teacher who needs to hear the message that their sustainability is important and a priority!

These tips are not rocket science, but they are ones that have allowed me, as a working, teacher mom, to manage all the things in ways that are slightly automated, removes the need to think about it

Goes with the new motto I’m adopting in my life and I think all teachers should...

1. No matter what planner I’ve had or lesson planning system I’ve used, I have always felt that the big tasks, the big projects I was working on as a teacher - like planning a unit, creating an assessment, planning out review and remediation, etc. - I always felt that no matter the lists I made to know what needed accomplished it just felt like I was barely keeping my head above water to get it all created and done in time.
1. Now, with Asana in my business, which absolutely applies to lesson planning and creation, then implementation in the classroom, I’m able to see when something I’m creating needs to be absolutely finished, and plan backwards, seeing where I have time available and when I’m able to work on it, and when I need to have certain aspects done in order to keep the train moving, but in ways that I’m not always thinking about only it.
2. In the classroom, if I ever wanted to implement something new and it required my creating and planning...

Hello there and welcome back to the Sustainable Teacher, I am your host Mandy Rice, and I’m so excited you’ve joined us for another episode of teacher inspiration and encouragement packaged into recommendations and tips to help make your teacher-life a bit more sustainable.  Because we are all about helping you have BOTH in your life.  What do I mean by that, you might be asking???

Well, I mean you should have BOTH an effective classroom AND a thriving personal life.  You shouldn’t have to sacrifice one for the other, and I’m hoping today’s episode, as well as this podcast as a whole, helps you take one step closer to that truth.

Starting with this episode, I am excited to announce that each of our episodes will now also be available in video format on my YouTube channel, so if you’re listening to the podcast head to the link in the description to check out the YouTube video that will give a visual glimpse into today’s topic....

Welcome back to the Sustainable Teacher Podcast, or welcome for the first time if this is the first episode of the show that you’re listening to.  Either way, I’m so happy to have you listening in.  And I’m going to start off by saying that this episode will be a healthy dose of tough love.

I have all the love for my people - and my people are teachers.  They are educators through and through, and I love them.  But I also have tough love for you today. And I’ll say that a dose of tough love might not be exactly what you want today. Heck, it might not be what you need, because you really need an open ear to vent to.  And that’s healthy as well, but unfortunately, on this platform I can’t be that listening ear, so I encourage you to go and find it.  We have our Sustainable Teacher Podcast private community on Facebook that you are welcome to join and find a safe place to vent and express your concerns.  Be sure to...

 I recently was driving in the car sans children so it was very peaceful and serene.  Not to say my time in the car with my three boys isn’t wonderful - it’s just a louder version of wonderful where I don’t get to sit in quiet or do what I ended up doing on this particular drive which is downloading a book that I forgot I had waiting for me on Audible and click play.

I’m going to recommend this particular book to you in this episode so I will talk more about it later, but for now I need to share how the book struck me in a way I was not anticipating.

So I’m driving along and I’m listening in as the author tells a story and brings wisdom to something I had been feeling for most of my life, and she gave such clarity I didn’t know I needed.  I was even brought to tears - not tears of sorrow necessarily but tears of feeling seen in what I thought was just all in my head.

And the book, so aptly named, is Jennie Allen’s Get...

Hey there teacher-friend and welcome back to the Sustainable Teacher Podcast, I’m so glad you’ve chosen to join us today, and man have you picked a good episode to land on.  I am so excited to have Trevor Muir on the podcast today.

Trevor’s roots are as a high school English teacher, and is now teacher, author, and speaker. He is the author of the books The Epic Classroom and The Collaborative Classroom. Trevor is a teacher at Grand Valley State University, was a national faculty member for the Buck Institute for Education, and is one of the Andrew Gomez Dream Foundation speakers. His work has been featured in the Huffington Post, Edutopia, EdWeek, and WeAreTeachers. He gave a TED Talk titled, "School Should Take Place in the Real World," at TEDxSanAntonio. Trevor’s Facebook page, The Epic Classroom, has inspiring videos that have been viewed over 30 million times. At the heart of Trevor’s work is the conviction that every student has the...

One year I got a wild hair and reduced my teacher desk to the size of a cafe table.  You know, like the ones you stand next to at a wedding reception or have a coffee over at the local coffee shop.  Yes, about a two-foot space.  I sure was up on my high horse that year thinking, “I don’t need a big space because my classroom is student-centered”, mmmmhmm.

It was cute and all, but I didn’t have any space to relax, which is what my teacher-desk was used for briefly during my planning period or other break times during the day, yes, even during class when I had a minute.

In fact, that was my space’s main purpose.  To be a small, but mighty space for me to be able to just sit and take care of a few things when I had a moment.  But I didn't know that until the space was gone.  So I quickly switched back to a regular table sized desk, but made sure that the space served it’s main purpose - allowed me to get work done and...

You know the age old tale of what it’s like to be a first, second or even third year teacher and all the hustle and grind that it is.  You get to work before 6 AM and you leave sometime after five or 6 PM and probably still have more papers to grade or lessons to plan once you get home and a lot to do on the weekends. And that’s just to keep your head above water.

As if those first years of teaching aren’t bad enough it’s as if the universe looked at me and said just wait. At the start of my fourth year of teaching I became a mother and everything changed.

Suddenly what had been my absolute top priority, which was teaching even above my marriage, sad to say it but true because I’m such a workhorse and so professionally focused, but motherhood shook the bedrock, if you will, of my priorities. And I had no clue how to deal with that when my identity had been so wrapped up in who I was as a teacher. 

And that is where this episode comes into...

Kids have just left your room, you grab your lunch from the fridge and decide to have a working lunch (because, yes, those are ok to have every once in a while) in the peace and quiet of your empty classroom, and as you sit down and open your laptop, you immediately lose all semblance of peace and quiet when you open your email to find 15 new emails amid your inbox that already has over 200 messages needing your attention.

Among those emails are no less than a few reminding you of past emails you have not responded to yet, and there goes your peaceful and lite working lunch.

Much like we talked about in last week’s episode referring to project management and all the roles we fill as teachers, we are filling the position of around 5 people.  It’s high time we start acting like someone who fulfills 5 positions by using a project management tool, and by streamlining how we handle our email inbox.

After listening to this episode you’ll be ready to tackle what is...

Well hey there and welcome back. I am so excited to have Samantha Fecich of EduMagic on the podcast today, and I’ll share a couple of reasons why.  First, I’ve recently  stepped into the higher ed  space, and she’s been there for a while, so it was nice to have a conversation within that context.  Secondly, as a special education teacher turned educational tech expert, she gives a refreshing perspective on ed tech in ways that reinvigorate my passion for the field and I think this conversation will do the same for you.

In this episode you will hear us chat about various topics including student-life balance for preservice teachers, tech tool (and non-tech tool) recommendations for preservice teachers, as well as the purpose and possibilities of educational technology for students today.  So no matter what you teach, this episode will be valuable for you, but will be especially valuable for pre-service teachers out there.

Without further...