3 Things I Do When I Have a Bad Day as a Teacher

Let's talk about hard days in the classroom. I am Jen and I am a K-12 self-contained autism teacher and I'm a blogger here at The Autism Helper. I've been teaching for 20 years and I am here to tell you that today was a really hard day in my classroom. I don't always have hard days, but I don't always have easy days. Our job by nature is hard, but I am here to tell you that today was harder than most. and it's one of those days that if I let it get in my head, I would really feel like a failure as a teacher. So I'm gonna share the 3 things that I do when I have a bad day to kind of help me reset for the next day and prepare to have a better day. So when we have a rough day in the classroom, the very first thing that we do is we kind of take a pause and we make a list, and we just go up to the whiteboard, my whole staff and I do this, and we just write down all of the wins that we can think of for the entire school year in 2 minutes. We just throw them up on the board. So it could be that a child is closer to potty training, it could be that, um, a student is able to write their name or identify their letters, or whatever those little victories were in your classroom from the beginning of school until that hard day. Just take 2 minutes, everybody write them up on the board, and then take a minute to reflect where you were and where you are now. Sometimes a little bit of perspective goes a really long way, especially when you're caught in a bad day. I took time to do this with my staff today. We took 2 minutes right after school, we all threw things up on the board to identify the progress that we've made this school year, and within 2 minutes, 6 of us had 30 items on the board. Not a single repeat. And I'm telling you this because when we get caught in like this, we had a really bad day, we lose sight of all the progress that we've made, especially if it's in January, February, March, second semester sometimes, um, because our students in August are not the same students that we have now. And so we are looking at who they are now and hoping to move them forward, when in reality we've already moved them so far. So while this doesn't take away the bad day, it does give perspective for how far we've come and where we started and where we're going. The second thing I do when we have a rough day is I take a look at my plans. I'm not saying that your plans were the cause of your bad day, but I am saying that after 20 years teaching, one thing that I've learned is that there is downtime or if there's a shift in schedule or if there's something I didn't plan for, well, that's when behavior can sneak in and that's when things can go awry. So, I want to make sure that I am appropriately planned for the next day and I want to make sure that I am not asking too much or that I have too little downtime in my planning. Easier said than done, but I'm gonna show you one of the activities that that I pull if I've got extra time and I always have on hand. I teach K-1 and 2, and so my learners are what I call learning to learn. They're learning how to sit down, they're learning how to attend, and they're doing simple things like easy matching and errorless tasks. And these easy matching workbooks are the perfect solution if there's a minute or 2 or 5 of downtime between subjects, centers, or when students are coming in and out of the classroom and just have a few minutes before they're starting something else. These errorless tasks are engaging and they change every day, so students can always have something new and something fresh. This is the spring version. I love every single version of this. I have all of them in my classroom. In fact, I have the dinosaur one right here that I am prepping, and these are just so great for those little time fillers. If you look at your schedule and you find that you've got an extra 2 minutes, 5 minutes, fill that time with something like this. So this last one's gonna sound cliché, but it really does work. Tomorrow we are gonna review expectations in the classroom, and we're gonna review transitions and what those should look like in the classroom. Now, I know that I teach special ed, and I know that transitions are going to be hard. So in reality, what this looks like is I'm working with my adults on how they can better support my students, in those transitions, and we talk about it, and we work through it, and we practice it as a class. So tomorrow, instead of centers, what we're going to be doing is reviewing expectations where we struggled. We're going to be reviewing in the morning with my staff before students get here how to support students in those transitions and in those tricky times, and then in those expectations, and then we're gonna practice that during center time. So So that way everybody gets extra practice. I get to be able to support my staff and my students. My staff gets to be able to support students and students get to practice that ex— The thing about expectations and rules is that students have to be reminded what they are, especially if maybe a student's put their toes over the line and it was no big deal and then they went a little further, a little further, a little further, and now it's a big deal. So those kind of things can kind of be reset when we review those expectations and transitions. The combination of these 3 things typically set us up for a really good day. Now, if you are having a situation to where you are consistently having one piece of your day that's a problem, look for one piece of your day that's going really well and move that piece into the section that's going really poorly. Just duplicate it, do it twice. It's okay to do it twice. Then slowly replace pieces of that with what was going wrong. I promise you it's not silly. It actually helps you because the expectation right here is really good, and now you're moving that expectation to the tricky piece. It's okay to have bad days in the classroom. Um, we've had our fair share this year, and in fact, this is one of the hardest years that I've had in a really long time. But at the end of the day, when I am looking at those plans and I am making appropriate changes, when I'm reminding students of expectations and transition rules, and when I am supporting my staff in supporting students, and I am able to really look at where we were and where we are, I'm reminded that it's just a bump in the journey. I would love to know what you do in your classroom when you have a really rough day. How do you reset? How do you recharge and get ready for that next day? Let me know in the comments below and let me know if you have any questions.