Building Your Habit of “Keeping Cool” as a Teacher Working in a Hustle Culture

As the summer winds down and school doors reopen for returning educators at a steady pace, there may be scarcely a hint of difference in the range of emotion experienced by teachers as by students themselves: excitement, wonder, anxiety, anticipation, uncertainty, confidence, and even doubt.

For teachers digging into the work of preparing for the new class, new school, new teammates, or new leadership, there is invariably a common question (unspoken or otherwise uttered): “what new initiatives will they be rolling out this school year, and how different will my workload look as a result?”

Fresh off an inspiring week at the Corwin Annual Visible Learning (AVL) conference in San Diego in July, Piper and I noticed a significant theme across presentations by renowned experts: the art and science of “de-implementation”. While participants all around us (hopefully those with the authority to make changes back home) feverishly scribbled notes on the critical ideas of the concept, nearly every speaker fielded at least one question from a concerned educator: “These ideas all sound amazing, but I’m not in charge. How do I convince my leaders to adopt this approach?” While various ideas were exchanged about suggested actions for these individuals, we felt inspired to take the conversation out into the community who wasn’t in the rooms with us at AVL. We wanted to think more about how individual educators could add de-implementation strategies into their own practice.

First, let’s review why there might be such an emphasis on training leaders to de-implement in the first place. Peter DeWitt, Dylan William, and others suggested the need is in response to another phenomenon, initiative overload, that has served to do little more than collectively build our own unhappy empire of overworked educators. Consider the following factors that have subsequently led our instructional staff (teachers, coaches, specialists, etc.) to bear the impact of this “hustle culture” side effect of the overload:

• External messaging: Society supports a belief that teachers are proverbial saints who are inherently driven to sacrifice their entire well-being for the good of the students in their care. To do otherwise positions teachers to experience internal and external conflict.
• Toxic productivity: Well-meaning education leaders foster cultures of rewards for achieving super-human feats in the work environment, leading to a perception of value for being a “go getter” or otherwise exceeding healthy limits of productivity. Toxic productivity may result in the presence of negative self-talk in which you are rarely satisfied with your accomplishments and perseverate on the accomplishments of others.
• Teacher attrition: In the contemporary education environment, schools and districts everywhere are commonly understaffed and, for those remaining, the required work is simply redistributed across fewer people. While improved delegation might be a logical response, little time exists to even effectively allocate tasks to others.

Build Your Own De-Implementation Habit of Prioritization

While it can be easy to fall prey to the mindset that you must accomplish everything asked of you, zeroing in on a few practices can provide some clarity and calm in the realization that you can balance your schedule and workload and still feel successful and productive.

1. Reflect on Your Purpose: The start of a new school year is a fantastic new opportunity to initiate or revisit a wholehearted examination of “why” you chose a career in education. Be as specific as possible and write it down: what is the impact you aspire to make? On or with whom do you intend to make that impact? What will be different for you and/or those you impact as a result?
2. Identify Your Strengths and Goals: Generate as many characteristics and attributes about yourself you consider a strength. Ask others to help you build your list! Then, jot down a few professional goals related to your growth and development (i.e., earn my NBCT certification).
3. Cross Check Your Tasks and Projects: Keep your purpose, strengths, and goals (P+S+G) list handy all year! As you generate the ever-present list of tasks at work, leverage your P+S+G list to guide how you prioritize your time and effort. If it serves your purpose, aligns with your strengths, and/or brings you closer to a goal, then it deserves utmost engagement! Your allocation of time is likely to become more purposeful as a result and thus, more rewarding.
4. Reward Your “Nope” Skills: Perhaps you are known as a “yes” person—someone who will always agree to do what is asked of them. Perhaps you experience guilt for disappointing others by not helping out or taking on more work they hope to delegate. Retrain your brain away from the dopamine reward of saying “I’ll do it!” to intentionally rewarding yourself for saying “that won’t fit my schedule at this time”. Choose a treat, small or large, and don’t skip it until you see a real shift in how you feel for declining requests.
5. Stretch Your “Influencer” Muscles: Don’t keep your new habits to yourself; you will benefit from strength in numbers! Toxic productivity and hustle culture are group behaviors developed by unwritten rules that build over time. Undoing your own behavior is a start, but what if you positively influenced others and the overall culture by supporting colleagues when they establish boundaries with you? You may be disappointed a rockstar teammate declines the request to lead the Yearbook committee with you, but by conveying you appreciate their willingness to protect their personal time and withstand the “hustle” will amplify your own benefits from the mindset shift across the team.

Starting the new school year can elicit a kaleidoscope of emotions from thrillingly positive to daunted and apprehensive. As you envision how you might experience the most successful year possible in the coming months, we encourage you to embrace your purpose, strengths, and goals! Then, choose one of the practices above to try first as you build your personal habit of de-implementation to successfully navigate the symptoms of a “hustle culture” at work. Curious to learn more? Read the chapter on the habit of “Prioritizing Amidst a Sea of Initiatives” in our Corwin book, Habits of Resilient Educators, or enroll in our asynchronous online course HERE!