Tip: Goodbye, 2022.
What do you plan to do over winter break to reflect, rethink, and recharge?
Last December, it felt like many colleagues were hanging on by a thread. Now it seems that we have, willingly or not, adapted to the “new normal.” So much so that this post-Thanksgiving time feels somehow both relaxed and frantic - but I suppose it makes sense that, after the past two years, the “normal” end-of-semester bustle feels like a significant downgrade in stress level.
This week is actually one of my very favorite weeks of the year. Work has slowed down and students are heading off for winter break, but my own kids are still in school, so there’s a little bit of a found time sense to the week. If you’re feeling the same way, you might find this a perfect time to look back at the fall and start to look forward to spring.
Reflect on Time & Workload
No matter how well-intentioned we begin in August, by the end of November, the wheels are starting to fall off the bus for many of us. I’ve written previously about the importance of planning to help us manage high teaching and grading loads and to help us find and protect space in our days for the tasks we find truly fulfilling. Thriving is about more than just working efficiently. Now is a perfect time, before the spring semester starts, to reflect on our capacity and how we set priorities (more on setting priorities here) and let this guide the decisions we make about our teaching and other work. Sometimes it is difficult to discern how and where the ideal and reality diverge; I find that this time planning exercise reveals a lot each time I plot out my actual weekly schedule, hour by hour. (This started as an exercise I assign to students.)
Rethink Evaluation
If you teach - whether one course or five (or more!) courses - you probably spend time thinking and worrying about how you assess student work and evaluate student progress. Perhaps you inherited a syllabus and haven’t found time to revise the grading scheme, or perhaps you have started to question how you evaluate students and whether it might be time to make some changes. No matter what is bringing you to a space of reflection about grading, I think it’s helpful to start by thinking about the labor involved with your current system of evaluating students and by articulating, if you haven’t already, your philosophy of grading. Once you have some additional clarity about what student evaluation would ideally look like, maybe specifications grading is something you would like to explore (more about specs grading here). Labor-based grading and ungrading models are attracting more attention and discussion (and to a certain extent, controversy). No one system works for every professor and every course, so it’s important to find some space to explore what others are doing and experiment to find what works best for you.
Recharge
Winter break is a time of stress for some students (and for faculty who think two weeks with family is the ideal time to ramp up productivity). While I have been guilty of this in the past, I have high hopes for setting projects, for the most part, aside. Last winter, I shared some strategies for taking time away, including my own intentions to remove email from my phone and spend 15 minutes a day doing something creative. I was successful with these small intentions last year, and plan to do the same this year. If you want to feel productive, perhaps James Lang’s reading recommendations will do nicely - I have Laura Portwood-Stacer’s The Book Proposal Book: A Guide for Scholarly Authors on my nightstand, along with Nancy Chick and Jennifer Friberg’s Going Public Reconsidered: Engaging With the World Beyond Academe Through the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.
What do you plan to do over winter break to reflect, rethink, and recharge?
With all the resources available to support teaching, I’m honored that you choose to read this one. Your paid subscriptions over the past semester helped support the Faculty and Students Together (FAST) Fund, which provides much-needed support to students experiencing hardship. Future paid subscriptions and one-time donations to Tips for Teaching Professors will continue to support this and other student-focused causes. If you have a suggestion for the next recipient, I would love to hear from you.
Tips will be taking a short writing break, and will return in January with a new semester round-up of helpful ideas. Thanks, as ever, for reading.
