• Sabbatical: A period of leave granted to a university teacher or other worker for study or travel, traditionally one year for every seven years worked.

• Recuperation: The action or process of recovering from an illness or medical treatment.

• Informal: Having a relaxed, friendly, or unofficial style, manner, or nature.

• Unscripted: Not written or rehearsed in advance; spontaneous.

• Curated: To select, organize, and present (content) using professional or expert knowledge.

• Metacognition: Awareness and understanding of one’s own thought processes.

• Neuroscience: The scientific study of the nervous system, especially the brain and the spinal cord.

• Generative AI: Artificial intelligence systems that can create new content or generate creative outputs.

• Logistics: The detailed coordination of a complex operation involving many people, facilities, or supplies.

• Affordable: Inexpensive; reasonably priced and within one’s financial means.

• Majored: To pursue a specific subject as the primary focus of one’s studies in college or university.

• Retrospective: Looking back on or dealing with past events or situations.

• Energized: Filled with enthusiasm, excitement, or vitality.

• Initiative: The ability to assess and initiate things independently; the power or opportunity to act or take charge.

• Low key: Restrained or understated; not elaborate or showy.

• Bizarre: Very strange or unusual, especially so as to cause interest or amusement.

• Pacing: The distribution of events or actions in a story, speech, or other narrative.

• Therapy: Treatment intended to relieve or heal a disorder.

• Curriculum: The subjects comprising a course of study in a school or college.

You welcome to episode 292 of Angela Watson’s truth for teachers. I’m your host, Angela Watson, and I’m here to speak encouragement into the hearts of educators and get you energized and informed for the week ahead. Today I’m talking about how I’m planning and setting goals this year. Visit truthforteachers.com for an easy to read summary and easy to share version of this podcast episode. In place of a sponsor message today, I’d like to make a request from you, especially if you’re a longtime listener and supporter of my work. If you’ve never left a rating or a review for truth for teachers on iTunes or wherever you listen to podcasts, would you take a few seconds and do that? You can click through right from your podcast player app, and there’s a link in the show notes, too. Every review helps boost visibility for truth for teachers and helps more educators discover it. Leaving a review, or even just clicking the star rating is one of the fastest, easiest ways to support this show, and your reviews mean so much to me. A huge thanks to everyone who’s done this. You are so appreciated. So I am back after my sabbatical. You may hear a little change in my voice. I was with my extended family for Christmas and there were 13 little ones, and one of them had a cold, and I think I caught that cold and it was well worth it because we just had a great time together. So my voice is still recovering a little bit, but I feel good. I’m energized. I’m ready to be back after my sabbatical, and I thought I would kick off this first episode of the new year with just a really informal, off the cuff, unscripted look at what I’m up to, what I’m planning, how I’m setting goals this year, and what I’m thinking about in terms of moving forward. So I’ll tell you about my sabbatical first. As you know, I take the month of December off from social media and being online as much as I possibly can, particularly in the second half of the month. And this was something that I started back in 2020. So I’ve had a couple of years now of doing this, and it’s just interesting to see how my focus and my energy levels each sabbatical are so different this year. When I entered, I was not burned out, which was great, so I didn’t need just like rest and recuperation. What I really wanted to do was focus on my art, because that’s something that I’ve been getting into more over the last couple of years, I actually double majored when I was in college. I was an early childhood and art double major. So art has always been something that I loved, but it really had been sidelined for so many years because I was focusing on work. And this December, I got my supplies organized. I really reduced the friction around accessing them so I can get to them easily and put them away easily, which encourages me to make art. I started working on sketchbooks. So Laura Horn is an artist that I like. She has an online course called Sketchbook Sanctuary that I took, which is about how to have a mixed media sketchbook that you just do right at your dining room table so you’re not cut off from everyone else in the household, and you’re not escaping necessarily to a studio, which is something that an art studio, which is something that she has. And actually, I have a little one, too. It’s a little greenhouse shed in the backyard that I use as an art studio. But this is something where you can just casually make art as breaks. So, for example, instead of sitting down on the couch and scrolling through Instagram or something, I can just go over to the dining room table, sit down, and work for a few minutes in the sketchbook and then let it dry while I go off and do whatever else needs to be done, make dinner, answer emails, whatever, and come back and work a little more. And that has been a really cool process. I really got into sketchbooks in December. I also was organizing my house. I just have a number of just closets and supplies that just were just a mess and I needed to go through them. So I cleaned out my clothes. I organized things like the batteries, the spare batteries and screws and nails and miscellaneous things for hanging pictures and art and things like that. So it was the kind of stuff where in the regular rhythm of daily life, getting batteries, spare batteries organized is not exactly like a thrilling thing. And it’s not going to be a top priority because I have work that I need to do. And then when I’m done with that work, I want to enjoy my life as much as possible. I need some downtime, but because I was not working, I was able to sort of focus on these things. And it is so nice now when I need something to open these closets and know where things are and to feel like when I’m done with something, I can put it back where it belongs because things are properly labeled and organized and easy to find. So I bought a label maker and ended up returning it. I was like, this is too fussy for me. I’m just like, handwriting on labels. And my husband still commented, like, when I showed him one of the closets, he was like, it looks like your classroom. I’m like, yeah, the teacher organization mindset is still there. So that’s what I was doing during my sabbatical. It was organizing, especially in the first half of the month, a lot of art. And then the last week was my husband and I went down to the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia. That’s where my family is rooted, and the whole family was together, and I got to spend time with all my nieces and nephews for really the first time since COVID It just seems like every year someone is sick and can’t make it, or there’s just always something going on. And we were all together, and it was just such a delight, particularly for me and my husband, since we don’t have kids of our know to get to know in that role. They call me Tia Angie. So to be tia Angie for a while, it was just such a lovely departure from my normal routines. And I’m back now in January, just feeling energized, ready to go, and excited about doing some new things. So let’s talk about this new things and how I’m planning. My goal this year is really flexible intentionality. So I want to be intentional with what I’m focusing on, how I’m using my time, but I also want to be really flexible with it. I want to hold things loosely. I want to have ideas and goals, but be willing to change them as needed and to really make those decisions from a place of purpose. I think of this as my intention, sort of carving out the path and flexibility, paving the way. So this is not a major change from my prior approach, but sort of holding those two words in my mind, flexible and intentionality, and thinking about how they fit together is going to be a guiding principle for me to make sure that I’m focused on the things that really matter and that also I’m not over committing. And that’s important because I have some really great stuff planned for you in 2024, but I need to make sure that I’m pacing myself. I felt like I did a really good job with that in 2023 and having busier seasons and slower seasons, and I want to make sure that I’m able to continue that. So one of the things that I’m doing slightly differently is last summer we did the 40 hours teacher workweek online summit. That was the first time I’d ever done that and I invited members of 40 hours to present their best time saving tips in like 15 to 20 minutes sessions and we did that over the summer. It was super well received. We had over 10,000 teachers sign up and the feedback was just overwhelmingly positive. However, it was a lot to manage in the summer because that’s when we kick off the new cohort of the 40 hours teacher workweek full year program, the course that runs throughout the school year. So it was sort of a lot and so I decided why don’t we do it this spring instead? So it’s going to be in early April this year and I’m going to split up elementary and secondary. So the way that it’s going to work, it’ll be sort of a two day event on a Friday evening. I’m going to give a longer keynote. I’ll do like a 90 minutes sort of kickoff and really do a deep dive into a topic with you all and then Then Saturday morning into the afternoon, we’ll have the teacher sessions. So this is going to be free to attend just like it was last time. Or you can purchase the recordings, and the recordings will be part of the 40 hours grad program, too. So if you’re a graduate and you’re in the grad program, you’ll have access to those recordings. So I’ll share more about that as the time gets closer. But all of that timeline got moved up basically because, because the summit was something that last year I did in the summertime. This time it’s going to be happening this spring. We’ve already accepted the proposals at this point, so I already know what the session topics are going to be. It’s bizarre to me to know that the first week of January when I think of this as a summer event, but oh, my gosh, it’s going to be so good. So that’s going to be happening in the spring. But I actually have something coming up even sooner than that. So these next couple of months are going to be really busy. I’m going to be doing free live online trainings on finding flow solutions. So that is my new curriculum line to help students focus their attention, to concentrate, to manage their time, to stay organized. It’s really the neuroscience behind learning. So if you have students who are not turning in work in time, they’re not engaged, they want everything to be fun, and they don’t want to really buckle down and focus on the things that they need to do and concentrate if their attention spans are short. These resources are designed to help for that. So I started doing workshops on finding flow solutions in schools this past fall, and I love it. It’s just really cool because a lot of times when you go to a workshop, you’re taught how to do something, but then you still have to figure out, how am I going to implement this with my students? And because this is a ready to use curriculum that I just give to participants of the workshops, they have the tools already, so they’re not scrambling to remember, okay, how do I explain this? Or what do I do next? Or what order? The way the curriculum works is for middle and high school students right now is there’s a student journal, and there’s an interactive PowerPoint. And so you just show the slideshow to your students, basically, and it guides you through each activity and everything that you’re going to say to students. It has videos and audio embedded in it. It basically teaches the lesson for you. It guides you through the entire thing. And then the student journal is their practice, activities and reflections and things like that. So we do some of those in the workshop. So teachers get to experience it, too, because these are all things that we need help with, too. Right? We also have trouble just focusing and getting our work done. We also get distracted and don’t manage our time well. This is something that is true for all humans, not just for kids and not just for this new generation. It’s something we all struggle with. So it was really fun to do it with the teachers and have. I could see the looks on their faces when they imagined doing this with their students. Like, each time that we did an activity there and they could see the AHA moments that they were having. They were picturing the AHA moments their students were having and like, oh, my gosh, this is going to be so good. They’re going to get so much out of this. So that was really fun. And I was thinking, I really want to do this with more people because not every school can afford to bring me out to do that. And I was thinking, you know what? I should do this online. I should totally do this online. It’s not going to be the same, but I can create an interactive workshop online, one for high school teachers and one for middle school teachers. So the idea is that you attend this free online training. It’s probably going to be pretty short, maybe 90 minutes or something like that. The one for high school teachers is going to be February 3, and the one for middle school teachers is going to be February 10, and replays will be available of it. And then you will feel like you understand the basics of the neuroscience behind focused attention and time management and things like that to translate to your students, and you’ll be equipped to go in and start using the curriculum. So each unit is only $12. So you can just buy one unit that has ten lessons. You can buy the whole bundle or just use the free unit. The free unit is called foundations of flow, and it introduces Mihai cheekset Mihai’s flow theory to both middle and high school students. So you can come to the training, you can learn more about this stuff and then use that free unit with your students. So I’m excited about it because like I said, it’s just really fun for me to do, and it’s something I’m super passionate about. The high school curriculum is completely done now, and middle school is mostly done. There’s a couple more units that are releasing, and that’ll be finished by March 2024. And then I’m going to start working on the elementary stuff. So I know elementary teachers have been waiting for this for quite a while. We’re going to start releasing that in April. That’s going to be a big focus of my year. I will be doing that not just this February, but I will do one over the summer as well. And then next fall. This is something that is probably going to be my biggest focus for 2024. I really want to show you how to use these resources and teach students about flow theory, about metacognition, all those kinds of things. Self advocacy, that’s another thing that I think is so important for kids to know how to understand their own needs, get their own needs met, communicate about their needs, take initiative, so all that good stuff and you won’t have to buy the curriculum to attend the workshop. However, I have made it intentionally affordable and it will save you so many hours in lesson planning and resource creation that I hope you will get your school to pay for it or purchase it yourself and support my work. So I really appreciate your interest in that and your enthusiasm for this too, that you all have been showing. So one other big thing that I’m planning for 2024 is a new 40 hours teacher workweek course called 40 hours AI, and AI of course, standing for artificial intelligence. And here’s what I’m thinking with this. If you invest 1 hour each month next school year, you will feel confident using AI to teach more effectively and efficiently. That’s the goal. There’s a lot of trainings out there for teachers on AI. This one is going to be specifically on how you can use it to trim hours off your work week. So it’s all about teacher time saving. This is not about using it with students in the classroom. There’s lots of great trainings on that out there or any other aspect. There’s so many aspects of AI. This is purely on saving you time. And what I hear most from teachers is that they don’t have time to experiment with AI. It is evolving so quickly. There’s so many new AIpower tools for educators. They don’t know where to start. And I also hear that folks try it out and then they aren’t happy with the results. It’s not actually saving them time and they’re like, this is crap. I should have just written it from scratch myself. And the thing that I know myself from having used a lot of different AI tools is that it does take time to experiment. And you do have to know how to refine your prompts. You have to know which tools to use for which which tasks and when do teachers have time to do that? So that’s what I want to build in the time for. I want to be your trusted guide through the world of generative AI. I am not going to teach you every tool and every possibility. I am going to give you the best ideas that I have curated for saving you time. So in the 40 hours AI course each month, there’s going to be a 30 minutes live online training that I conduct on how to use AI to save time on that month’s focus topic. So in the full year program, we spend like one month on lesson planning, one on grading. So there will be a 30 minutes live online supplementary training on AI. So how would we save time grading with AI? And then after the 30 minutes training, you can log off or you can stick around and try out the ideas right away. I will stay online for you to ask questions and get more assistance with tasks related to your specific teaching content context. So the idea is that you can spend that 30 minutes learning. That’s all it takes, 30 minutes a month, and then dedicate that extra 30 minutes to actually experimenting if you want to. So that would be just 1 hour a month and I think you will walk away feeling like, okay, I understand what’s out there, I understand what can be done and I feel confident in this Without it taking over my life. Because I don’t want AI to be the center of my teaching or the center of my world. I just want to know how it can be useful for me, how it can improve my teaching, how it can accelerate my tasks and reduce my workload. So that’s what I really want to teach you. So that’s something that I’m going to be working on to release this summer. It will be in conjunction with the 40 hours full year program. And in fact, if you’ve never joined the 40 hours teacher work week full year program, the AI course will be included at no cost. It will be an add on for that. Or you can just purchase the AI course separately if you want that. So a lot of stuff that I’m going to be doing between now and this summer, we’ve got the finding flow solutions trainings, plus I have to finish the curriculum units. We’ve got the 40 hours teacher Workweek summit happening in April and then we’re going to have this summer, the next 40 hours course kickoff and 40 hours AI. So the front half of the year for me is definitely loaded up with some really good stuff. The last thing that I am planning on for 2024 is I feel like I’ve got on the podcast and talked about this so many times and it’s not happening. But I still want to offer healing nature retreats for educators and I hope to do the very first one locally in the Poconos in Pennsylvania. It’s the eastern part of Pennsylvania. It’s about 2 hours from Philly and 2 hours from NYC. I hope to do one this year at least and then start offering more in 2025. And my vision there is to offer an affordable, low key getaway with an easy driving distance for people, which is why I want to offer them eventually in different locations. But I’ll start with my own area that I know best. I’d like to offer an easy hike to my favorite waterfall, a yoga class with my favorite yoga teacher, a meditation class, art therapy, sound bath therapy. All is optional, included activities. This has been a dream of mine for a really long time, but there’s a steep learning curve. There’s a lot of logistics to figure out. So I want to try just one locally this year and then expand in 2025. So we’ll see, because I already told you how much I have sort of front loaded for the first half of this year, and that retreat should probably be in summer, but maybe it’ll be in fall. Stay tuned for that. It’s still on my radar. That’s my point. So that’s where I’m at as we head into 2024. I also have some fantastic podcast guests lined up for you. I’m going to continue releasing the new episodes here biweekly and the Truth for Teachers daily encouragement podcast will also be continuing through June 7. That’s going to be the last day, so that’s the podcast that you can subscribe to for 399 a month through Spotify, where you get a new message of encouragement every weekday. So that is continuing. And also, I have a biopopular demand. I have a one time payment option. So for people who don’t like having the 399 a month or don’t want to go through Spotify, they just want to just pay one time upfront to me. I’ll put a link for that in the show notes, too. So if you want to get those episodes, as I said, I’m only doing it for this school year, so it’s going to be ending in June. If you want to have those daily encouraging messages from now through June, you have the option to get that. So I’m going to keep working on that podcast just for a little boost of encouragement and motivation each each weekday. So that link is in the show notes. Or go to truthforteachers.com daily encouragement. Your takeaway truth for the week ahead is a callback to my theme of flexible intentionality, and it’s this. As we step into the new year, remember that intentions carve the path and flexibility paves the way. Have a great week. You can do this. And remember, it’s not going to be easy. It’s going to be worth it.