Special Education can be a very rewarding job but it’s also overwhelming at times. I am all about self-care and a positive mindset but when I have reached that point of being overwhelmed I find that I don’t even know where to start with self-care. Through my own journey with anxiety, I have learned that step-by-step tangible processes help me during difficult moments.
In this blog, I am going to take a fake scenario that might be overwhelming. I am then going to walk you through five steps that you can take if you’re feeling overwhelmed and we’ll see what it looks like with that scenario. I hope this gives you an effective strategy that you can continue to use in the future when you’re overwhelmed. This is also available as a podcast episode. Listen here!
Here’s the scenario. It’s Sunday night. You check your email to get ready for the new week and you see the email from your special education supervisor. She’s informing you that due to the nature of the school year and distance-learning, all of your IEP’s are now out of compliance. IEP amendments need to be completed by Friday at the latest. You have 10 kids on your caseload, whole week of lessons to teach and oh by the way you have a life outside the classroom. You instantly become overwhelmed and you don’t know how you’ll get it done before the deadline. Let’s apply our strategy.
Step 1: Cool Down
Cool down for at least five minutes. You’ll have to play around with this timeframe because you might find that you need more like 10 minutes or 30 minutes or an hour to cool down but whatever you do, don’t respond to the email until you cool down. A lot of us, myself included, have potential to say something that we don’t mean in the heat of the moment. There are many things you can do to cool down. My preferred method is to take my dog for a walk. Other options include doing five minutes of meditation or yoga, five minutes of stretching, five minutes of laying on your bed and staring at the ceiling. Just five minutes of something that is relaxing and not work related.
Step 2: Talk it Out
Talk it out. My best problem-solving happens when I start verbalizing what I need to do. I’ll be honest, a lot of this process for me is venting. Sometimes I need to say this is bleeping bleep bleep. If you also tend to curse plug in whatever words make you feel better because sometimes it does just help to vocalize that. Get it all out of your system. All of those ugly feelings. You can talk to somebody that you live with talk to your friend talk to your dog or just talk to yourself. Just get it all out of there.
Once you get all of those feelings out start to talk through what you could possibly do to help fix the problem. Again sometimes the solution is sitting right there but I had to talk through it with someone else or with myself to figure out what it was. In this instance, I’m gonna see how many IEPS I have and how many days I have to get this done.
Step 3: Make a Plan
Once we have everything out of our system and we start to process it’s time to make a plan. We can’t stick our head in the sand and pretend like those IEP’s are going to go away. We know it’s Sunday night and we know we have to have this done by Friday. If I was looking at the scenario I’m not going to do anything Sunday night. It’s only going to get me a couple hours ahead and it’s going to take away some of the relaxation that I need.
I know that I need to reach out to all the parents and get the meeting on the books. I also know I need to plan out what I’m going to amend my IEP‘s. I would probably tackle doing the IEPs in two days. I will split my group of 10 kids into two groups: Group A and Group B. I’ll tell myself that I’m going to get Group A’s IEP’s amended on Monday and Group B’s amended on Tuesday. Wednesday can be my buffer day to get any of the IEP’s done that I missed or to have my supervisor or another trusted teacher review to make sure I didn’t miss anything. I can try and get all my meetings scheduled for Thursday with Friday as another buffer if a family can’t make Thursday work.
Step 4: Start the Plan
This is where I’m going to contradict myself a little bit. I said that I wouldn’t start working on Sunday night, and I wouldn’t but I meant I wouldn’t go into the IEP. I might send an email to all of my families letting them know that we have to get these amendments done and I’m trying to have meetings on Thursdays so they could let me know if they’d be available. That will take me about five minutes and I can cross it off my list.
I also really like to write my to-do list the night before so when I sit down on Sunday night to write up the things I need to get done on Monday I will be sure to list all 5 kids in Group A so I remember to amend their IEP‘s. That will just help me keep on track when I get home from work on Monday. Have all your little bullets laid out so that way as each day passes you know exactly what you need to get done and it’ll take that overwhelming umbrella and break it down to a more manageable project for you.
Step 5: Self Care
We have done everything we can reasonably do in this scenario. I don’t want to burn myself out staying up until 2 AM on Sunday night amending all 10 IEP is because that’ll make Monday more difficult for me. I’ve done something to chill out a little bit, I talked it out and I came up with a plan. I laid out all the bullets need to get done and then I selected a small handful of things I could do on Sunday night.
It is time to do something for myself because I can already tell that this week is going to be more challenging than I anticipated and I want to make sure I’m going into it with a mindful perspective. Self-care can be a variety of things and you have if you have no idea what to do for self-care check Episode 53 of my podcast because I had Sarah from The Designer Teacher on and we chatted about a ton of ideas.
That’s the strategy! It’s pretty simple. Cool down, talk it out, make a plan, start the plan, and self-care. I know it might feel like duh but trust me when that really overwhelming email comes you might sit there thinking oh my gosh where do I even start. Hopefully, this by step process will give you a place to start and I can help you feel a little bit more confident as you travel these challenges. Be sure to download the freebie that comes with this blog post here!