Finding our Balance

As Educators, we are often asked the question “Did you always know you were

going to be a teacher?”

And for us, the answer was always pretty easy- ”Yes.”

We both began our college careers with the intention of becoming and staying teachers. What we didn’t know, is how much our priorities, mindset, and involvement in education was going to fluctuate and (continue to) change… We had no intentions on doing this “extra” teacher stuff. THIS was not planned.

So why are we doing it?

If you love teaching so much, why don’t we just stick with JUST that?

To be quite honest with you, it has taken us almost 3 years to figure this all out. (And we STILL don’t have it all figured out, so thanks for sticking with us through this journey).

When we started as new educators, we were excited! Although we did not work together as co-workers our first couple of years, we have both reminisced on the fact that we were what some people call, ”serial workers”… and by choice. We knew that the first years were hard, so we worked overtime to try to figure it out and make it easier for ourselves the next year. We prepared over the summers, attended all the PD’s we could find, read all the books, tried all the trends, spent multiple extra hours at school, volunteered religiously, and happily spent our weekends entangled in school related activities. When we started working together, we realized we are similar teachers in the fact that we were willing to go the extra mile. We pushed each other, shared with each other and learned from one another. We had meaningful and fruitful conversations that, I think we both agree, inspired one another to be the best teacher you can be.

Now, let me pause right here by saying, this is the kind of teacher co-worker you want!! This situation is one teachers DREAM of!

Ya'll, we were living the dream! We were in the best case scenario, right?!

Did we love it? Yes. Was it balanced? No.

We were both newly married and talked often about how we both wanted little babies running around! We would spend hours planning together as we talked about our futures and how we couldn’t wait to have our kids in school with us.

What we both took note of, is how much extra time we were spending at school. And we started to work that into conversation… how were we going to do both?

We worked hard to create new, interactive, and fun activities daily. We were being our BEST TEACHER SELVES. And we knew it. If we didn’t create a fun, active, or engaging lesson, we felt like it wasn’t our best. We felt like we were doing a disservice.

We spent hours before school, hours after school, hours on the week

end and countless dollars in our classrooms. We were quickly realizing what "burn out" meant. We started to understand the veteran teachers who told us "prioritize your teaching and time," "remember, it will be there tomorrow," and "don't worry, take the days off!" So, here’s how it changed our teaching mindset.

We decided that we had to prioritize what we were passionate about and what made the BIGGEST IMAPCT. We decided that for us, that was transformations and active learning approaches.

We started to focus on transforming our mindset and implementing these strategies into our daily curriculum, creating routines that were active, purposeful, and meaningful. We learned (through trial and error) and planned transformations driven by curriculum that were realistic, affordable, memorable and impactful. We LOVED what we were doing and felt like we found a way to teach with balance! We loved sharing our ideas with the teachers around us and would get very excited when other teachers tried some of our approaches and strategies.....

And thus, gratefulingradeschool was born! We created our first educational platform! Now, fast forward-- this lasted about a year before we had to

re-evaluate... again!

Social media was way more than we bargained for. We were spending hours on instagram and teachers pay teachers trying to find our voice and reach other teachers. At the end of the year, we decided that we were not doing this in an effective and efficient manner. We were exhausted.

This couldn't be how other people did this...

We started to ask and brainstorm how teachers were now balancing teaching, social media, creating, and managing their social lives!

What we found is that it looks different for everyone.

So, we needed to find ours.

We have found balance in working on social media continuously, but consciously considering our season of life we are in.

We work together. One of us will work on TPT, while the other will work on Instagram. We spend one or two days a week (depending on the season and our schedules) creating content.

We plan our transformations, budget them, and save them. We share active learning approaches and build them together as a team. We have worked for years to find our balance... and to be honest, we most of all recommend, forgiveness and flexibility.

Our balance has worked because

we were able to learn TOGETHER how to transform our teaching in a meaningful way. We have worked for years creating transformations, and trying active learning approaches that have proven successful. Through this epidemic of teachers feeling drained and lifeless, we feel we have been called to share what we have learned, help make the process easier for other educators, and to ultimately transform your educational experience, lifestyle, and balance!

Now, we are here to provide you with short cuts, share our secrets, provide our services, offer advice, and just communicate with teachers to help transform education as a whole!

Our balance is found in inspiring others to transform their thinking the way we did.