If you're looking for a ton of teacher self-care tips,
then this video is for you.
We're about to go over 24 self-care tips that go over physical,
social, mental, as well as professional self-care for teachers.
So, if you're a teacher trying to navigate the space of distance learning, be sure
to stay tuned for this entire video.
Before we jump in, I just want to tell you that after you watch this
video, you're going to want to check out our back to school resource hub.
In it, we provide a ton of free resources that will help you
and your fellow educators in getting ready for the school year.
In it, you're going to find a ton of free resources that go over things like
how to build relationships virtually as well as how to conduct meaningful
virtual parent-teacher conferences.
Also this video is brought to you by Albert.
If you're looking for extra practice question and detailed explanations,
as well as automated grading for your students, be sure to check out
our pilot program using the link and the video description below.
By doing so, you'll be able to try out our platform for yourself to see whether or
not we can help you out this school year.
Without further ado though, let's jump into these teacher self-care tips.
Let's dig into seven physical self-care tips that you can take to stay fit
during this time of distance learning.
Our first recommendation is to go for a socially distance jog.
Jogging is a time tested and proven method of maintaining physical self-care.
It can help with weight loss, developing muscle, as well as
strengthening your bone health.
If you haven't run an ages, the first thing you're gonna do is grab
a decent pair of running shoes.
Nike or Hoka shoes are always a great starting option.
From here, you're gonna want to download a fitness tracker app like Runkeeper
to help you keep track of your runs.
For those who haven't run in a while, start your runs with a 15 to
20 minute walk before then jogging.
After you work up some of your stamina, look to aim to cover two to four miles.
And then from there, five to six, and then the world is your oyster.
Make sure you keep a steady routine in order to realize the benefits
of jogging for both your physical, as well as your mental health.
Another great physical self-care tip is to try out some yoga at home.
Yoga has a ton of benefits, from improving your sleep to helping with weight loss.
And even promoting overall bone and muscle health.
Yoga can also help strengthen your cardio.
There are a ton of free resources that you can use to try doing some yoga at home.
For example, there's MadFit on YouTube or Yoga with Adriene, and there's also
a super helpful New York Times guide that you can reference to get started.
If you're not a fan of running or yoga, you can also try to incorporate
a regular full body workout from home.
Just like in the yoga world, a ton of new channels have come up that
can help promote a full body workout, but you can try out for yourself.
Two great channels are Pamela Reif and the SELF channel.
Pamela Reif channel has a ton of great full body workouts whereas the
SELF channel has a ton of helpful cardio exercises that you can do
from the comfort of your home.
You might also find sites like DAREBEE helpful, which provides a ton of different
workouts that you can choose from to target certain muscle groups depending
on the day of your workout routine.
Another tip is to become a cycle master with an at home spin class.
Now, obviously you will need some sort of a bike in order to achieve this, but you
don't necessarily need to buy a Peloton in order to do some spinning at home.
Spin classes can be one of the best ways to burn calories as
well as strengthen your cardio.
This is because your instructor is going to change up a lot of different elements
over the course of the workout, such as your speed, resistance or your posture.
Studio Sweat on YouTube can be a great place to start when it comes
to trying out an at home spin class.
I know there are great at home workout is dancing.
There are a ton of channels that incorporate dancing into
different fitness routines, or just more traditional dancing.
Two recommendations that we have are Pop Sugar Fitness, or
MadFit like we mentioned earlier.
What they do is they incorporate popular songs into workouts so that
it can be a fun way to sing one of your songs that you really like while
also getting a great physical workout.
This next tip really depends on where you live, but we also
recommend that you go for a hike.
If you're in a more urban area, then you can also just try to go for a longer walk.
Hiking can be a great way for you to burn some calories, strengthen
your muscles, or just check out some nice views in your area.
Whether you're hiking in a nearby forest preserve or just in a different
part of the neighborhood that you don't typically walk to, just changing
up the scenery can be a nice way to mix things up during these times.
Our last physical self-care tip is to develop an at home bar routine.
Bar is an increasingly popular workout.
The reason why is because it derives a ton of different unique challenges
from ballet, Pilates, as well as yoga.
This is a great way for you to focus on your strength training, cardio,
as well as your muscle development.
Most classes are going to require some form of a bar for support.
However, there are some at home alternatives that you can explore.
We recommend that you check out channels like Nourish Move Love, or Coach Kel to
check out what these workouts are like.
Now that we've gone over some physical self- care tips, let's shift gears to
talk about some of the social self care tips that you can take as a teacher.
Before we do so, if you're finding this video helpful, be sure you hit that like
button below and also consider subscribing and hitting that notification bell
if you'd like more videos like these.
Our first tip is to create a weekly Zoom or FaceTime schedule with your
friends, family, and your colleagues.
The reality is that in times like these, the line sort of blur when
you're working from home all the time.
And so, you want to have some dedicated time for the people that
are important to you in your life.
An easy way to do this is to use a site like, WhenIsGood to figure out when
everybody is good on their calendar.
Once you have a time that works for everybody, you can
create a Google calendar event.
And then make it a recurring event, whether that's weekly,
biweekly, monthly, et cetera.
This is really important because staying connected with others is
at the root of us being human and promoting our overall mental health.
Our second tip is to play some online games with friends.
Games are not just for children.
In fact, there's been a ton of studies that show that games help reduce
stress, promote social activity, as well as overall wellbeing.
There are a ton of online games that you can check out like Words With Friends
or online chess, monopoly, et cetera.
You can even play games like Settlers of Catan online.
You just have to find the right site to do so.
What you can also do is you can fire up your Zoom or your Google Hangouts
and play a game like Jackbox games, which has a variety pack of games that
you can play along with your friends.
From here, your friends will be able to use their phones as their answer devices.
And it'll sync up to the servers and show everybody everybody's score.
Tip number three, if you haven't already done so is to start a group
chat with a group of friends or family.
You can do this with your standard texting feature, whether you're on iOS or
Android, or you can use a more dedicated app like WhatsApp or GroupMe to create
a group of your friends, or family.
The nice thing about using WhatsApp or GroupMe is that it's not
dependent on which OS system that your friends or family are using.
The fourth social self-care tip is to celebrate happy occasions through
live video calls that are either in small groups or in larger groups.
This can be a great time for you to celebrate birthdays,
job promotions or anything good that's going on in your life.
If you're more shy, you can use these sorts of key events as a reason to
reach out in the first place with your friends or your family and get everybody
together to celebrate the good occasion.
Our last tip is to use some walkie-talkie communication apps,
such as HeyTell, or Two Way.
These apps can be fun ways to engage your friends asynchronously because you
can essentially record a message for them, they can play it back at their
own leisure and then send you back a message without necessarily having to
sync up for a time for a live call.
It can also just be fun because it makes you think about the times
when you're a kid and you played around with some walkie-talkie.
This is perfect for anybody that's looking to have some short lines of
communication, but don't necessarily want on and use apps like Snapchat,
or just be texting all the time.
To wrap up this section, if you're finding this video helpful, be sure you hit that
like button below and also subscribe.
If you want more videos like these.
Now let's shift gears to talk about some mental health self-care tips.
The first big tip is to make sure that you're getting adequate sleep.
According to the sleep foundation, we spend a third of our lives sleeping.
So, it's really important as functioning adults that we have at least seven
to nine quality hours of sleep.
This often is listed as the number one self-care thing that you can do.
So make sure you don't forget about this.
Getting great sleep is highly correlated with reducing your risk of stroke
or heart disease and other ailments.
If you struggle with getting a good night's sleep and you want to get more
data about yourself, you can download an app like Sleep Cycle to start to
learn more about the way that you sleep.
Our second tip is to carve out some time every day to meditate.
Meditation is a great way for you to reduce your stress as well
as anxiety while also promoting your overall self awareness.
You can use apps like Headspace or Calm to have some guided meditation
to help you out in case you've never explored it for yourself.
These apps will often guide you through a time to meditation, helping you with
synchronizing, when to breath in as well as when to breathe out, as well
as the different things to be thinking about as you try to calm your mind.
Our third tip is to check out some fiction or some poetry.
While it can be helpful to read a self-help book every now and then, it
can also be just as helpful to read a piece of fiction or a book of poetry
to take yourself to another space.
By immersing yourself in a fictional characters world, you can take a
step back, from everything being just focused on you and think
about things from a different lens.
As a result of experiencing this fictional characters experiences,
we might realize something about our own experiences that we can relate to
that we wouldn't have otherwise seen.
Check out Penguin or the New York Times book review list for some great
works of fiction or poetry to explore.
Our fourth tip is to plan some healthy meals.
While it might not necessarily seem like a mental health self-care tip, it is closely
related because by consuming really good food, we can maintain a positive
headspace as well in terms of just our overall energy levels throughout the day.
Studies have found that poor diets have often been correlated with mood disorders,
such as anxiety, as well as depression whereas on the flip side, healthy diets
have been correlated with improved moods.
If you need help devising a plan for yourself, check out apps like news Noom
or Calorific to help you plan out which sort of meals might work for your diet.
Tip number five is to get organized.
Believe it or not, having clutter around can impact the way that you perform.
Disorder and messy places can cause anxiety because it forces
your mind to focus on the disorder as opposed to whatever task that
you're trying to accomplish.
So, if you look around yourself and you notice that the environment that you're
in is starting to impact the way that you're performing, it might be time
to get a little bit more organized.
Tip number six is to make or follow a playlist of ambient music.
This might sound a little bit wonky, but it is a great way for
you to refocus yourself and also improve your overall self awareness.
There's even music producers that specifically target ambient noises
to help with reducing anxiety.
For example, Brian Eno creates ambient one music for airports, which specifically
targets reducing anxiety for people that have a fear of flying or just
generally get unsettled for flights.
If you need some help finding some great ambient music playlist, check out Spotify.
They have some curated playlists already created for you that you can start
to test out and see what you like.
Our final tip when it comes to this section is to make a goal every single day
that is outside of your ordinary routine.
Doing something new can energize you and provide you with a new dose of confidence.
So, by incorporating a goal towards something that you didn't do every single
day before, can be a great way for you to keep yourself on track and productive.
Make a journal or a daily log to track your new goals and then
you'd be surprised what you can accomplish even within just a week.
These things can be super small to start such as texting somebody that
you haven't talked to in awhile, or even just making a great dinner
for your partner or for yourself.
The main thing here is you're going to want to start small
and then work your way up.
All right.
So, at this point we've gone over physical social, as well as mental self-care tips
that leads us with the final portion of self-care, which is professional
self-care and how to promote it.
Before we jump into this section, if you found this video helpful, like I mentioned
earlier, we'd greatly appreciate it if you hit that like button below and also
consider subscribing if you haven't already to get more videos like these.
The first thing you can do to maintain your professional self-care is to keep
up with current events that are going on in education with sites like, EdWeek.
EdWeek goes over all things education from things like the best
instructional strategies to trending topics, as well as policy changes
that are going on in education.
It's really important that during this time that you are working from home
most of the time, or doing some sort of blended model that you're staying
in the know as to the things that are occurring in the education space so
that you can be in front of it and be more proactive as opposed to reactive
to everything that's happening.
Oftentimes, these sorts of publications will have newsletters
as well that you can sign up for.
So you can sign up for a weekly or a daily newsletter to keep yourself in the now.
The second tip is to complete as many of your PD hours as you can
through an online educational module.
What you're going to want to do is you're going to want to sync
with your administrator to figure out what you need in order to
meet your PD hour requirements.
And then from there, you're going to want to use PD tools
that you have such as Eduphoria!
or whatever professional development software your school
uses to track your progress.
The third tip is to check out education policy panels, or lectures.
If you're interested in learning more about education from a policy
lens, there are a ton of ways to do so on sites like YouTube.
The Brookings Institute recently had a helpful panel that discussed the
implications of the upcoming 2020 presidential election on education reform.
There are also a ton of helpful TED Talks on the topic.
And so it can be a great way to get some additional insight that
you might not necessarily get from your school or district.
Another great tip is to Zoom or FaceTime with other teachers to
share instructional strategies.
This can be done either just your school or at your district level or
with any other educator that's willing to connect with you in the nation.
All you need to do is use professional networks like LinkedIn
or Facebook groups to find a time to sync up with another educator.
From here, you're going to be able to connect with another person who's
going through the same challenges as you to talk about what's
working and what's not working in your distance learning classroom.
As with our earlier tips, when it comes to Google conferences, Zooms, or
FaceTimes, it's most helpful when you do this on a routine basis, whether that's
weekly, biweekly, monthly, et cetera.
The last tip is to stay up to date on the latest and social and emotional
learning opportunities by Casel.
Casel is an organization that's dedicated to promoting SEL opportunities
in more schools, and they've done it for more than 20 years.
Casel has a ton of materials when it comes to social and emotional learning, as well
as its history and educational settings.
And they also provide case studies, webinars and further readings that
you can explore on your own time.
Social and emotional learning is in some regards becoming more and more important
than even test scores in some districts.
So, it can be really important that you stay in the know
about these sorts of trends.
If you haven't already seen it, be sure to check out our back to school resource hub.
In it, we provide a ton of free resources that will help you and other
educators in this distance learning time.
It's completely free.
So, all you need to do is click the link in the video description to check it out.
If you find it helpful, do us a favor and share it with anybody that you think
might benefit as well from the resource.
Lastly, if you've never tried out Albert at your school or district, we encourage
you to apply for our pilot program using the link in the video description below.
If you do, you're going to get access to thousands of practice questions
as well as detailed explanations to help you monitor student growth
over the course of this school year.
Also, by using the link below, you'll get priority access because as you're
coming in from a YouTube video.
So, if you're looking for extra help in supporting your students this year,
as well as doing some automatic grading for you, be sure to check out Albert.
That's it for this time though.
If you're looking for more distance learning videos, be sure to check them
out on our channel and also subscribe if you haven't already, because if you've
made it this far into this video, then you definitely liked this sort of content.
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