This post is part of our series on personal development for teachers. Content knowledge, curriculum standards and teaching strategies are just part of the equation for what makes a successful teacher.  Personal habits, attitudes and behaviors are also a big part of the picture. In this series, we explore ideas that will help you as a teacher and as a person.  We hope you enjoy reading it as much as we have enjoyed researching and writing it.

How Teachers Can Embrace Flexibility

Do you consider yourself a flexible person? Are you glued to daily routines and structures or do you just go with the flow? Either way, there are times when you will need to embrace flexibility.

You can write lesson plans weeks ahead, gather and print out your materials, and color code your daily planner to help you stay on task. The life of a teacher is busy, and no doubt these things will help you stay organized. Sometimes however, our best-laid plans fall apart.

A knock on the door brings a new student to your classroom. The power goes out just when you were starting a lesson using computers. A fire drill leaves you with a shortened class period and not enough time to give the test you were planning to give. Someone gets sick and throws up all over the ABC carpet.

It happens. Your well -planned lessons go out the window as you now must deal with deal with new and unexpected circumstances.

What’s a teacher to do?

 Here are four ways to embrace flexibility:

Prepare for the unexpected.

Here in the Midwest we often experience challenging winter weather. Extreme cold or heavy snowfall results in delayed or closed schools. Water pipes burst, cars won’t start, and the wind chill is serious enough to be life threatening.

Those of us in places that experience severe weather know that we can prepare for the unexpected. We have heavy coats, boots, scarves and gloves. We fill the car with gas, blankets and emergency supplies. We fill the house with groceries and logs for the fire. We learn to control the things we can and then learn to deal with the rest.

You can prepare for unexpected situations at school, too. If weather is threatening, make sure you have warm clothing, in case you end up unexpectedly being assigned recess duty. Be sure to take home things you might need the next day if school is cancelled. We know a teacher who lives out in the country far from her school who keeps a bag of extra clothes in her car in case she gets stuck and end up spending the night at a fellow teacher’s house in town.

For those last minute, unexpected classroom disruptions, you can keep a set of alternate plans and materials in your sub folder that you can grab and teach at a moment’s notice. Another idea is to keep students’ favorite learning games handy and bring them out in a pinch. Many teachers plan units with projects that have individual or small group work tasks that are ongoing such as presentations and reports where students can work independently while you attend to an emergency. A little planning can help you adjust to unexpected circumstances while keeping students engaged in learning.

Use the skills you already use to adapt to learning differences.

You already have a skill set that allows you to adapt, and you likely make adaptions every day. When students don’t understand a concept, you reteach it in a different way. You create adaptions for students who are struggling or students who have already mastered the material. You have likely used adaptations for different learning styles and made accommodations for students with IEP’s.

Think of the ways you already adapt your instruction. You mix up groups, rearrange seating, and use learning centers or stations. You give alternative assignments. You offer learning through print, but also through audio and visual modes as well as in hands-on lessons. You may have associates in your room to assist specific students. The ways that you already adapt lessons can be the same ways you adapt when your original plan is no longer viable.

Ask, what does this make possible?

It is a natural to be out of sorts when our lives and routines are interrupted. We can complain and commiserate. However, that is not the only response we can have to challenging circumstances.

So much of flexibility is really just re-framing how we think about the situation. Author Dan Miller of the 48 Days to the Work You Love book and podcast teaches that whenever we are faced with a challenge, we should ask “What does this make possible?”.

Sometimes, shaking things up results in something new and wonderful. You have probably experienced a time when you deviated from your lesson and the new lesson was far better to the original one.

What does an unexpected or challenging event make possible? With less time, how might you do things differently?  Without expected resources, how might you be creative? Could you ask students for their ideas about what they could do?

Be open to that the unexpected might leave room for inspired energy.

Stay calm and maintain a positive attitude.

There are always challenges, but inflexibility and personal negativity don’t make those challenges any less challenging.

You can choose to be rigid and self-righteous. You can resist the challenge and expend all of your energy trying to swim against the current. See what it does to your attitude and see where that gets you. Getting yourself into a tizzy and raising your blood pressure only makes things worse.

There is a reason why people conducting a job interview often ask you to describe a time when you faced a challenge and tell how you handled that challenge. They don’t really care what the challenge was. They want to know how you will react to unexpected situations. They don’t want people who say, “that’s not my job” or even worse, “but we’ve always done it that way.” They want people who can think on their feet, roll with the punches, and adapt to new and unforeseen events with confidence and creativity.

Being flexible doesn’t mean throwing all caution to the wind and letting life just come at you. We need some structure and some routine. The secret of success is to understand what you can control and when to let go of things you can’t control. You can stop resisting inevitable challenges. You can learn to envision a new outcome, or plan a new scenario.

You can even learn to enjoy the journey despite all the bumps along the way.

Our best,