How to Use Your Students to Work Smarter Rather Than Harder [Episode 166]

Rebecca 0:00
So I told you all last week that my theme for this year, and my work personally, is optimization. And part of my optimization is being sure that I am best using my very limited work time and energy on things that only I can do, or I want to do, or that are, like, in my zone of genius, for example, I absolutely love creating resources. That’s like, literally why I started. It’s not rocket science, and I love recording this podcast. So those are things that I want to make sure I’m spending my time and energy doing. And so this year, my big focus is really, of course, maintaining this podcast, because I love it so much, but also working on the physical science curriculum revamp, and then everything else. If I have time to do it, I will do it myself, or I’m going to offload those other tasks like proofreading, editing, digitizing, resources, marketing, that is like the opposite of my zone of genius, is marketing, okay? And this has helped me so much to really see that I’m working smarter rather than harder, like I don’t need to keep up the hustle. Okay? I think I’m aging out of my hustle era. And it’s not saying I’m not working hard. I’m just not going to kill myself over this. I’m just going to be more strategic with how I work, and I want to help you do the same. Like, I love this podcast, because I love learning things, and then, you know, sharing those with you guys, and we are, like, learning and growing together alongside each other. And I hope you feel the same way if you do shoot me a DM on Instagram, so I know I’m not crazy if you’re listening to this, because that’s my real hope with this. So I want to share that with you, because I want to help you do the same. I want to help you utilize what I think is most likely your most underutilized asset, and it’s a free asset, and that’s your students. That’s right, your students. And I mean this in the most like PC, way possible is like you guys, we have free labor available in every class that you teach. You know you might have 30 students, and every class period you teach five or six class periods that can be like 150 students at your disposal. Are you using them to your advantage? And I don’t mean this in, like, a using them way, like to harm them, or, like, abuse them. For the biology teachers out there, I don’t want this to be a parasitic relationship, okay, where you’re, like, sucking the life out of your students. I want this to be something that’s mutualistic. There’s a mutual benefit here. I think sometimes we just forget, like, all of the energy that we have before us. They have more energy than most likely we have the creativity that’s before us, the innovation, like what they can do and what they can bring to the table. Honestly, I’m seeing this so much in my personal life, with my children. I think when you have babies, and if you have babies close together, you get so used to just doing everything for them. It’s so much easier. Like, let me help you put your shoes on, let me load the dishwasher. Let me just, you know, make this part of dinner. And I’m starting to realize that with my oldest, who’s almost seven, I’m not saying I missed my opportunity, because, y’all know, I don’t believe anything’s ever too far gone, but I’ve noticed how I’ve conditioned him to, like, not help. You know, I’ve not utilized him and his gifts, because all the times he wanted me to help, I just pushed him aside. Like, it’s faster for mommy to do it herself. And I’m seeing my daughter is really in this helping stage where she wants to help, and I’m having to, like, fight the urge to just do it myself, because I could do it faster or more efficiently or better, and seeing that like, No, this is actually good for her and me. It’s good for me to pass things off. It’s good for her to be trained to do things while she’s interested in doing them, so that when she herself is almost seven, hopefully she’s a little bit more autonomous, a little bit more independent. So I want you to think of your students in this way. Let’s use our students. Let’s slow down and teach them and engage them and bring them into some of these things, and we can really work smarter rather than harder. Let’s use their brains to think creatively. Let’s give them opportunities to earn service hours while also benefiting your classroom. Let’s give them opportunities to strengthen their autonomy and their critical thinking skills and so much more so in today’s episode, I’m gonna share seven very specific ways that you can work smarter rather than harder, by utilizing your students as your greatest asset in your classroom. All right, you ready here? Let’s dive in. This is secondary science simplify, a podcast for secondary science teachers who want to engage their students and simplify their lives. I’m Rebecca Joyner from it’s not rocket science. As a high school science teacher turned curriculum writer, I am passionate about helping other science teachers love their jobs, serve their students and do it all in only 40 hours a week. Are you ready to rock the time you spend in your classroom and actually have a life? Outside of it, you are in the right place, teacher friend, let’s get to today’s episode number one, have your students make your class decor Okay? Most likely, if you’re a veteran teacher, you’ve kind of accumulated your vibe in your classroom. But I think back to my first year teaching, and I had this, I did not know how good I had it. Y’all, I had this insane classroom with a lecture space in the front and this beautiful lab space in the back. I had these giant windows. I had a whole wall of whiteboards. I was attached to a chemical prep room. So I had the chemical supply closet and all sorts of prep things, refrigerator. I mean, like, Yo, I was so spoiled at this large public school. I just had no idea until I had other jobs. But I spent so much energy wanting to decorate my classroom and like, use Pinterest to, like, make the cute bulletin board and like, invest in the lab safety posters. And I was cutting things out, laminating them for class rules and things like that, and it’s like, okay, your students can be a part of this. In my later years in the classroom, my students really did it all. I had a blank slate at the start of each school year. I might have put like, some contact paper up to cover the bulletin board because I had so many holes in it. But other than that, I let it be a blank canvas. And throughout the year, my students decorated our classroom. I gave them an opportunity to decorate the bulletin board. You know, we often made it our a amazing work wall where they, you know, the best a work got to be hung up on the wall and displayed at the beginning of your first units. You could have them make some lab safety posters based on the rules you cover as you go over your lab safety contract. Have them make witty ones or funny ones, and you can hang them up, come up with class rules together, and have them make those posters, make timelines as you cover different historical developments through scientific discoveries like atomic theory or D discovery, and have those be the decorations on your walls. I think there’s no reason why, unless it’s absolutely again, your zone of genius and your passion. If you love decorating your classroom, go for it. But if not, let it be a clean slate every single year and let your students really take over that they are most likely more creative than you are, unless you’re a very creative person. I’m not artistic at all. Okay, my second tip is your students should be making all of your student samples that you save for future years. So every time I do any sort of creative activity or project or anything that’s gonna have some sort of output, it’s gonna have some sort of product. At the end of it, I ask the students, can I save your best work? Some of them like to keep it, but usually every year I get one or two that are really good. I’m like, can I save this to show future classes, and they say yes, and so this takes time to accumulate. That means the first time you do something, you’re not gonna have a lot of examples to show them. I get emails all the time from people who use it’s not rocket science resources, and ask for pictures of like student work samples for different things. And most of the time, I don’t have stuff I can share, because, you know, when I was in the classroom, I wasn’t thinking about this job that I now do, and so I only have a few student work samples that I have written permission to share with you guys. So those are the ones that I do share in the read first, PDFs, everything else that I saved over the years I can’t share because I never got permission from those students. But if you’re just doing this for own classroom use. You don’t need to worry about that. You just say, Hey, can I save this? And most of them will let you. And here’s the one piece of encouragement I want to give you on this, if you’re like But then, what do I do the first time I try something and I have nothing to show them? I actually think it’s better sometimes not to show them. A lot of examples. I think a lot of times students will see examples and then they just want to copy those examples, as opposed to when there’s no there’s no basis to go off of say, hey, look, just do what you want to do. As long as you follow this rubric, you have complete creative autonomy here. I just want to see what you come up with. So have them do that, and then you save that, and then you have these archives that you can show year after year for your students. If you’re not doing that, start doing it today. It’s so valuable to have third thing you can use your students for

Rebecca 9:07
is peer grading. Guys, I basically stopped grading labs entirely. Okay? I had the students grade them for me, and not in a sense that, like they are marking up papers with the red pen and putting like, minus 10 or anything like that. But hey, before I’m going to collect this lab, you’re going to swap with the person next to you, and I want you guys to look at each other’s graphs. And I would walk through with them. Do they have a title? If not, circle it, check their axes. See if they’re going up by an even scale. Are they going up by twos, fives? Are they skipping? I would give them, like, a list of things to check for and just mark okay. Now switch back. You have five minutes of silence to make any corrections that your peer, your neighbor, noticed, and then I’m gonna collect them. Then I can spot check so much more easily, because they’ve already marked, like all of these things that hopefully you know, corrected them before I see them. It makes it so much. Faster. I also love peer grading too, just for like, practice problems and things like that. I do think if you’re gonna grade practice problems, I like to spot check for completion. Just give them, like, a 10 point grade, just that they tried for effort, and then you can let them correct their own or correct each other’s. I do like for those giving them the option to not swap, some students get really sensitive to that, but I found with the labs that most students aren’t sensitive to it, because it’s truly like they’re not really grading. You should really say peer reviewing, like, Hey, I’m just you need fresh eyes on this to make sure you didn’t miss anything before you turn this in. Fourth thing I recommend is taking advantage of your honors sections. Okay, if you have, like, an honors bio, and you also teach on grade level bio or honors Chem and on grade level, Kim, Your Honor students are going to be able to go, hopefully, through the content faster. And, of course, you’re going to go deeper on some things. But I think oftentimes too, like I love using my honor students to give them extra projects, and the result of those projects, the products they make are going to support, you know, my lower level class periods, or my more diverse learners than maybe some of my other class sections. So for example, at the start of every unit, you could have your honor section, make word walls for the unit say, hey, after you guys finish your test, you know you’re each gonna get assigned a vocabulary term. You are gonna make three pieces to it. You’re gonna make the actual term on one piece of paper, and then you’re gonna have the definition on one and then the picture on another. And then at the start of the unit, you decorate your unit. You make these word walls from what your students made as the unit goes on. You can remove the definitions from the wall and just have the word and the picture. And you can kind of evolve it as you want to help them learn these things, but like there’s no reason why you need to be killing yourself making word walls, and that is such an easy thing that you can spend half a class period having your honor students do or say, Hey, this is an extra credit opportunity for you. If you want to do this same with like having your honor students help you use AI say, Hey, you finish early. Okay, I want you to use some AI here and make a simpler version of this lab for me, or translate this for me, so I can give it to some other students that can be an extra credit opportunity for them. Or service hours. Honor students are always looking for those National Honor Society hours. Have them tutor. Say, Hey, I tutor every single day, three to 330 after school. If you want to come help me and be here, that would be great. And I’ll give you service hours. I’ll sign off on that for you coming and staying? Then you can assign them to students. Or if no one comes to the tutoring time and they’re there, say, Hey, I’m gonna have you test out this lab for me, or clean up these beakers and sign them off like you should not. You don’t need to be testing out every single lab. Have some of these students stay and do it. It’s such a game changer. So speaking of volunteer hours, another thing your volunteers can do is make copies for you. You can train them to do that. I’m also a big fan of having a teacher’s aide, and I have a blog post all about that. If your school, your school, should start a TA program. It’s a game changer. I had one every single year I taught at every school I taught in, and it changed my life. This is adjacent to volunteers, because they they’re not getting hours, but they have to be. There is detention students. I don’t know your school’s policy on detention or how you implement disciplinary measures or infractions or whatever, but at my last school, we had, like, a detention policy, like, if they get so many infractions, they have to have attention. And you could have students in your classroom that, like, aren’t your students, and you had to be, you know, run detention every quarter like someone had to run it. It was like Wednesday afternoons for an hour, whatever they can sit there. Sometimes they’re assigned work from other teachers. Y’all, I used those detention students. I would have them scrub my lab sinks out. Y’all know how absolutely filthy those get. That was when I had a lab. You know, there was several years I didn’t have any lab, but when I had a lab, I was having them scrub lab sinks. I was having them under my lab tables that we used as desks with literally scraping gum out from underneath the bottom of those tables. I would have some of them make copies for me. I was using them to do different things that I like, I’m like, You’re not just gonna sit here for an hour and stare at a wall, or, like, write lines like, this is not 1992 okay, you’re gonna work while you’re here, and you’re gonna learn something from it, and it’s gonna be, like, a good experience, but it’s also gonna be something you’re not gonna maybe, probably wanna come back and do again. So not encourage them to use a detention. So take advantage of those students that have detention and, like, put them to work in your classroom. Honestly, a lot of mine really liked having something to do physical too, and made the time go by faster, but it wasn’t fun enough that they wanted to come back. That’s the key. Okay, the sixth thing you should be using your students to do is make your review games. Y’all, I hate reviewing. I’ve talked about this so much. I hate review days. That was probably one of the hardest parts about teaching an EOC course, and then later an AP course is like knowing that I had to legit spend time reviewing because it’s so important for those high stakes exams. And I hate review, and they want games, but I don’t like making them. Okay, maybe I’m not playful enough, I don’t know, but there’s a lot of ways you can do this. One is that at the beginning of the year, you can assign students to different units, say. Everyone’s gonna be in charge of review game for one unit for the year, and you can assign them. You just make a simple rubric. They can come up with any sort of gain. It can be as simple as a Jeopardy type thing. It could be more complicated, like a board game. It’s up to you. It can be an assigned project. It could be extra credit. Another thing I really love to do is add, like, a post EOC activity, or if you have a lot of built in time for final exam review, is make that the review project. And then maybe you don’t get a lot of great ones, but you’ll probably get one or two a year, and then you can save those and use those in future years. And again, it’s like with the student work samples. You’re gonna get these great things over time that accumulate that you can use, and then you’re not having to, like, make up all these games, or, like, constantly be editing your Jeopardy or anything like that. My seventh recommendation for using your students is, and this is another kind of opportunity for an end of year project, like after the EOC or after the AP exam, when you have this awkward month and the seniors have gone and the juniors are still in your class. Or again, this could be an extra credit thing. So when your students are like, I need extra credit, this could be your extra credit opportunity. They can do at one point throughout the year, is a make this lab or activity better. And I like this at the end of the year, because you say, Okay, I want you to reflect over this entire year. You can go through, if you’re like me, you have packets. Go through all the packets and pick one lab or one activity that you didn’t like, or that you didn’t didn’t really help you understand this better, or, you know, you felt like the procedures in the lab, you didn’t get good data. And your job is to improve it and make a better version of it that I can use in future years, and you can give them like, you know, say you’re going to make a Google doc of this, or a Word doc that I can then edit. But it’s such a good activity because it’s really getting them using some higher order thinking to do this. And again, you will benefit. Let’s say you have 30 students do it. Of course, some of them are not. A lot of them aren’t going to be great. It’s still a good learning assignment for them, and you’ll probably get one or two that are good. And then again, they are helping you in this you’re using their sharp, fresh, energized, creative minds to do some work that oftentimes you might like doing and might be good at, but you just don’t have the capacity time or energy for. So let’s take advantage of our students in a positive way, in a mutually beneficial way, because they’ll learn so much from it, and oftentimes they’ll be really proud to see like, hey, some of these things I’m creating, like they’re used for years to come. That’s pretty cool. Okay, so seven ways again, you could be using your students this great asset that’s free and right before you is making your class decor, making your student samples that you save for future years, peer grading each other’s work, especially peer reviewing labs before you collect them, to majorly decrease the time you’re spending grading labs, giving your honor students specifically extra projects and assignments to do, like making word walls, coming in and tutoring, testing out labs for volunteer hours, and anyone can do it. Doesn’t have to just be an honor student. I just know those students typically are finishing work faster and are bored and sitting there. Okay, here’s something you can do for me, that kind of thing. Fifth, giving detention students actual work to do that’s helpful in your classroom. Six, having your students make review games for you. And seven, giving them an end of year project or an extra credit project where they make a lab or activity, some sort of instructional resource you use during that year better and more effective. I would love if this episode inspired you with your own ideas for how you can use your students in a beneficial way to support and help your classroom. If you’ve been inspired by some ideas, will you DM me on Instagram and let me know my Instagram is, it’s not rocket science. There’s dots between each of those words. Or you can email me at Rebecca, at it’s not rocket science classroom.com. I would love to hear from you. Would love to hear your ideas. And if anyone shares any additional ideas, we can kind of get a group list together, a little group project here. I’ll send them out at my email list and make sure that you get those, but I hope that these seven inspire you maybe to work a little smarter, rather than harder the second half of this school year and really take advantage in a healthy way of the very brilliant and creative and energized minds that are in your classroom. I mentioned a few resources and that blog post about having a TA and I will link those in the show notes at it’s at rocket science classroom and.com/episode

Rebecca 19:24
166, and I would love it if you haven’t left a review yet, leave a review today if you’re excited about one of these seven ways that you can use your students this semester to make your life a little bit easier and a little bit more simplified in the Classroom. All right, teacher friends, that wraps up today’s episode. If you’re looking for an easy way to start simplifying your life as a secondary science teacher, head to It’s not rocket science classroom.com/challenge to grab your classroom reset challenge. And guess what? It’s totally free. Thanks so much for tuning in, and I’ll see you here next week. Until then, I’ll be rooting for you, Teacher, friend!