If your lessons feel disjointed, here's 3 steps to get into the flow

Teaching ELL students is a privilege and a joy. Is it easy? No way. But with the right support, you can feel empowered to tackle each day with ease and confidence. I'm your host, Beth Beauches, founder of Inspiring Young Learners. With over 10 years of teaching both nationally and internationally, I know what it takes to ensure that your ELL students have what they need to thrive today, tomorrow, and for life. I'm on a mission to empower you to equip your English language learners. Welcome to Equipping ELLs. Let's get to today's episode. Hey there, and welcome back to the Equipping ELLs podcast. I am so glad that you are here today. And I want to start this episode by saying something that I mean completely sincerely. It's that you are doing a really great job. And I know that that might feel hard to receive right now, because if you are anything like most ELL teachers, I know at this point in the school year, you are tired because You're not the summer tired where you can sleep it off. You're the real tired that after the back to school rush, kind of tired that comes from showing up every single day for students who need you in very specific, specialized ways. And you're trying to do that well across multiple groups, multiple language levels, multiple classrooms, maybe even multiple schools. And all of that with limited time and limited planning support. And sometimes, I don't know if you're like me, but usually after that couple weeks in and you start to get in the groove, you start to feel like you haven't found your groove quite yet with your lessons and the flow of your lessons. Maybe you feel like you're still stitching things together and they're really not quite connecting yet. Like you have pieces, but you don't have the flow. Like you end a lesson and you think, did that actually do anything for my students? And that feeling does not mean you are failing. it means that you are paying attention. And today I wanna give you three simple steps that are gonna bring your lessons into a flow that feels sustainable, purposeful, and actually effective. So we're gonna kind of take a back step. I say this a lot here, but the more you can simplify and then add on, the better off you're gonna be. So I wanna help give you some really simple steps to take that are gonna bring you into a place where your lessons are gonna flow. And then you can add on as you see needed for your students, for what's going on in your school, all those things. So this isn't a complicated framework. It's not a full unit design. It's three steps and that's it. So let's get into it. First, let me name what a disjointed lesson actually feels like, because I think it helps to know that you are not the only one experiencing it. First, a disjointed lesson is one where the pieces do not talk to each other, right? Maybe do a vocabulary activity, then maybe a reading activity, maybe throw in a grammar activity. Then your students do some writing and each of those things you're hitting on the right things, but they do not build on each other. So students finished the lesson, walked out the door, and then you're not entirely sure what they took with them. I've had as a teacher