Shared Teaching Podcast

170: What to Prioritize During Your Teacher Planning Time

• Shared Teaching • Season 4 • Episode 170

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Feeling overwhelmed during your prep periods? In this episode of the Shared Teaching Podcast, Susan shares practical strategies to help you make the most of your teacher planning time so you can stop working late and start sticking to your contract hours.

Learn how to create a weekly routine, batch tasks for maximum efficiency, and stay focused on what matters most. Whether you’re a new teacher or a seasoned pro, you’ll walk away with a plan to stop wasting precious planning time and start feeling more accomplished and less stressed.

BLOG POST / SHOW NOTES LINK:  https://sharedteaching.com/what-to-prioritize-during-your-teacher-planning-time/

In Today’s Episode We’ll Talk About:

  • Why instructional planning should be your top priority
  • How to create daily routines for your planning time
  • What to avoid doing during back-to-school prep periods
  • Using student data to plan effective small groups
  • Tips for organizing your materials and lesson plans ahead of time
  • Incorporating differentiation into your weekly planning
  • The importance of “white space” in your prep time schedule
  • Time-saving systems for newsletters and emails

Resources Helpful in Today’s Episode:

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Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Shared Teaching Podcast. I'm your host, Susan, and you are listening to episode 170, where we're going to talk about what to prioritize during your teacher planning time. I really kind of started this summer informal podcast series all about how to set you up for success as you go into the next back to school year. So hopefully you're enjoying it. Make sure to give me some love in Apple podcasts if you are. 

And let's go ahead and get started with the episode. 

So I know, and I'm sure you know, being a teacher means you have to be flexible, organized, and able to prioritize. Your planning period really needs to be approached the same way as the rest of your day is. So we're going to talk about how to make the most of your planning time in order to feel like you can leave school at a proper time, because I really want you to be able to stick very closely to your contract hours, because with everything else going on, we don't need to be giving them our extra time for free money, right? Okay. 

So why prioritize prioritization? That's a hard word. Why prioritization matters. Let's talk about that for a minute. So I don't know about you, but when I taught second grade, I never knew which day I would actually get a prep period because it often disappeared at a moment's notice. Like, you would be about to drop your kids off, and then someone would say, hey, did you check the schedule? You're covering for so-and-so. And you're like, seriously? So there goes all those day's plans for what I was going to do for my planning period. So when I did get a planning time, I really had to make the most of it. And one of the things that I've been learning as I'm trying to grow this business is that when you have limited time, it's really important to maximize it. So this means for me creating routines and structure. So when I sit down to work, I know what I'm working on because I very easily and very often get highly distracted, especially by Netflix series or other things going on. Or maybe I'm taking my daughter to after school activities and things can take other priority, right? So we really want to make sure that we are applying these ideas to our planning periods and making it work for us. So I love having a routine, so it's really hard for me when I'm at home in the summers and I don't have one. I really should start actually trying to have one. 

But anyway, so when it comes to my planning period, it really made sense for me that I had to have a focus for each day of the week. And I talked a lot more about this on a previous podcast episode. Or you can read about it either way, the episode was called Making the Most of Your Planning Period, and it was episode 111, and I'll make sure to link that in the show notes. So if you're driving or something, you can go back to it and reference it later. And when we are really intentional with our planning period, we're going to become less overwhelmed. I said less. It's not going to be a cure all, but we'll be a little bit less overwhelmed. We know exactly what needs to be done and we can dive right in. Otherwise, we spend most of our time wondering what we should be doing, and before we know it, it's time to pick up our class from specials, right? And then you look around and like you literally accomplish nothing. Maybe you were talking with your colleagues. Maybe you were having a little snack. Of course you were using the restroom, right? The one and only time you usually get to use it during the day, but you're not getting other things done because you were not intentional with your planning period. So let's go ahead and try to fix that. 

And what we want to do is we want to focus on instructional planning first. So I know during the first few weeks of back to school, it's going to be really tempting to want to do things like organize your classroom supplies or your bulletin boards, right? Maybe they're not decorated yet. You have like a meet the teacher or an open house coming up and you're panicking a little bit, but this is not the time to be doing those things. You're going to resist the urge. These things can wait. In fact, you're going to reduce the urge. And maybe you're going to hang up papers instead on your bulletin board that say, work in progress or student work. Loading. I found really cute free versions of these in TPT, so you just have to search for them. Maybe what I think they're just called like work in progress papers or something. Or you can just type it up on a piece of paper, document whatever, and make your own. But it looks cute, like you have a space for where you're going to have the student work. But the student work doesn't have to be done yet, so not everything needs to be decorated and fully done immediately. So it's okay to say to parents like, oh hey, they're going to be working on that later. But you know what? I never had any questions about parents, about why is this blank or what's not done here. They want to see that you are planned. You're prepared. You can answer their questions, right? They just want to know where little Bobby is sitting in the classroom and what kind of materials maybe you're using. If you come across as knowledgeable on those areas. Your room is, you know, mostly put together, like the kids have a space, things are organized. They're not going to see piles of clutter everywhere. Then you can relax about the rest of it. They're not expecting to walk into a classroom, and it looks like you won $1 million makeover. Okay, so just keep that in mind. As a parent myself, like that is not my focus. When I walk into my child's classroom, I want to see that they can. They care about my student, my child, and that they are prepared and ready to teach them. Like they seem like they know what they're doing and they have it together, right? That's what I'm looking for. 

So what should you do instead if you're not decorating or putting the supplies in groups and stuff? Well, I recommend putting your focus on the instructional lessons. You're going to look over your units, and you're going to see how you can break them up into smaller mini lessons. Or if you're going to need any supplemental materials, you're going to make a list as you look over the curriculum materials. Then you're going to decide on a day where you're going to look for those additional materials and pull them during that prep time, because you probably won't have enough time within that first prep time to do all of that. Right. So you're going to have to break it apart just like you're breaking apart the mini lessons. Okay. 

Next, you're going to think of a day of the week that is going to be how you're prepping your materials. I love choosing specific days of the week. For me, it was Fridays to photocopy all my worksheets for the next week. In fact, I always try to be at least two weeks ahead and then if my plans need to be adjusted, I'm just going to move the copies I have into a different folder. It's just it was so simple to adjust. So I'm going to try to find a picture and post it on this blog post, but it was literally a hanging file, right? Just like an open hanging file that sat on the edge of my desk. And then it had days of the week labeled on it, and then I had it by subjects as well. So like it might say Monday. And then inside the Monday hanging file folder was individual folders that would say like math, reading, science, social studies, because we didn't always do those right on the same day, like maybe one week was social studies, the next week was science. We alternated it, so I didn't need separate folders for those and every single day of the week file. So that's how I organized it. So if I needed to move something from Science on Wednesday to Science on Friday, I just picked up those copies and moved them in the to the Friday science folder. It was that simple. Batching certain tasks on a particular day of the week is also really helpful. So for example, if you do maybe lesson planning on on Mondays, grading on Tuesdays, filing and returning papers on Wednesdays, copying on Thursdays. And maybe you're resetting your centers on Fridays so they're ready for the following Monday. You're going to choose what works for you. So brainstorm some ideas here, and don't be afraid to mix it up until you find the flow that's going to work best. Because of course, you know yourself best. And just because someone else says they like to do photocopy Fridays doesn't mean you have to. Maybe you like photocopy Mondays or Wednesdays, you know, whatever it is, maybe it's even Saturday because you want to go in when the copiers are free, right? So what I do as I'm getting ready is when I'm doing my planning period, I am pulling aside the master copies, and I'm putting them into a drawer that says copies. That way, on my photocopy day, I'm just taking all the papers out of that drawer, and they've been pre-labeled with little sticky notes for my planning of how many copies I need. It has, like, double sided, you know, 25 copies or, you know, two for every student, 15 copies. So it's labeled on there. So I know when I go to the copier or if I happen to be super lucky and I have a school that does my copies for me, or I have a parent volunteer do them, then they can read that sticky note and make the copies. 

Okay, the other thing we want to think about during planning periods is reviewing state student data to guide our instruction. So during the day that you've decided is your grading day, you want to plan time to reflect on student work. Examples. This can be exit tickets, pre-assessments, or even running records. You're going to have a blank class roster nearby to record the data or whatever format you like. I happen to like doing a blank class roster for my grading program, because it already has the names on there for me, alphabetically, in the same order as when I'm going to actually put the grades in. So it just makes it really simple to record on those sheets. I'm going to look for patterns in what students know and what they need more lessons on. And I'm going to use this information when planning out my small groups or my reteach lessons, whatever days. Those are right. So again, I'm making little notes or putting it on a sticky note so I don't have to go back and rethink what it was that I thought of the first time. And on the day that I'm going to be doing my lesson planning or my small group planning, I am looking at those sticky notes I had made. Okay, during reviewing student data. 

You want to plan for differentiation. So consider how you'll support your struggling students or challenge your high achievers. We always tend to leave out our poor high achievers, right? We're just like, oh, buddy up with somebody, go work with so-and-so and help them out. And usually they're helping out a struggling reader or something, right? We don't want to do that all the time. To our high achievers, they deserve to be pushed. Okay, that is my little $0.02 for being a great teacher. So make sure you add this into your plans during your prep time. So what that looks like for me is I am setting individual goals for students. If you haven't heard about my writing student goals, this is what I do with them. Also reading goals. They have a math goal like I love me some goals. So they're doing some kind of individual goal setting and I'm doing like a check in on them or I'm planning for what they need for that goal. Okay, so what do these kids need in order to achieve, you know, reading fluency, whatever. Okay, so I am kind of reflecting on that as I'm planning. And I'm also looking for students that I can pull a quick like maybe five minutes for a small group and then they'll be okay. So one of these ways I've done this is word study. And for word study, what I did was every student had a folder. And if you've seen those videos going along around lately. About what color for? What folder? For me, I don't do L.A., I do a word study is red, writing is blue. So I guess I'm kind of like one foot in both camps. So they had a word study folder, and in their word study folder it would have their word study work. So I pre-assess my students on their sight words. And there's many, many blog posts episodes I've had about differentiating your spelling lists and doing your sight words. So please refer back to those. I will try to find one to link in the show notes that will hopefully lead you down to the other ones. But once they have their list of words, there's usually more than one student on that same list of words. That is their word study group, and they're formed from how they did on the sight word assessments, but also how they do on their phonics screener. So I don't put them in their groups until they've done the phonics screener. So okay, these kids are working on short vowels. These kids need silent e. These kids need long vowel sounds. These kids need still vacation. I don't know, I'm just throwing things out there. So I would find worksheets that are very specific to that skill. So these kids need short vowel sounds. I am saying, okay, we're going to work on short A this week. Next week is short I, the following week is short E or whatever order I want to do it right. And it's just like a really quick worksheet that they can do independently. Or because they're in a small group, they can work on it together as a group, but they have to show it to me that they've accomplished it. And then they go off with their centers, which is usually differentiated by what sight word list they're on, and they have individual sight word notebooks, or they have just sight word center games that they work on, where they're practicing reading and writing and sounding out and spelling the sight words. So that was my kind of word study, so very simplified, very routined. And then they move through different levels of the sight words, and they get a little bit of variety of the activities that they're doing as they move through the different levels. Hopefully that makes sense. All right. 

So another thing you can do for differentiation is you're going to review previously taught information during your center rotations. So this is where you're looking through worksheets maybe from your curriculum. And you are assigning that during the center rotations you don't have to go out and reinvent the wheel. Laminate a whole bunch of task cards just for a few kids. But you do want to make sure that what you put in your centers is not previously taught material. So the more intentional you are with this, the more differentiated the learning is going to become for your students. So again, it's as simple as assigning different leveled worksheets straight out of your curriculum. Right. You don't have to go too far to find differentiated work for them. All right. During your planning period, I would like you to reserve at least the last 5 to 10 minutes to check and respond to emails or messages from parents or colleagues. And it's okay if you want to do this for like, the end of your day. I don't know about you, but I have a little bit of wiggle room once I've dropped off the kids and the final bell rings and then when I'm allowed to leave. So that is a good time right there to do this kind of thing. And if you find yourself repeating some of the same things, maybe consider creating email responses in a Google doc that you can copy and paste into the email body to save yourself time. And there's a lot of tutorials on this, I'm sure, depending on what email software you use, but it's a great way to kind of free up some time on your plate and then also creating a weekly newsletter. 

It can be a really quick way to keep families informed. If you set up a template, it should only take a few minutes to write up the content each week and send home with students. Again, we were looking for the same format and a routine, right? So it makes it really simple to kind of plug and play what information you want in there each week, especially if it's set up the same way all year. Okay, my last bit of advice for your teacher planning time is to leave some white space in your prep plans. This is a term I recently started hearing about and I love the idea. It means to have some room for unexpected changes or last minute interruptions to your planning period. So planning doesn't mean scripting every minute. It means setting yourself up for success. So I hope you enjoyed this podcast episode. Please let me know. 

What is your favorite planning schedule for your prep time? Do you do certain things on certain days of the week? If so, I would love to hear and I'm sure our other shared teaching listeners would love to hear as well. So don't forget to write in, leave a review and give us that information. 

All right, bye for now. Stay tuned for an all new episode next week. If you've loved this show, then join me in sharing the teaching. Hitting that subscribe button and leaving us a review on I tunes so we can be found by more teachers like you who are ready to start sharing the workload. I hope you've enjoyed this episode. Find new episodes each week on Shared Teaching. Com. Thanks for listening to the Shared Teaching Podcast.