Ep. 87 - How to Scale Back on Teaching (without Guilt!)

Feeling the weight of the upcoming semester? You’re not alone. In this episode, I explore why so many academics head into fall already exhausted—and how you can change that. 

I share a simple but powerful three-step approach to reduce your teaching load without sacrificing student learning. You’ll hear why it’s essential to put your own priorities at the center of your semester planning and how a few intentional choices now can save you from burnout later. 

Whether you’re facing large classes, heavy grading, or endless course prep, these strategies will help you reclaim time for your own well-being. If you’ve ever wished you could teach less but still feel good about it, this conversation will show you that it’s not only possible—it’s necessary.

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#2: Four-month Career Reset Program for Overwhelmed Academics who want to reconnect with purpose. Over the course of 6 hour-long sessions, we’ll clarify your personal career vision, create space for what matters, overcome internal obstacles to change, and define what success means on your own terms so you can work less and live more.

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Transcript

YWU Podcast Episode #87

How to Cut Back on Teaching (without Guilt!)

Hey there, writers! It’s nearly the end of summer. How are you feeling?

Let me guess, maybe not too good? There’s this meme that circulates amongst the academics I know every August.

It’s a picture of a woman on vacation standing on a beach, her heels dug comfortably into the sand. 

She’s facing out towards the water, and a 50-foot, AI-generated tidal wave is about to crash onto her.

In large, white, ominous letters stamped across the tidal wave are the words, “Academics on August 1st.”

It’s very likely that you’re feeling this big crunch as well. 

Maybe it’s manifesting as a knot in your stomach. Maybe you’re starting to have stress dreams about the first day of class and forgetting your syllabus or to wear clothing.

I’ve been there. It’s not fun.

All of the clients I’ve met with over the past few weeks have been an interesting mix of relaxed, refreshed, and worried.

They’ve been trying to mentally prepare for the onslaught of work this fall, which would be immense even without all of the global and domestic turmoil of the current moment. 

They are also reckoning with the widest range of institutional problems I’ve ever witnessed in American academia. 

The combination of financial pressures, declining enrollments, and the very real attacks on higher education from Trump’s authoritarian regime has been lethal. 

I’m sure you’ve heard that campuses are eliminating entire departments. 

Unfortunately (and unsurprisingly), they’ve been slashing the humanities, performing arts, foreign languages, and areas like Middle Eastern and Women and Gender Studies. 

In many cases, the faculty and staff that teach and manage these departments are being let go. 

As we’re seeing, being on the tenure-track no longer provides protection.

Many faculty have had their research funds frozen, slowing down their research agendas indefinitely.

Faculty members in red states who teach and research race, gender, sexuality, etc., are feeling less safe and more surveilled in their own classrooms.

Some are jumping back onto a very tight job market to try to find more welcoming and like-minded communities.

It’s clear that higher education is at an impasse, and no one person is going to be able to turn this ship around. 

Although negative institutional change is often instantaneous, positive change is glacial.

This is such a loud wake-up call for universities to embrace new ways of doing things. 

And one of the most revolutionary of these is to actually prioritize the well-being of their workers.

I highly recommend that people check out Kevin McClure’s new book called the Caring University: Reimagining the Higher Education Workplace After the Great Resignation.

You might recall Kevin’s interview with me where he talked about writing this book and doing public scholarship; this was episode #70. I encourage you to go back and listen to it!

Here’s a line from his book’s description that stood out to me: 

“At the heart of the caring university is the premise that all employees have talent, all employees should be treated as whole people, and all employees deserve to be cared for as essential contributors to organizational success.”

For those of us who have gotten really cynical about the neoliberal university and being treated like cogs in a wheel, this is like a breath of fresh air.

I know for a fact that if I had felt truly cared for, respected and valued as a human being at my previous institution, I probably would never have left academia. 

Or at least, it would have taken me much longer to get there. And I’m sure this is true of many folks who are leaving.

So, what does all this have to do with the topic of today’s episode—which is how to cut down on teaching this fall without guilt?

Basically, the vast majority of higher education institutions do not protect your time or care about your well-being. You thriving is not on their list of priorities.

This means that if you have a full teaching load and want to end the semester feeling good rather than completely burnt out, you must intentionally choose to do things differently.

And the clearest path to this goal is to cut back on teaching in ways that help you while still centering your students’ learning. 

What I’m going to try to convince you of today is that when it comes to teaching, LESS IS MORE. 

But be forewarned: this might make you feel very uncomfortable. As they say, feel the fear and do it anyway!

I’ll give you some ideas on how to do this so everyone wins, especially you.

You can find the full transcript of this episode at YourWordsUnleashed.com/87.

What Prompted This Episode

So let me first tell you what prompted this episode and what made me decide to commit to structuring my work around my life priorities, rather than the other way around. 

A few months ago, I had my annual physical. When I went, I had a sneaking feeling that I was less healthy than in previous years.

Like so many of us in the United States, Trump 2.0 has been a shock to the nervous system.

I was very reactive and very outraged for the first half of this year. 

I wasn’t sleeping well, eating well or exercising enough. I was also working very hard.

So when I went for my physical, I remember telling my husband that I wouldn’t be surprised if I was now prediabetic. 

It runs in my family and my habits hadn’t been great. Like I predicted, the test results came back in the prediabetes range. 

I was presented with a choice to either keep going as-is or to make a commitment to radically centering my health. 

I know people who didn’t change anything and slid into Type 2 diabetes, so I chose to overhaul my life. 

It’s taken a couple of months to learn about my nutritional needs and become much more intentional about my health.

What it means in practice is that I have less time for work, which I have always tended to put before other things. (I’m sure you know what I’m talking about!)

When I left the academy to run my own business, I cut way down on work—as in, I never work at night and mostly not on weekends.

This new lifestyle means cutting back even more. But I’m doing it as a long-term investment in myself because my life will ideally outlast my career.  

Being intentional with food and exercise has already had big pay-offs. 

I’ve gotten back into shape and am enjoying cooking again. I used to love cooking but had come to resent how much time it takes. 

Now I just accept it as a necessary component of staying healthy.

And as these things often do, my husband is also seeing benefits to his own health. 

He jokes that this diet is basically a colon cleanse, so I like to remind him that all of this kale is adding years to our lives. 

All of this conscious centering of non-work priorities got me thinking about how to apply these lessons to academics who are about to start another stressful school year.

I feel like the biggest chunk of time a faculty member has control over is teaching, so that’s the best place to start cutting back.

It’s also an area where people have to be pushed, because for a lot of folks I know, teaching is the very thing they enjoy the most about the job.

They also often feel very responsible for their students and protective of them.

But there are ways to intentionally design your courses ahead of time so that they work well for YOUR life and student learning.

Three Steps to Scale Back Your Teaching

So in the past I’ve advised people to choose the percentage effort you want to put towards teaching and then try to scale back your efforts as you go.

In my last year of teaching, I chose 70% as the amount that felt right to me so that I could focus on building my business while not shortchanging my students.

Throughout the semester I used that number as a guide and would try to make sure my efforts matched it each week. That worked well for me.

But one of my clients recently told me that this strategy would NEVER work for them.

This person is a tenured professor at an R1 school with young kids who just goes straight into survival mode when the semester begins. 

Once things start, they give teaching 100% no matter what. They just don’t have the brain space to modify as they go.

As a result, they’ve had a new project that hasn’t been fully able to get off the ground due to a lack of time, energy and focus.

They also feel like they’re unable to be truly present with their kids because their mind is always consumed with their classes.

I realized that for folks who just naturally give their all to teaching, your priorities have to be clarified and incorporated into your course planning ahead of time. 

So here’s three steps you can do to ensure that you prioritize your own well-being even during the chaos of the semester.

Step 1: Choose a theme to guide the semester

The first step is to choose a theme word that you want to guide your semester.

A good way to get at this is to take a look at your list of your core values, if you have one. (And if you don’t, check out the episode page where I’ll link to a free core values exercise you can download).

Choose one or two values that feel the most important to you to focus on this semester.

If you don’t want to do core values work, no problem. Just choose a feeling to guide you.

A good question to ask yourself is: how do I want to feel throughout the semester? Remember, we’re centering satisfaction and sustainability.

You might choose peaceful, playful, open, free, balanced, present. Anything that makes your heart swell a bit. 

One of my career coaching clients chose the word “blooming,” which I thought was beautiful.

Step 2: Turn this Theme into Personal Objectives

So now that you’ve got your guiding value or theme, it’s time to operationalize it in Step 2.

By this I mean, what does this actually look like in practice? You need to put it into concrete terms.

As I mentioned, my current guiding value is health. In practice, this means that I now spend about two hours on Sunday afternoons meal planning and prepping for the week. 

I use Sundays to lighten my mental load on busy weekdays where I would normally just eat random things for lunch that are not great for me.

Instead, I’ve purchased some big glass mason jars and make salads that I can just eat without thinking and know that I’m getting the right mix of things.

There’s also something really motivating about seeing these gorgeous, colorful salads every time I open the fridge.

I also factor in spending about 45 minutes each weekday cooking dinner.

I’m also committing to taking three hour-long exercise classes per week, which actually take longer than that because of the drive there and back. 

But a friend does some of these classes with me, which makes it social time as well. 

I put these classes in my calendar before scheduling coaching sessions. In other words, I’m treating them as non-negotiable appointments.

So take your semester theme and choose at least one non-work-related activity that will amplify this feeling for you, if done consistently.

Even better if it’s something you always say you want to do but it reliably falls off your to-do list because it feels indulgent.

Say that you want to feel calm throughout the semester. Make a list of things you like to do that make you feel calm when you have all the time in the world.

This might be physical movement like taking a yoga class, a hike in the woods, or going for a long bike ride. It might also be non-active things like meditation, reading novels, listening to music.

Choose at least one of these to commit to. Then, calculate how much time you would give it on a weekly basis if it was your top priority. 

For example, my client who always gives 100% to teaching decided to prioritize physical activity and social connection this semester.

They decided to get back into a challenging sport that includes a strong community. 

This commitment will take up 5 hours of their week, which they would normally would spend on teaching.

So clearly, they needed to figure out what could be scaled back in their courses to create this time.

Step 3: Scale Back Teaching to Center Your Priorities

Step 3 brings us to ways to scale back your courses while still maintaining high standards and centering student learning.

I’m going to give you a short list of things you could try. None of these are particularly new or surprising suggestions. 

The difference is that you will have already intentionally chosen where the saved time will go. 

In other words, you are doing these things to promote your own well-being rather than putting any hours saved towards more work.

If you do the latter, you may be more productive but you’ll still end up burnt out at the end of the term.

 #1: Reuse and refine existing materials.

The first idea is to reuse and refine your existing materials.

This sounds really obvious. But we all know people who switch up their textbooks every semester or assign a million new readings in courses they’ve already taught.

Instead of creating new lectures from scratch every semester, reuse previous slides, videos, and handouts. Only make small updates. 

Think about it: students actually benefit from materials you’ve already tested and improved.

For example, when I taught Sociology of Family, which was an upper-division elective course, there were one or two weeks I took directly from my Intro to Sociology to class.

I assigned the same readings and reused my lecture notes and class activities. 

Occasionally I did have students from Soc 101 who took my family course. But when they did, these weeks only reinforced their understanding of these topics.

Students take a lot of courses and have a ton of other things going on in their lives. 

Reinforcement is a good thing!

#2) Cut down on assignments to reduce grading time

My next three suggestions relate to cutting down on grading time.

I don’t know about you, but grading is the #1 thing I hate most about teaching.

I was happy to prep my lectures and to actually teach the material to students, but sitting down to grade a pile of papers was the absolute worst. 

So I looked for a lot of different ways to reduce grading time and the need to provide detailed comments.

First, take a look at your written assignments and see if you can decrease the overall number.

I have several clients who had weekly writing assignments that required a couple of hours grading each time.

This is clearly unsustainable, so they switched to a lower number of higher-impact assignments.

My second suggestion is to use rubrics to grade writing assignments, if you don’t already.

I was skeptical of rubrics when I was a grad student and postdoc, but once I was on the tenure-track, I became a big fan.

I obtained examples from other instructors and tweaked them to fit my own courses and assignments.

I found that having the visual of a rubric gave students a better sense of how I graded their paper. It seemed less subjective to them, so this reduced the number of grade disputes.

It also cut down on my need to provide overly detailed comments. 

My third suggestion is to try to incorporate more peer review in class. 

Of course, that can be hit or miss depending on your students. But when it works, it really works!

#3) Assign readings that help YOU

My last set of suggestions relate to class readings and to assign them in a way that would be most helpful to YOU.

First, ask yourself which readings are absolutely necessary and which can be shortened or taken out completely.

One of the things I’m hearing a lot is that students no longer read like they used to. So if that’s the case, why not assign a smaller number of shorter readings?

Wouldn’t that increase the likelihood that students will come to class prepared?

I’ve talked before about the year I served as a grad student TA for the incredible Michael Burawoy, may he rest in power.

For his social theory courses, he assigned very short readings. Like two or three pages of a text. 

And then we read them together as a class and discussed each point in a detailed way.

He really curated the readings so that students actually got what he wanted them to get.

This approach is very different to most other instructors I’ve had who assign many pages—even entire books. It’s not necessarily the best way to learn.

So that’s something you could consider doing.

Secondly, as you know, I am a huge fan of double- or triple-purposing your time.

So, try adding readings to your class that you need to do for your own research anyway. 

Or, assign your own writing—especially your work-in-progress—to your class and have them tell you what they think.

This can be really scary for some people. But it’s also super effective because in the end, students make up the primary audience for scholarly work. 

If it doesn’t make sense to them, then you know it probably needs to be changed. 

Summing Everything Up

So let’s sum everything up.

I’ve tried to convince you to intentionally cut back on teaching this semester so that you can invest more in your own well-being.

Once things really get rolling, it can be hard to shift course. So doing this reflection ahead of time is key.

You are probably a responsible person who cares a lot about your students and wants to do a really good job. Therefore, the idea of paring back your teaching obligations may feel deeply uncomfortable. 

But remember that less can definitely be more.

The process I’ve given is meant to help you get through the semester in a more sustainable way. 

I’ve given you three steps to do this:

Step 1: is to choose your personal theme or core value to use as a guide for the semester.

Step 2: is to operationalize this theme by choosing a non-work-activity that amplifies this feeling for you. 

You need to figure out how much time it would take each week if you really committed to it as your top priority. And again, it will likely be challenging to give yourself permission to plan your work life around a non-work activity. 

You may want to find an accountability partner to do this with so you can check in to make sure you’re not backsliding.

Step 3: is to implement time-saving strategies into your classes. 

Remember that the goal is not just to save time that you can then put towards more work.

It’s actually about self-preservation and investing in your own well-being. 

Most academics now accept that their jobs will never love them back. 

But in many cases, institutions are actively harming faculty and staff through never-ending demands and blatant lack of appreciation.

You are not just a worker—you’re a three-dimensional person who deserves to live three-dimensionally during the academic year.

And ideally, you will live decades beyond your career as a teacher and a scholar. 

So invest in your life and well-being as you go. Your future self will thank you!

I’ll talk to you again soon.