Episode 335: The Power of Weekly Routines in Your ELA Classroom

Feeling overwhelmed with lesson planning week after week? In this episode, we're digging into how simple, consistent weekly routines can completely transform your classroom. Learn how to save time, reduce stress, and build stronger engagement—all by putting a repeatable structure in place.

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Transcript

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Well, hello teachers and welcome back to another episode. Today we're digging into something that transforms your classroom and... your wellbeing, and that is weekly routines that support planning organization and flow. So before we start, I do want to remind you about our fun July giveaway we're doing here on the podcast. We are giving away one free year inside of our membership, the EB teachers, ELA portal at the end of the month. All you have to do to enter twin is leave a review on iTunes and then send us an email at hello at EB academics.com to let us know that you did. That's it. Super simple. And honestly, I love reading your reviews so much. They keep me going with these episodes, especially two a week right now. So thank you so much for those of you who've left wonderful reviews and the feedback and the love. I just, it means the world to me. So thank you very much. All right, let's dive into today's episode. Hi there, ELA teachers. Caitlin here, CEO and co-founder of EB Academics. I'm so excited you're choosing to tune into the Teaching Middle School ELA podcast. Our mission here is simple, to help middle school ELA teachers take back their time outside of the classroom by providing them with engaging lessons, planning frameworks, and genuine support so that they can become the best version of themselves, both inside and outside of the classroom. And we do this every single day inside the EBTeachers ELA portal. This is a special place we've developed uniquely for ELA teachers to access every single piece of our engaging, fun, and rigorous curriculum so that they have everything they need to batch plan their lessons using our EBTeacher digital planner that's built right into the app. Over the years, we've watched as thousands of teachers from around the world have found success in and out of the classroom after using EB academics programs, and we're determined to help thousands more. If you're interested in learning more, simply click the link in the podcast description. And in the meantime, we look forward to serving you right here on the podcast every single week. Now, before we jump into the routines, I want to start with a critical question, which is why do weekly routines work and why do they matter? And why do we need to put them into place? So number one is our brains crave structure. There is tons of research and cognitive load theory that shows that when we create consistent systems, especially as teachers, our students are able to focus more fully on learning because what happens is it lightens that mental load of worrying or thinking about what's next because they just know. And what it does is it enables more effective memory and engagement. So when we have the structure, we're not thinking about what's coming next or what do I have to prepare for or whatever it might be. And according to an article on parents.com, and we also quite frankly just know this inherently as teachers, but according to an article on parents.com, routines build safety, They reduce anxiety for our students and for us. And they also foster sustained attention. So really routines prime students for learning. and being active learners, as opposed to constantly reacting to their surroundings and not knowing what's coming next. And then for us as teachers, routines really help us combat decision fatigue, which we are probably familiar with this. And that's that gradual depletion of willpower, of patience, of, you know, I've made a thousand decisions today and my brain is not functioning. And in fact, there was one landmark study that showed judges make harsher rulings as the day goes on, only to reset after breaks. How fascinating is that? Decision fatigue, right? And that same exhaustion shows up in our classrooms, right? We lose patience. We skip critical decisions. We default to easier choices. whatever it might be. And Cult of Pedagogy even noted that a lack of systems, routines, and habits causes teachers to reinvent the wheel every day. And we don't want to do that. So by building simple, repeatable weekly systems, we free up a bunch of this cognitive space in our brains. We reset our mental energy, and that allows us to keep our patience intact. So today I want to talk about weekly routines, not content routines or classroom management routines. I want to cover like the behind the scenes nuts and bolts routines that keep your week flowing, that keep your paperwork under control and put your mind just a little bit more at peace. Because the truth is, if you are constantly operating in chaos mode, right, which is survival, if you're constantly scrambling every single morning to figure out Where you put this thing or digging through a pile of papers to find that one handout that impacts our decision fatigue and our cognitive load and all of the things that are going to set us up for failure. So the truth is, is that if we just have a few simple weekly systems, what we can do is we can create intentionally ease, consistency and breathing room. for you and for your students. So today I'm gonna give you nine different weekly routines that can help keep your classroom organized and your week running smoothly. But I don't want you to feel like you have to implement all of them. I want you to just pick one. Or if you already do some of these, pick a new one to start with. And I promise you that you will feel the shift. I did all of these when I was still in the classroom and it makes such a difference. So I know some of you might be listening and you're like, well, I'm not that type of teacher. Well, that's fine. And if you know anything about me, I'm going to say, you can sit in that belief and you can allow that to be an excuse for yourself, but nothing's going to change, right? So if you're quote unquote, not that type of teacher, well, now's the opportunity to be a different type of teacher and to say, okay, I might be more of like that organized chaos teacher, but I do want to try one of these new strategies. Okay. So don't, um, argue for your own Limitations. We can always change. You can teach an old dog new tricks, okay? So you can change, I promise. All right, number one. This I call Thursday or Friday copy and prep time. So I love this one. It's a game changer. I did it every single week when I was in the classroom. What you're going to do is you'll block off time every Thursday if you have a prep on your Thursday or I didn't. So I actually stayed Friday afternoons after everybody left before I went home for the weekend and I made all of my copies and I prepped all of my materials for the following week. Yes, it took me 30 minutes after everybody had left for the weekend, but guess who didn't think about their school over the weekend at all? Me. It gave me peace of mind. What happens is, is you walk in on Monday and you are ready to go. You are not like, oh my God, I got to get to school because I got to make copies. Hopefully nobody's there, right? Think about that energy that you bring into the classroom and That is frenetic. That is uptight. That is stressed out. It is rushed energy versus the teacher who's made their copies. They're nicely organized. And I walk in on Monday and I'm like, oh, okay, what are we doing today? Let me just look at my copies. That is a totally different teaching experience. Okay. So it's super, super simple. Stay Friday afternoon. Make your copies, prep your materials for the following week or on Thursday when you have a prep or Friday if you have a prep. So even if you don't have a prep, so what? I stayed Friday for 30 minutes after school and it was 30 minutes that was so well worth it. And it's like, if that's what you want to do, to be able to have that peace of mind over the weekend and to come in on Monday, feeling good about the week, then it's worth the sacrifice of the 30 minutes. But the thing is, is that most people are not willing to do that. And so I don't want you to be most people. I want you to decide that I'm going to have the discipline. Maybe I'm not going to be motivated. I'm not going to want to do this, but because I'm disciplined enough to set my future self up for success and I'm going to take these 30 minutes on a Friday when I don't want to be doing this and I'm just going to do it anyways. And then on Monday, I'm going to say to my past self, thank you so much, Caitlin, for doing that. It made a huge difference on my Monday morning and my whole weekend, quite frankly. Okay. And then a little pro tip with this one is that you can combine this with the Monday through Friday drawer or bin system that I'm going to talk about in just a second so that everything stays super organized and accessible for you.

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Okay.

SPEAKER_00: 8:59

Okay, number two, Monday morning. The Monday morning look ahead, what I like to call this. So before the kids walk in on Monday, before your students come into your classroom, I want you to take just five to 10 minutes to mentally preview the week. So pull out your planner, pull out your materials, your lessons, and you're just going to look. You're just going to review. And you will be amazed at what a difference this makes and how you feel as you walk into the week. It grounds you. It helps you remember what's coming. Oh yeah, that's right. We have that assembly on Thursday. Don't want to forget that. Or it's Halloween and they need to bring a dollar or whatever, all the little things, right? And it gives you that quick, calm reset before all of the chaos of students coming into your classroom begins. And one of the things I'd love to do that I'd also suggest that you do after you take these five to 10 quiet minutes to mentally preview the week is before your students walk in, I would put on some music that makes you want to dance. Yes, even at 745 in the morning that makes you want to dance and just move your body before your students walk in. It is a simple way to get a smile on your face at the start of every single week. So that's number two. Number three is weekly planning power hour, or maybe 30 minutes, however long it takes you, depending on your level of batch planning expertise. So what I want you to do with this one is pick one consistent time each week. Again, maybe it's Friday afternoon when everyone's gone or during one of your planning periods or Wednesday afternoon, maybe you stay late because your kids have soccer and your partner takes them to soccer, whatever it might be, find a time and you're are going to map out the following week. So in that hour, if you've batch planned, you already know what you're teaching. So you're not even going to be looking at what you need to teach because you should already know. But what you're going to look at is what do I need to prep for next week so that when you go to make copies on Thursday or Friday, you're golden. What am I grading and what might trip me up? So what you're doing is you're thinking ahead and You're proactive. You're not constantly reacting to what's happening. And that's where your power lies. And if you're a batch planner, this is where you take what you've already outlined on your scope and sequence and you plug in your weekly planning, right? We call this stage four of our batch planning framework. So you know exactly what you're teaching on which day, what you're assigning for homework, all of that stuff. Okay. So I know for some of you, um, This might be an entire identity shift. Maybe you've never been this type of organized person. Well, now you can be, and you just create a new belief. You fake it till you make it. It literally is that simple and difficult at the same time. Simple, not easy. Number four is to use a daily drawer or folder system. So once you make your copies and you've prepped your materials, we don't just want to leave them in a pile somewhere on our desk. Like disorganized. What I always did is I had a folder system for each class labeled Monday through Friday, and I would put my handouts or my lesson materials or my manipulatives in each day's spot for that class period. And then that's it. So on Monday morning, I looked in my folder. Oh, that's what I'm teaching. I have my lesson plan in there. If I had to print it out for my principal, whatever, you know, all of your copies and what you're doing is you are saving time every single morning for yourself. And you also create this visual clarity as well. That when you look at those folder files, that filing system that you've set up, you're like, Oh, I'm good. I have seventh grade all ready to go. I've got eighth grade ready to go. I've got homeroom, whatever, whatever it is that you teach. And you can do all of these systems for any type of subject. It doesn't just have to be ELA. All right. Friday's desk reset ritual is number five. This one was my favorite. So at the end of every Friday, After my students were gone, after I made all of my copies, I spent literally just five to 10 minutes cleaning up my desk. I cleaned out any lingering clutter, just completely reset my workspace. And what it is, is it's this small act of like cognitive closure, right? You're physically saying to yourself, this week is done. I'm cleaning this off and I'm ready for what's next. Because when you walk into your room on Monday morning, you have this clean slate and you feel the difference. So if you struggle with clutter, this could be a whole separate conversation. And I'm sure I've talked about Diana on the podcast before, my friend. is the decluttered mom. And I went through and took her course and I decluttered my entire house. And I now do it kind of like on a monthly basis. I just get rid of stuff because we just have so much crap that we don't need. And it is like an emotional, psychological thing to detach from certain items. But the less stuff we have, the easier all of these things become and the more white space you have in your brain. So I did this with my whole house actually when my ex-husband moved out. I actually got a huge dumpster bin delivered to my house and I went through the entire house and anything that was not serving my future self, I got rid of it or donated it. So one of the two. And it was hard. There were certain things where I was like, well, maybe I might use it. And then I'm like, Caitlin, you have not used this face cream in two years. Throw it away. It's expired. Why is it still in your house? Right. And I will tell you right now that every single night it takes me about 15 minutes. I call it the PM pickup. I think I got that from Diana and I clean up my entire home. And so I, and granted my house is small, it's like 1200 square feet, but I clean up my entire home. And when I wake up in the morning, my house is perfectly clean. I make my bed every morning. My son makes his bed every morning. And it just creates this space of comfort, of safety, of cleanliness. And so when you do this Friday desk ritual, if it takes you more than 10 minutes, you probably have some stuff you got to get rid of. But that's a whole other conversation. We can talk about that. Maybe I have Diana on podcast, actually. That would be fun. Okay, number six is a weekly slide deck template. So every single week, whether or not you use like Google Slides template for your daily agendas or you put your learning targets or whatever on your board, every single week, maybe during that weekly planning hour, you just update the next week's info. So like what I would do, when I had my high school classroom because I had a bigger whiteboard is I would put Monday through Friday every single class period for the following week I would know what we were doing and so on Friday before I would leave I would erase everything that we just did and I'd put everything up there for the next week Or if you're super prepared in advance, one of your students with really good handwriting can do this for you, right? And they write everything on the board. But if you use a Google Slides template, you're just typing in your daily agenda, your learning targets, your warmups, your reminders, whatever it might be. And so you're not recreating anything from scratch. You use the same exact template. You use the same exact whiteboard structure. You just rinse, update, and reuse. And it's efficient, it's organized, and also it gives your students consistency too, because they know exactly what to expect in Mrs. Mitchell's classroom. All right. Number seven is to grade and return is to have a grade and return routine. So right now I would pick like two light grading days each week. This is like I know on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I'm going to set aside 15 to 20 minutes of grading. This is nothing major, but this is like those, I don't know, skills-based passages that you're correcting, or these are those reading comprehension checks to make sure your students read, or they're a quick grammar quiz or whatever it might be exit ticket. And so what you do is on Tuesdays during lunch period, every Tuesday, I just know this is what I do is I take 15 minutes and I grade from this pile of papers. so that you don't have this paper grading pile monster sitting in front of you that has to get graded. So you just know. I think about this with the gym. Granted, I still am not able to work out yet. I have to go have surgery. I don't think I've updated you guys on that, but I will. But I think of the gym... Tuesdays were back and bicep days. Thursdays were chest and triceps. Fridays were glute focused leg days. Right. And so it's like, I just knew there was no thinking. There's no thinking that goes into it. This is just what I do. I go to the gym on this day and this is what happens. So on Tuesdays I go into my classroom at lunchtime and this is just what happens. I just grade this pile of papers. I turn on some gladiator music and to the soundtrack and I just get it done. I set a timer 15 minutes, boom. And it just happens like clockwork. So all of these things I'm sharing with you take discipline. It's not like, again, it's simple. It's not easy, but if you can just pick one of these and then you master that, and then you add another one under your belt and then you master that it's just creating and stacking these small wins, but you just, you have to do it. right? You have to do it. It's that mindset of, I don't really want to do this, but I'm going to do it anyway. Right? Layla Hermosi, who's a business person online, she says a bad word. She says, screw your mood, stick to the plan. Like, so forget about how you feel. Just do what you said you were going to do. And now you're creating evidence for yourself that you're the type of person who keeps promises to yourself. And so the next time that you really don't want to go do this, you're going to do it because you know that you're the type of person who makes, who keeps promises to yourself and actually follows through with what you say you're going to do. Okay. So grade and return, grade and return routine. So you grade on one day or whatever. And then that means that every Thursday you pass out papers or every Friday they go home in the Friday folder, whatever it might be. But we want to create that grading routine for ourselves more than anything. Okay, number eight, end of week, no stack grading. That's what we've called this. So before you leave on Friday, if you can, again, this is kind of next level, this one, I want you to take care of any short assignments that would otherwise stack up over the weekend. So if you still have those exit ticket, short responses, homework checks, whatever it means that you have to get done, maybe on lunch on Friday, Maybe at the end of the day when you have that 30 or 60 minutes that you stay at school just to set yourself up for success for the weekend and the following week, what happens is you feel so much lighter heading into the weekend because you don't have that pile of paper like whispering your name in your teacher bag sitting in the corner at your front door that you swear, I swear I'm going to do it when I get home. No, you're not. You are not going to grade those papers when you get home. That is not happening. So you may as well not even put them in your teacher bag, to be honest with you. And honestly, you can probably even throw some of those away. For real. Like, do you really have to grade everything? The answer is no. Okay. All right. Number nine. Friday library tidy. So this one is quick, simple, and you can actually have your students reset the classroom library every Friday. So on Fridays in one of my schools, I had really short class periods. They were like 20 minutes every Friday. And all I did was my R vocabulary test and silent reading. That's all we did on Fridays because there was no time for anything else. And test prep depending on the time of year. And so what I would do is once they took their vocabulary test, my students could earn the ability to clean up my classroom library. So what I didn't want to happen was I didn't want my students who didn't want to read cleaning my classroom library, right? They had to earn it to get that reward of being able to clean the classroom library. Fascinating psychology, right? You get to earn the reward of cleaning. So we want to have them straighten our books, fix any misplaced titles if you have them organized in a certain way. Maybe you have them rotate a featured... book or whatever it might be. And what it does is it keeps your space feeling cared for. And that really reinforces pride in your learning environment in your classroom. Okay. So some final thoughts for you on this is these routines are not just about being quote unquote organized. So I don't want you to see them as Oh, I've just got to be more organized is what Caitlin's saying. No, what I'm saying is, is that these routines create freedom for you. So instead of saying, okay, this makes me organized. You want to say instead to yourself, this creates freedom for me. So you're creating freedom from chaos, freedom from decision fatigue, freedom to actually enjoy your weekends without a giant cloud of teacher stress hanging over your head. You are creating your own freedom. And so here's your challenge is I want you to pick just one of these routines and implement it at the start of school. Just one. And then if you're a month in and you've got that one down pat, come back and listen to this episode and choose your next one. And over time, these habits become the systems that are a part of making teaching sustainable. Even joyful again, because you have so much more white space. And if you are looking for done for you, lesson plans, time-saving tools, and a community of teachers who get it, we've got that for you too. We have our membership, the EB teachers, ELA portal, and we would love to support you. And while we aren't currently open for enrollment, you can add your name to the priority list at ebteacher.com forward slash portal and learn more about what our programs offer you as a middle school ELA teacher. All right, you guys, thanks so much for listening today. And again, I'm looking forward forward to your reviews that you're going to leave on iTunes because you're going to enter to win the giveaway that we are doing this month of July. All right. We'll see you guys next time on the podcast.