Episode 391: The Friday Whiteboard Planning System That Gives You Your Evenings Back

For today's Teaching Middle School ELA podcast episode, I share the Friday whiteboard planning system that moves next week’s decisions out of your head and onto a public board, cutting mental load and Sunday dread. A simple grid creates clarity, closure, and accountability for you and your students.

• naming the Friday whiteboard planning system
• why visibility beats memory for planning
• the grid setup across days and classes
• writing concise daily actions instead of full plans
• reducing student questions through public plans
• creating closure energy before leaving on Friday
• delegating board updates to students over time
• starting small and ignoring perfection
• three core benefits: clarity, closure, cognitive relief

Please take pictures of your Friday whiteboard, post them in the EB Teacher community if you’re an EB Teacher, or share them with us on Instagram @EBAcademics

Transcript

Why Your Brain Feels Overloaded

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Well, hello teachers, and welcome back to the podcast. I am so excited for today's episode. This is one of my favorite things that I ever did in the classroom. Made my life so much easier. And I can't believe that I haven't talked about this before on the podcast. It is my Friday whiteboard planning system. It makes your life so much easier. So today's episode is for anyone who has ever been halfway through their weekend and thought, oh my gosh, wait, do we have a test next week? Did I forget to copy something? What am I even doing in seventh grade on Tuesday? If that sounds familiar, I want you to know something right up front. It's not a personal feeling. You just don't have the right system in place. So today I want to share one simple system I used in my classroom that really truly gave me my evenings back, not because I worked harder, but because I stopped storing everything in my brain. 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 EB Teachers 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 EB Teacher 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. So I am calling this system my Friday Whiteboard Planning System because I couldn't come up with a better name. And it's exactly what it sounds like. And I love this because what happens is on evenings and weekends and weeknights, right? A lot of the times our evenings disappear into us thinking about teaching. Not necessarily like we're actually doing things, but because we have work floating around in our head. We have decisions that haven't necessarily been made yet. That information is living somewhere inside of our head instead of somewhere visible. Right. And I think about this too in terms of just when we have lots of things to do, right? If you have kids and you have a million different projects and places they need to be in sports and blah, blah, blah, and all this stuff, if we didn't write that all down somewhere and we just carried that in our head, that is a massive cognitive load that we are keeping in our brains that take up a ton of white space and really impact our ability to function well, right? And that same thing is true for teaching, right? It's not just exhaustion from teaching, it's all the things that we are mentally carrying throughout the week when we leave school. So instead of giving you like three different systems or 10 different productivity hacks, I want to zoom in on one habit that quietly solved like all of these problems for me that really took off that mental load from my brain. So, yes, batch planning, 100%, you need to be doing that. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, we have a million episodes on batch planning. However, I also, for me, needed to get this out of my head, out of my plan book, and into a place that was visible, not just for me, but for my students as well. So the Friday whiteboard planning system, I'm gonna walk you through what this actually looks like. Okay. Here's what I did, and here's what I'm gonna suggest that you do. On Friday afternoon, before I left for the weekend, I had like a big, big whiteboard in my classroom. And if you don't have a big whiteboard, you can totally do this on Google Slides or a document projected on the board, whatever. The format matters less than the fact that you can see it and it's actually stored somewhere. So on my whiteboard, I had like a very simple grid. Across the top, I had the days of the week: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. And then down the side, I wrote each class period or grade level. So seventh grade, eighth grade, whatever I was teaching. And then very simply in that grid, so like Monday, eighth grade, I would write exactly what we were doing in class on Monday. Same thing for Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday for every grade level, every class period, every day of the next week. These aren't like elaborate lesson plans. It's just like what we were doing that day. Okay, so we had reading workshop, we're drafting a body paragraph, we're taking the vocabulary test, whatever it might be. Verbs and pronouns on this day, whatever. Right? Doesn't matter. Very, very simple. That was it. And so when I walked out of my classroom on Friday, the entire next week of what was happening in my classroom was visible, not just to me, but to my students as well. And that is the magic of getting it out of your head. It's out of your head. And once it was on the board, like I didn't have to remember what was happening. I didn't have to go through the week. I didn't have to worry that I'd forgotten something important. If there was a test on Friday, it was already there on Monday when I walked into my classroom. And so that meant there was no like Sunday night, oh my God, I have no idea what's happening, or Thursday night, oh my gosh, I forgot that there's a test tomorrow. Or like I gotta apologize for my students because I forgot something. There's no last minute scrambling. I wasn't holding that whole week in my brain anymore. My board was. And the really cool bonus about this is that my students were a part of this with me. Because once I started doing this consistently, my students stopped asking questions like when is the test? What are we doing? What is this? Blah, blah, blah. They could see it. And they held me accountable to it. Right? It wasn't hidden in my planner. It wasn't locked inside my brain. It was public knowledge. And when a plan is public, there's accountability. You don't have to manage it. It's just there. And that's just what you do. And that alone saves so much mental energy that we don't even realize that we're spending. And so it wasn't about like it being perfect. It just needed to be up there. And I want to be really, really clear about something. This system isn't fancy at all. It didn't require very much more prep. It was just this sense of like completion energy on Friday. Friday was ending because I'd made all of my copies and I have everything written on the board of exactly what I was going to do. And the system evolved over time, and hopefully this happens for you too. Towards the end of my teaching career, I got so used to planning this way that I was able to just write it on a piece of paper and have a student with really nice handwriting write it on the board for me during our independent reading time on Friday. And so it's like there's this whole system that's containing everything that's going on in my classroom. And so I don't want you to say I don't have time for this. I'm gonna gently push back on that. This does not take extra time. It replaced time that I was already losing to stress, to rethinking, to second guessing, to ruminating, to waking up in the middle of the night at 3 a.m. wondering if I had forgotten to do something, right? You make it visible in your classroom before you leave on Friday. Very simple. If you just want to start out even simpler, you could just do one grade and do one week and use whatever surface you have. Write the day, write the main focus, nothing else. Right? It doesn't need to look perfect by any means at all. Like I have the worst handwriting and it still worked. It still worked, even though I could barely read what I had written. And it got even better when my students with great handwriting would do it. What I love about this system is that it does three things at once. It gives you clarity because you know exactly what's happening, and so do your students. It gives you closure energy. The week is done, it's decided, you can leave on Friday, and that gives you that cognitive relief. It gives your brain this relief that nothing is floating around in there, nothing is being forgotten about. I am no longer carrying that really subconscious cognitive load in my brain. So you're not always like half working. You actually get to turn your school brain off. Okay. All right. If you take anything from this episode, I want you to take this. The simplest systems are sometimes the ones that change everything. And it doesn't get much simpler than this. If you do this, please take pictures of your Friday whiteboard. Post them in the E B teacher community if you're an EB teacher. Share them with me on Instagram at EB Academics if you're an EB teacher. And I will see, I'm sorry, if you're not an E B teacher, and I will see if I can find gosh, any pictures from my old classroom to share on social media with you guys so you can see what this looks like. All right, everybody. I really hope this was helpful. Short and sweet, but man, this makes a difference. Please use it. It's such a helpful system. All right, everyone, I will see you next week on the podcast.