Episode 404: Tips for Using Your Prep Period to Grade (Instead of Plan)

In today's Teaching Middle School Podcast Episode, your prep period is getting stolen and it’s not because you’re “bad at time management.” Between emails, copies, surprise student needs, and drive-by conversations, that one small window becomes a catch-all and the work that matters most ends up in your bag at night. We’re breaking that cycle with a structure that helps middle school ELA teachers grade at school more often and get evenings and weekends back.

➡️Here's the link to grab our free Batch Planning Guide: https://www.ebteacher.com/free-10-tips-for-Batch-Planning

Subscribe for more time-saving ELA routines, share this with a teacher friend who needs their nights back, and leave a review if it helps. What job are you assigning to your next prep period?

Transcript

Why Prep Periods Disappear

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Well, hello teachers, and welcome to another episode of the Teaching Middle School ELA podcast. I am really excited to dive into today's episode talking about using your prep period to grade instead of plan. Right? It's that time of year where it is extraordinarily busy and you don't want to take stuff home. You're exhausted. You want to go home and be able to relax or go to the gym or hang out with your kids or whatever it might be. So I know that if you're like most teachers, you probably walk into your prep period with really good intentions. You're like, I'm gonna close my door, I'm gonna turn my lights off. No one's gonna talk to me. And then 45 minutes later, you've answered a few emails, maybe made a trip or two to the copier, a colleague came in and talked to you for way longer than you meant to, and you have gotten absolutely no grading done that you've wanted to do. And then the grading follows you home, right? It sits in your bag over the weekend, it sits at you at, it stares at you at dinner time. It is the worst feeling. It's like a sinking feeling pit in your stomach. And I hated that feeling when I was in the classroom in the first couple of years of teaching when I did not have a grasp on how to use my prep period effectively. So that cycle is what today's episode is really all about breaking, the one where your prep period gets swallowed by everything else except the work that you actually need and intend to do. So I want to walk you through a real system for reclaiming your prep period and using it for grading so that your evenings and weekends can actually belong to you again. And I wanna be honest with you up front, this isn't like a collection of quick tricks like last week's episode about grading was, which was fabulous, by the way. If you haven't listened to it, go back and listen to it. Really, this is like a structural, like foundational shift in how you operate and how you think about your prep periods. So it's gonna take some discipline to build, but once you build it, it changes the game. 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 in to 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 before we talk about solutions, I want to name the problem clearly because I think we tend to blame ourselves for this in ways that really aren't entirely fair. So the prep period, as most of us experience, kind of becomes like a catch-all, right? We use it for planning or for grading or for copying, emailing parents, responding to your department, tracking down students about a missing assignment, you know, fielding visits from your colleagues who just somehow always know when you actually have a lot of work to do. And I swear to God, they come in and talk to you. And it gets stolen by things that seem to be kind of out of our control, right? It's supposed to be a prep period, right? Preparation time. But in practice, it acts more like this window and this small window where you're trying to like stuff everything else that you need to do as a teacher, like into this short little period. And when you sit down to prep with a stack of essays in front of you, you're not just fighting the grading, right? You're fighting everything else that is happening in your life all at the same time because nothing is really clearly like designated, and that's what we're gonna talk about today. Everything competes against each other, right? You have a massive to-do list, and when that happens, nothing ends up winning. So the system that I want to share with you today works because it really like eliminates this competition for your time entirely, and it takes every task that we have as teachers grading, emails, copying, catch up, and it gives it its own dedicated time. So when you sit down to grade, this is the only thing on the agenda, right? The decision has already been made. And so you're not negotiating with yourself about whether to answer the email first or whether to do this first. You're just gonna sit down and grade. Because the thing is, is none of this works unless you've handled your planning for it in advance. Because if you're still using your prep period for planning, there's no room to grade. So that's actually the place that we're gonna start in just a second. But I do just want to share like a personal thing with you, right? Like, so I did this when I was in the classroom. And even though I'm not in the classroom anymore, my whole team functions in their work week like this in the departments where they can. So, like, for example, my Mondays are dedicated to a very specific type of task. Same thing with Tuesdays, are very specific like tasks, same thing with Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays, et cetera. And other staff members do the same exact thing with their weeks. So it's like I know on Mondays, I'm just gonna be in meetings pretty much all day. And I then plan the rest of my week around that. But I can't do that in my brain if I don't have designated time slots for all of the other things, obviously, that I have to get completed in the business. And I think the thing that is really important that we're gonna start with first as a teacher is making sure that you are planned in advance for your week. So, like I planned and I did this in the classroom, but I still do this as the CEO of the business, is I plan my week in advance. So I know what I'm gonna be working on, I know what promotions are coming down the line, I know what professional developments we're doing, I know what emails campaigns we have going on and all of this stuff way in advance, right? We plan the year of 2026 back in October of 2025. So everything has a home. And so teaching is the same thing when we're talking about planning and really utilizing our prep period effectively and being able to create these like compartments of time on certain days of the week. So that's gonna bring me to something that if you're a longtime listener, you've heard me preach about for a thousand years. And if you're a new listener, it's gonna be something that I highly, highly, highly suggest you adopt. If you do nothing else, this is the thing that changes everything. So the foundation of making sure that you can use your prep period to grade is batch planning. And I'll say this as plainly as I can and as directly as possible. If you want to use your prep period for grading, you have to stop using it for planning. And to do that, you need to plan in a completely different way. So batch planning essentially means sitting down for one extended block of time. Now, if you're a longtime listener and you know what batch planning is, you can skip a little bit ahead and get into the rest of this episode. But if you're not, you need to listen. So, and I say that with love. Batch planning means sitting down for an extended block of time, and this is like several hours, and you're gonna pick this on a weekend or a school holiday, and you're gonna sit down for like six to eight hours, and you're gonna plan out your lessons for an entire unit or an entire month or an entire full quarter at once. So you're not planning day to day or week by week during your prep period. You're planning in bulk. You're planning in advance during time that is specifically set aside for this. And then the rest of that planning cycle that you plan for, your prep period is free because you're not using it to figure out what you're gonna do the next day. And I did this when I was in the classroom. Game changer. So many of our A B teachers inside of our membership utilize this structure. We do a live experience twice a year, all around batch planning. And this is even how successful companies and businesses run. We we don't just fly by the seat of our pants, right? When we plan for 2026 for the company in October, as a team, we get together in person and we spend three days together planning all of the following year. And we have a basically schedule of what we're going to do. And then we even break it down by quarter and revisit the plans that are coming up. So it's like you have this template of what you're going to do, and you can make changes on the fly as needed, but you have the structure in place in advance so that you aren't flying by the seat of your pants, and it makes changes so much easier. And the reason it works so well beyond just the time that it frees up is that when you plan in that focused, uninterrupted block, you think better, right? You see the arc of the unit more clearly. You can make decisions about pacing and sequencing that you simply cannot make when you are planning tomorrow's lesson at 7 p.m. while you're also making dinner or at 11 o'clock at night after your kids have gone to sleep, right? There is a cognitive quality difference between planning in a flow state when you have these hours of time set aside, or in like those short little 15-minute windows, and you're, you know, trying to fit it in here and fit it in there, and that is disjointed, right? So those hours that you're gonna sit down, and I know that sounds like a lot, but you're you can do it, are going to benefit you a hundredfold in the long run. So if you've never batch planned before and you're like, Caitlin, you're crazy, that sounds horrible. I don't want to do that. I want to encourage you to start small. So don't plan like an entire semester on your first attempt. You want to plan like two weeks. And in fact, we have a batch planning guide that I'll include in the show notes for you guys that has like 10 simple steps to get started. Um, so you just want to like get familiar with the process of sitting down, blocking everything else in your life and working through your lessons for the next two weeks from start to finish. And then once you master two weeks, then you go on to a month and then a full unit. And it's like any other skill, right? It is a skill. You have to practice it and you will get dramatically better with practice. Um, so that's all I'm gonna cover with batch planning because I want to get into the rest of the episode. But if you are interested in learning more about it, definitely download the free batch planning guide that I'm gonna include in the show notes for you. And that'll walk you through like 10 steps to get started. And then in the summer, we have a whole batch planning live event that I'll share information with you via email as the time gets closer. Okay, so as I want to dive into the prep period and what we're gonna do, I wanna talk about the framework of giving every day a job. So the core of this approach is very simple, and that is that you are going to assign each of your prep periods a specific singular purpose. So every day of the week has a designated task. And when that period arrives, you know exactly what you're doing, right? There's no negotiating, there's no, well, should I do this or should I do that or I have this and blah, blah, blah. The decision's already made. So here's what that can look like in practice. And I want to emphasize that this is a model, right? It's an example, it's not a mandate, and you can adapt it to your schedule, to your context, or the number of prep periods that you have per week, right? You might not have a prep period on a Wednesday, et cetera. So you are going to designate specific grading days. So you might pick two days. Let's say it's Wednesday and Friday, and those are your grading days. Literally nothing else happens in those periods. You're not making copies, you're not dealing with, you know, writing the class weekly newsletter, whatever it might be. You walk into your classroom, you close your door and you grade, and what you're grading is already prioritized before you sit down because you know I'm grading on Wednesday, I'm grading on Friday, you're gonna have your stack ready to go in advance on your desk so that you know, okay, I got this, and that's what's coming down the pipeline. And on these days, especially, I think it's really important to protect your physical space. So put up a sign on your door that says, don't talk to me. I love you all, something like that. And then close your door. So if your room has any sort of way to signal that you're unavailable, use it. And I want you to think about this. You are not being unfriendly, you're not being cold, you are not being um antisocial. This is about keeping a promise that you made to yourself. And I think that it's a great example for you to be a lighthouse for your colleagues so that they can do this too. And they're gonna start to want to do what you're doing when you get to consistently leave at contract time while they're still grading. One thing that I will say about grading is during this prep period, let's say that you have 45 minutes. There's the Pomodoro method. If you're not familiar with it, it is something that we use when we are writing our book. It's you essentially set a timer for 20 minutes and you work for 20 minutes and take a five-minute break, and then work for 20 minutes and take a five-minute break. And so you might want to do something like that where you set a timer on your phone for 15 minutes and you go as fast as you can. And then you take a little five-minute mental break. Maybe you eat a Hershey's kiss, I have no idea. And then you grade again for 15 minutes. And for me at least, and it might not be helpful for everybody, but for me, it creates an external pressure that, like, I gotta go. I can't just screw around as I'm grading these papers. I really want to use my time effectively and consistently. So that's extraordinarily helpful for me, and it might be for you too. The next thing that I want you to think about are designated communication days or times of the day. So you might have one day, probably not two. I would try to save those for your grading days, but pick like one or two days that are gonna be solely for like email and communication. So on these days, you might send updates or handle correspondence. Maybe you're the yearbook proctor. You're also responsible for the lost and found at your school. And this is a day where you are handling communication. And it's really important that you only do it on these days, not during your grading days or 9 p.m. when you should be watching Real Housewives of Beverly Hills and going to bed, right? The other thing that I want you to think about are times of the day that you can designate to respond to emails because I know it is important that we are definitely gonna have to get back to some parents on a daily basis, on a 24-hour basis. And I know this as a parent who has a child who's gone through a tremendous amount of turmoil. And there are times when I need to hear back from his teachers, you know, before the end of the school day. So what you might want to do is designate a certain time of the day every day where you respond to email. And maybe that is from 3:15 to 3.30 or 3.30 to 340. And it's only again, you set a time and it's that period of time, and that's all that you're doing. Nothing else is distracting you, and you're just dialed into emails, and it always happens at that time of the day. So I know that this might be very difficult, especially for those of us who don't necessarily have a brain that thinks this way. So it takes a lot of discipline in just never questioning the decision. Like if this is something you want to do to free up time for yourself later, you just don't negotiate with yourself. You put it on the calendar. It's in literally put it in your Google Calendar so that you can see respond emails from 3.15 to 3.30 across the board, Monday through Friday on your Google Calendar. And that's just what you do during that time period. So when your calendar tells you what to do, there's no negotiating with your calendar. That's just what's happening. Okay. Um, the other thing that you want to pick a day for are your logistics days. So this is things like copying, organizing materials, setting up for your upcoming lessons for the following week. So I always did this on Friday. I would stay a half hour late after everybody else had left for the weekend, and I would make all of my copies, get them all, you know, in nice little file folders for the following week. I'd have all of my week laid out on my whiteboard of what I'm teaching on what day, the homework listed for every single day. So Friday, when I left, I literally got to close my door and not think about school until I got there at seven o'clock on Monday morning. And what was so interesting about that, of having this logistics day on Friday for 30 minutes at the end of the day, is that when I left and I came back to school on Monday, I sometimes forgot what I was even doing in school because I was so removed from the classroom over the weekend and it was such a gift to myself. So even though I was giving up 30 minutes after school on a Friday, when the last thing that I wanted to do was be there, guess who got to completely unplug for the weekend? I did. So it's about sitting in the discomfort for a brief period of time to be able to reap the benefits of it on the back end. And it's really hard for our brains to do that because our brains just inherently want like to take the easy way, right? That's just what we're born to do. It's how our brains are wired to function. But if you can have that discipline in yourself to have this designated logistics day, whatever it is, day of the week, Thursday, Friday are typically the better days for this, you are batch planning your copies. You already know it's needed for the next several weeks. You're not rushing to the copier at 7 a.m. or at lunchtime, waiting, you know, waiting at the machine or something's broken or whatever it is. Like you're good to go because you've handled it on that logistics day. So, again, to reiterate, you have two grading days, a designated communications day, a designated logistics day. And then I also suggest that you have what we call a floating day. So we teach this in batch planning as well. And that would be to keep one prep period per week, like as a buffer. So this might be your Monday, because who knows when you come into school on Monday, what's gonna fall on your plate. So, and that's kind of how I treat my Monday. I don't treat my Monday at EB as a CEO as any sort of like productive day, because inevitably someone on the team needs me. There's gonna be a problem that comes up when we've come back from the weekend, I'm in meetings all day. And so I just know like Monday, I'm not gonna be in deep work of recording videos for you know our curriculum, I'm not gonna be in the deep work of recording podcast episodes or writing YouTube videos or any of that stuff. That's just not happening on Monday. And so I know that. So if you know that your Monday is just kind of like your catch up day, get my feet underneath me for the week. And you also know that you have your designated grading days and communications days and logistics days, you don't stress out on Monday when you're handling all of these other things that are coming up for you because you already know that you have these other pockets of time dedicated to the other things that need to get done throughout the week. Um, and if you don't have anything to do during your prep period on that floating day on Monday, then great. You could take a nap at your desk if you wanted to. Um, I don't know if you're allowed to do that, your school don't get in trouble, but I used to do that sometimes. Okay, so what I love about this is that the structure itself is really straightforward. And what makes it work over time is this uh untangle? Intangible. Oh my gosh, I swear. At some point, all of my brain cells will come back to me from my my injury. But it's the intangible aspect of this, and that is that you have to treat this decision once you've designated these certain days as a non-negotiable. You literally don't negotiate with it at all. A student needs you, sorry, this is my day for grading, and that might be something that you put on your schedule, like Thursdays or Tuesdays, students can ask you questions during your prep period or whatever it might be. Your colleagues, you can tell them, hey, this is what I'm gonna do. The moment that these disruptions are not treated as interference with your non-negotiable, we start to go back to our habits that are not serving us. So we wanna treat these designated days as non-negotiables in our life and our prep period as something that is sacred space that we hold with absolute fortitude around it. Like we are not negotiating on it at all. Never question the decision. And I think it's really important that every time you do get distracted or you do kind of fall outside the scope of what you've planned to do, that you just remind yourself, hey, that's that's not what I actually want to do. I'm gonna come back to my goal. I'm gonna come back to my non negotiable. And so you're at least acknowledging and having a way. Around that your walls fell around this non-negotiable, and now we're gonna keep building the habit to make it stronger over time. And there is an identity piece around this that I think is worth sitting with. The teachers who have the best boundaries around their time aren't necessarily the ones who are the most disciplined in some abstract sense. They are the ones who have simply decided that this is who they are and what they're doing. They decided I'm a teacher who grades during my prep period. They decided that they're a teacher who doesn't bring work home. And when you think about it from that identity piece of this is just how I operate. This is just who I am as a teacher. That does a lot of the motivational work for you. So you're not negotiating with yourself. And this was a huge shift for me in my gym habits and also giving up alcohol. And I haven't had alcohol for three and a half years at this point. And it's one of the best decisions that I ever made. And it really became an identity piece. Like I am someone who doesn't drink. I am someone who goes to the gym every day, unless I'm traveling, you know, and I have decided that that's just who I am. And because that's who I am, when Monday, today, you know, whatever, Wednesday, today rolled around, I didn't want to go to the gym. Well, it's on my calendar. And I'm gonna go because I go to the gym every day. And so I'm just not negotiating with myself. And so I think that that's so important. If you have this perspective of this is just how I operate, and you make that decision, and it's like because you decided it's going to happen, then it will happen. And in fact, let me see if I can find this quote that I wrote down the other day. It's the concept of like, I knew, I know that I'm gonna do this, and I know that I'm gonna do this because I decided. Like that it's as simple as that. I know this is going to happen because I decided that it will. And that's that. It's a simple concept, not necessarily easy, but if you can adopt that way of being, it's gonna impact every area of your life. I just know that it's gonna work because I just decided that it will. Period. And you can hear like even the certainty in my voice when I say that. So it is literally something as simple as you brush your teeth every day, every Wednesday, Friday, you grade during your prep period. Like it has to become that habituated for you. So tell yourself, I'm someone who uses my prep period well. So when teachers start complaining about their prep period and you just say, Oh, well, I'm someone who uses my prep period well. And that's that. And you don't negotiate with it. It's as simple as that, right? Um, okay, before you go, as you head into this week, I want you to head into a week with a prep period that you're actually going to use. So I want to give you one starting point. As soon as you finish listening to this episode, or if you're listening to it where you're near a Google Calendar or your Microsoft calendar, whatever you use, open up your calendar right now and label each prep period with the job that you're gonna decide that prep period does. So your grading days, your communication days, your logistic day, your floating day, literally like block it out on your calendar. And once you have it on your calendar and it's color-coded and it's blocked off, that single act of making this decision in advance in advance is the thing that changes everything. So if you try it, which I really hope you do, and when it works, because it will, because you decided that it will, I want to know. Come find me on Instagram at eB Academics. Tell me what shifted for you and what's working for you. And if you're an EB teacher, let us know in the over in the EB teacher community with a Facebook post so that maybe you can inspire others to do the same. All right, you guys, I will see you next week on the podcast. Hope you have a wonderful rest of your week and hang in there. We're getting towards the end of the year. And also, I want to say just a side note, my birthday is coming up, and we've got a huge birthday sale coming up in celebration of that. So mark your calendars for the beginning of May. More details to follow soon. Hope you guys are doing well and have a great rest of your day. Bye, everybody.