Episode 415: Stop Planning Week to Week — There's a Better Way and It Changes Everything

In today's Teaching Middle School ELA podcast episode, I challenged the idea that Sunday planning sessions are just part of being a teacher. Let's explore how week-to-week planning can contribute to burnout, disconnected instruction, and the constant feeling that you're forgetting something important. You'll hear why students engage more when learning feels connected and purposeful, and how intentional planning can strengthen both instruction and classroom culture.

I also unpacked three common beliefs that keep teachers stuck in reactive planning and shared a more effective approach to curriculum mapping, writing instruction, and reading unit planning. If you've ever felt overwhelmed trying to fit everything in, this episode offers a practical and encouraging path forward.

Want to take the next step? Join us for a free live summer workshop, "3 Proven Steps to Engage Your Students + Get Them Mastering the Standards." You'll walk away with actionable strategies to increase engagement, strengthen instruction, and start the school year with confidence.

🎟️ Save your spot at: ebteacher.com/workshop

Transcript

Welcome And Summer Workshop Invite

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Hello teachers and welcome back to another episode of the Teaching Middle School ELA podcast. This is a special Thursday episode, and like I shared on Monday, we are airing episodes twice a week that are focused on teaching, and then every Monday for our Monday mindsets throughout the months of June and July because we are headed into summer professional development slash workshop season. So I'm super excited about these bonus episodes for you, the extra Monday mindsets, and I just really hope that it gives you some reinvigoration over the summer, some excitement about things that you can make adjustments to next year. And I also want to make sure that I invite you to register for our June workshop, which is focused on engaging your students and getting them to master the standards. If you go to ebteacher.com forward slash workshop, you can pick your date to choose from to sign up for that workshop with me. We have a couple different options. And then I'm also doing a whole pop-up Facebook group with bonus trainings, tons of awesome giveaways. I'm giving away a MacBook Air to one lucky teacher. That is one of my favorite things to do every single summer. So if you have not joined us in the past for our summer workshop series, definitely make sure that you go sign up again. That's ebteacher.com forward slash workshop. 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.

Why Week-To-Week Planning Fails

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All right, today we are talking about why we need to stop planning week to week. Hopefully that is not something I need to convince you of. And we're gonna talk about a better way to do basically your planning and how it changes everything. So I'm gonna read you three statements, and I want you to notice how your body responds when you hear these statements. So just pay attention to like your visceral reaction. So the first statement: your lessons feel all over the place. One unit ends, the next one begins, and there's no connection between the two of them at all. There's no thread, no build, no sense that things are going anywhere. How does that make you feel? Number two, you have no real system for when you teach particular writing units. You know you have to teach narrative or argumentative or evidence-based or expository, but honestly, like you kind of just teach them whenever they seem to fit, which is really just whenever you get to them. We get to the end of the year and we're like, oh no, we gotta teach argumentative, I forgot. Not really a good feeling, right? Or number three, you lesson plan on Sunday afternoons or Sunday evenings, or during your one prep period on Thursdays, if you don't happen to have a meeting, which you usually do have a meeting. So, how did all of those land to you? If even one of those hits close to home, this episode is for you. And I promise you that by the end of it, you're gonna have a completely different picture of what your planning can actually look like. Not someday, but like this summer, this next school year. So I want to get into it, but I'm also going to go further into this in my summer workshop series as well. So again, go to ebteacher.com forward slash workshop. Yes, we're talking about engaging our students and getting them to master the standards, but it all starts with your planning. Like that is how important it is.

The Hidden Costs Of Last-Minute Plans

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So I want to start with kind of like describing what you're facing. So here's what week to week planning is actually costing you. And I don't think that we always see like the full price tag of what this week-to-week planning is doing to us in our lives as teachers. So when you plan week to week, obviously it costs you your Sundays, right? You sit down after a weekend with your family or your friends, or after doing something that actually filled you up and you enjoyed. And then you spend two, three, sometimes four hours or more piecing together lessons for the week ahead. And even then, you might be going to bed on Sunday night, not entirely sure that you have everything planned that you needed to. It also costs you continuity in your classroom. This is something so important that I don't think we really realize until we become expert planners. So when you're planning that close to the wire, you don't have the mental space to think about how this unit connects to the last one or how it's setting up the next one. Everything feels just disconnected for you and for your students. And students can quite frankly feel that, right? They feel when a classroom has a rhythm and they feel when a classroom doesn't. The other thing that it's costing you, which I think is hugely important, is it's costing you your confidence, right? When you don't have a plan that extends beyond next Friday, there's this kind of low-level anxiety that just follows you everywhere. It's this hum in the back of your brain of like, am I covering everything? Are my students actually making progress? What am I forgetting? Oh my gosh, I still have to do that, right? It's always in the back of your mind. And here's the thing that really, really gets me. None of this is your fault as a teacher, right? Like, not even a little bit. No one actually taught you how to do this. Like, think about your credential program. I even think about my master's program at one of the best universities for getting a master's in education in the country. I didn't learn how to plan effectively. The lesson plans that they had us turn in were outrageous and were so not reflective of what teaching is actually like. Like there's so much theory, but there was no actual practice. There was no, this is where the rubber meets the road, right? Here's how to plan out an entire year of ELA instruction so that your students are building on skills progressively, right? So that you're covering every standard that you need to. And so that you're not planning every Sunday afternoon. That is not a class in college, in your master's program, in your credential program. Instead, they taught you lesson plan formats and assessment theory, right? They did not teach you an actual system for this. And so most teachers do the only thing that they know how to do, and that's to plan week to week, or like wing it when something falls through and hope it all comes together. And the thing is, is that it does not have to be this way. This is what we've spent years at EB teaching other teachers about because it's so crucial to keeping great teachers in the classroom, is learning how to plan like a boss. Because then you can deal with all of the other things that come along with teaching that are a lot more difficult, that we can't necessarily place the same types of systems around, right? So I want to talk about some of the beliefs that I hear teachers have, comes up over and over again, that kind of reinforce the problem or that are even causing the

Three Beliefs Keeping Teachers Stuck

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problem. So I want to answer the question of why do teachers, and maybe this is you, stay stuck in this week-to-week planning cycle, even when it's clearly not working, even when it is extremely stressful. Because a few of the beliefs sound completely reasonable on the surface, but again, we're reinstilling this belief that's actually not beneficial to us in the long run. So, belief number one that I hear all the time from teachers, constantly, especially when I post on social media, this is the one that I get pushback on a lot. And teachers will say planning ahead isn't realistic for me. Things just change way too much. Or I don't know my students. This is the one I get pushback on all the time. This is like the number one belief. And it's like, yes, admin changes things. Yes, assemblies get added. Yes, your students are not where you thought they'd be. These things do come up. But and I'm gonna challenge this. This belief is often being used to just not or to justify rather just not having a plan at all, which actually makes those interruptions harder to recover from, not easier. And we'll talk about that in just a second. The other belief that comes up is I just need to get through this week. I'll plan ahead once things calm down. How many of you have said that to yourselves, especially if you're an EB teacher? Once things calm down, the honest truth is things don't calm down, right? Like they never do. The week-to-week cycle is self-perpetuating. If you wait until things slow down to build a system, you're gonna be waiting forever. It's like in life, you're like, I'll, I'll, I'm gonna wait, you know, I'm gonna I'm gonna start eating healthy once things get a little bit easier in my life. It's like, bro, life is always tough. We just have to decide how we're gonna look at it. We just have to choose the perspective that we're gonna take, right? Or belief number three, I hear this one a lot too, is like I'm a creative teacher and I don't want to be locked into like this rigid plan. And this is the sneakiest one because I think we see this as a strength or like we're making it sound like a strength, which it is, right? Creativity is a strength, but there's a big difference between being rigidly locked into a plan and having no plan at all, right? A mapped-out curriculum does not take away your creativity. In fact, I say all the time that frameworks equal freedom because when you're not using all of your mental energy figuring out what you're teaching next week, you have so much more space to think about how to teach it in a way that's engaging and meaningful. That is huge. So I want to break these beliefs down and I want to kind of discredit them. I want to bust these beliefs so that you can see that if you have any of these, you don't have to hold on to them, right? We can change our minds about things, and that's a really powerful lens through which to approach life and the world, especially teaching. So let's take that first belief. Planning ahead isn't realistic because things change. So I want to offer you a different frame. When things change, when things change, and they will, would you rather be adjusting a plan that exists or scrambling to build one from scratch with 48 hours notice? Right? Having a mapped-out curriculum doesn't mean you're married to every single lesson on every single day. What it means is it means that you have a foundation, right? You have a roadmap. And so when a detour comes up, you know where you are on that map and you know what you need to get back to. You know what your students need to cover before June, and that is infinitely more manageable than not knowing at all, than having no idea. Now, the second belief, I'll plan ahead once things calm down. I want to call this out for what it is. This is a comfort story. This is a story to keep us stuck in our comfort zone, which is what we do as humans. It is human nature. There is no judgment. We do it with everything. Week to week planning is familiar, right? We've all heard the phrase the devil you know is better than the devil you don't know, right? Planning week to week is the devil that you know. And even though it's exhausting, it feels safer to you than committing to a bigger process that you haven't tried, right? Humans will always default to comfortability, even at the expense of something that's gonna make them greater or help them more in their lives. Right. I just have this phrase that I think about constantly is like the growth is in the discomfort. Like, so if we're feeling uncomfortable, maybe we're doing something right, right? We're expanding our capacity, we're expanding our threshold of tolerance for things that are difficult. I think about this with my son all the time and helping him with his anxiety. It's like when he has to do something that's hard for him, he is helping build new belief that even though it's hard for me, I can still do it, right? As opposed to staying stuck in that comfort and not wanting to try something different. So I have talked to so many teachers who said that they couldn't imagine carving out time to plan ahead. They're like, nope, absolutely not, until they actually did it. And I would say almost universally, like 99.99% of the time, those teachers come back and say afterwards, I can't believe I waited this long. Like, why did no one ever teach me this? That's pretty powerful. And that third belief that having a plan kills creativity.

How Planning Boosts Creativity

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I'm gonna share something that happened in my own classroom because I think that this will land for you. When I first started teaching eighth grade, I had to teach The House on Mango Street, and that was my first novel of the year. And it wasn't something that was like randomly chosen. It also wasn't something that was like next in the textbook. It wasn't something that was assigned to me by the curriculum that we had because we didn't have one. I created one from scratch. I chose that as the first novel of the year intentionally. And I did that because its short vignette structure was accessible for students at the start of the year before I really had any time to assess their levels per se. And so because its themes connected beautifully to narrative writing, I was launching narrative writing shortly thereafter of teaching that it served as this like natural bridge for my writing and my reading. And for me, that was creative, quote unquote teaching because I was being really intentional with how my reading and writing tied together in my classroom. And that was only possible because I had planned far enough in advance to see those connections. So I noticed I'm gonna teach the House on Mango Shoot, I'm gonna teach all of this beautiful language and writing and similes and metaphors and all of this stuff, right? While I also teach evidence-based writing. But then when we finish the book, we'll be finished with evidence-based writing. And now my students are gonna write a narrative. And so it was like I was clearly able to build the connections between my reading and writing class by choosing that intentionally. And to me, that is creative teaching because it's not like happenstance. It was intentional for a very specific purpose. And I think about that compared to the years where I just was like, oh my God, what novel am I gonna teach next? And I'd ask the teacher down the hall in my first couple of years teaching, and it was like, that teaching was technically fine, but there was no momentum. It was like, oh yeah, we're reading Julius Caesar next. You know, like students couldn't feel necessarily the point of what they were doing. So planning ahead doesn't dull your teaching, it actually makes it more intentional and it makes it richer. So, what is the alternative to the Sunday scaries and to just not doing

Batch Planning With A Roadmap

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this next year? Like, let's just not do this next year. And if you've been around a long time, you know the answer. And if you haven't, and it's your first time here, you're gonna hear me talk about this a lot this summer. The alternative is batch planning. And before you click away, because you've heard this term before and it feels overwhelming, stay with me. This is where you're gonna get uncomfortable and you're gonna do something different. I say that with love, Coach Caitlin, because I'm gonna show you what this actually looks like in a real middle school ELA classroom. We're not gonna talk about theory, this is actual practice. So, batch planning is simply this sitting down, ideally once a quarter or once a semester or once a month, depending on your skill level with this and how much time you have. And you're mapping out your content for the next several weeks or months. You're doing what units you're teaching, when you're teaching them, what standards they cover, how they build on each other. And that's it. This is the roadmap. And once you have even just that basic roadmap, if you do nothing beyond that, your Sundays are already going to start to change. Because instead of building the plane while you are flying it, you're just following the GPS. And so here's what I want you to understand about batch planning that most people miss it is not about locking yourself into rigid lesson plans. It is about giving yourself the bird's eye view so that you can make intentional decisions about your curriculum instead of just reactive ones. Imagine if you were playing offense as a teacher and weren't constantly feeling like you were playing defense. So I want to give you some steps, I want to give you some examples, and I want to talk about problems if we don't fix this. Now, before I start, I'm gonna do like a how would I describe this? This is like a beginner's guide, novice guide to batch planning. There's we've written a whole book about this at EB. This is what our summer workshop series is gonna focus on. We have a whole course on it inside of our membership. But I do want to be able to share some of the guiding principles and first steps for how you can start doing this on your own. But still, definitely make sure that you come join our summer workshop series, ebteacher.com forward slash workshop.

Three Steps To Batch Plan

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So, step number one is you're gonna start with your big units, not what you're teaching on Monday. You're starting with the big units. When you sit down to patch batch plan, you start from the top down, not the bottom up. So that means you start by asking, what are my major units this year? What novels am I teaching? What writing genres do I need to cover? What short stories need to be in there, et cetera. And you're gonna get those anchors on your calendar first. And then, and only then do you start thinking about what standards you're going to address inside each one and how the units connect to each other. So this is a step that most teachers skip. They plan lessons instead of planning a curriculum for a year. And when you plan lessons on a week-to-week or day-to-day basis, you can't see the big picture. You can't notice that you've done narrative writing twice in two months, but you haven't touched expository writing since September. Right? You can't notice that you're building toward argumentative writing with students who haven't developed the literary analysis foundation that they need to do it well. Right? When you have that 30,000-foot bird's eye view, it changes everything. And if you skip this step, you'll keep teaching units in isolation without any intentional arc. So your students won't feel the building effect of their learning, and neither will you. And you'll keep ending the year in like a scramble trying to cover what you never got to. And that's one of the things that I think is so important to realize is a lot of the times towards the end of the year, teachers will say to us, Well, they don't understand this standard. And I'm like, Well, did you ever teach it to them? And they'll go back through their plans and they'll realize that they didn't, right? So it's not necessarily a students can't master the standards error. It's my plans aren't even covering the standards error, if that makes sense. So that's step number one is to start with your big units. Step number two is to map your writing units in a deliberate sequence. So here's something that sounds simple, but it's genuinely game-changing. The order you teach your writing units in matters tremendously. So most teachers don't really think about this. They cover narrative writing at some point, maybe argumentative later, expository somewhere in there. The order is basically arbitrary, right? Whatever feels right or whatever the department decided years ago or whatever your district tells you to do, right? But there's actually a progression that works best. And when you follow it, your students grow as writers in a way that's noticeable. So in the past, we've taught for the younger grades to start with narrative, right? It's an approachable genre. Students have stories that they want to tell, they've been telling them their whole lives, right? A narrative writing unit at the beginning of the year lets you learn your students as writers as well. So you can do this if you have, you know, you can well, you can do whatever you want. Let me just say that. You can do whatever you want. But I do love narrative writing at the beginning of the year for some grade levels. However, I do really suggest starting the beginning of the year with evidence-based writing. And that's literary analysis here at EB, which we call the EBW approach. And the reason that we start the year with this is it is the foundation that every other genre of academic writing is built upon. So argumentative, persuasive, expository, all of those writing styles all require the ability to analyze the text and construct a logical, evidence-based argument. So if your students don't have the foundation of evidence based writing of literary analysis, then those units are going to be a battle every single time. And so when you map your writing units intentionally, your students are ready for each new thing that you're asking them to do, right? The learning compounds, it builds. Teaching the same foundational skills over and over again because they weren't ready, right? You teach literary analysis or evidence-based writing at the beginning of the year, and then argumentative and persuasive are so much easier because you're just adding and enhancing and making small adaptations to those writing styles. So if you skip this step, you'll keep fighting uphill battles in writing. I promise you. You'll start an argumentative unit, you'll realize your students don't have the analysis skills to do it well, or you'll teach expository writing to students who still don't even know how to construct a claim, and we'll be frustrated with our students when really it's like, okay, well, the sequence just wasn't set up to serve them really well. Okay, so step number two is to map your writing units in a deliberate sequence. Step number three is to plan your reading with the same intentionality. So everything that I just said about writing applies to reading too. And the two, if you can, should really be planned together, right? We really believe here that students should be writing about what they are reading about. So when you are choosing novels and texts, you're not just picking things that your students might enjoy, though we do want to make sure that we're doing that in some capacity. Instead, you're making decisions about complexity, theme, timing, what skills that text allows you to teach. So in my eighth grade classroom, I didn't start the year with Romeo and Juliet or Knight, right? Those are incredible texts, but they're not texts for September, right? Night is particularly an emotionally demanding text. That requires a level of psychological trust between the teacher and your students, and that takes time to build, right? So we're not gonna ask our students to go somewhere that emotionally challenging with someone that they've only known for three weeks, right? That's something that we're gonna get to at the beg at the end of the year when that psychological trust exists in and psychological safety exists in the classroom. So I always started, like I said earlier, with the house on Mango Street, right? Short chapters, beautiful language, accessible themes, and it allows you to get to know your students, right? We connected this really naturally to writing about ourselves and what our name means and all of this like beautiful stuff about getting to know yourself. So that is intentional curriculum design. And it doesn't require a PhD in curriculum theory. It just requires that you've given yourself enough time and space to actually think about it. And that is exactly what batch planning creates. You can also think about this through the lens of equity and representation, right? You want to make sure that your students are reading a diverse range of voices and perspectives throughout the year and not just defaulting to the same handful of titles. Because when we batch plan, that gives you the chance to audit that, right? You can step back and look at your year and say, okay, who are my students reading? Are they seeing themselves in these texts? That's really important. So if you skip this step, your reading units might feel random and disconnected, right, to you and to your students. And texts aren't necessarily going to reinforce what students are learning in writing. So you really don't want to miss the opportunity to build toward more complex reading in a way that actually prepares students for the work ahead. And that's what batch planning allows you to do. So step three is to plan your reading with the same intentionality. So again, number one is to start with your big units. Number two is to map your writing units in a deliberate sequence. And number three is to plan your reading with the same intentionality.

Engagement Link And Workshop Next Steps

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So I want to wrap this up and really bring this home for you. The reason your curriculum feels scattered is not because you're a bad planner. It's because you've just never been given a system. And you've been told, either explicitly or implicitly, that planning more than a week out isn't realistic. And that is just a belief because that is not true 100% of the time for every single teacher everywhere. So that makes it a belief and not necessarily a truth. So when you batch plan, when you start with your big units, when you sequence your writing intentionally and you choose your reading with purpose, things begin to shift. Your classroom has a rhythm, right? Your students feel the momentum. And you walk into Monday morning knowing exactly where you're going instead of frantically trying to figure it out on Sunday night. And that's the version of teaching that made you want to become a teacher in the first place. And like that is absolutely within reach. And so that's exactly why I want you to come to my free live workshop this summer. That is going to build on everything that we've talked about today. So what I want to tell you right now is I really truly believe that the biggest reason student engagement falls apart and we have behavior problems, right? There are other things that are contributing factors to the behavior problems. But when student engagement falls apart, it's really that the curriculum doesn't have this clear intentional plan structure underneath it, right? Students can feel when the random then when the lesson is random and they disengage. And when they disengage, that's when we have behavior problems. That's when they get in trouble. But when they can feel themselves really caring about what they're learning and they are building on what they already know, like they start to just lean in in a different way. So everything that we talked about today really helps set the foundation for the engagement strategies that I'm going to walk you through in our summer workshop. They go hand in hand. So it's completely free. Go grab your spot ebteacher.com forward slash workshop. I'll link it in the show notes for you as well. And I also have a ton of free resources that I will be giving to you and teaching you how to use at that summer workshop series. So I'll see you in the next episode. But in the meantime, I want you to seriously think about at least that first step, your big units. When you think about next year, the 26th, 27th school year, what are those big units that you're going to teach? And just start with that. Like just start there one step at a time. You've got this. I'll see you next week on the podcast. Monday, we've got a Monday mindset airing, and I'm also talking about simple frameworks for helping your students retain their learning. We're going to talk about how to get back to loving teaching. We've got a bunch of great episodes coming your way, and I cannot wait to air them and for you to get to take a lesson. All right, you guys, thanks so much for joining me today on the podcast, and I will see you next week. Bye, everyone.