Episode 423: Two Things to Do This Summer That Will Change Your Entire School Year

In today's Teaching Middle School ELA Podcast episode, I tackled the three beliefs that keep middle school ELA teachers stuck: the idea that you cannot plan until you know your students, the fear that batch planning takes too much time up front, and the frustration that schedules always change anyway. You will hear why planning foundations early makes differentiation easier, why one focused planning stretch beats constant week to week planning, and how floating days keep your scope and sequence flexible when assemblies, reteaching, or pacing surprises pop up. 

If you want more support, check the link in the description for the free workshop, and if this helps, subscribe, share the episode with a fellow teacher, and leave a quick review.

www.ebteacher.com/workshop

Transcript

A Calm Monday Morning Vision

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Well, hello, teachers, and welcome to another episode of the Teaching Middle School ELA podcast. We are talking about two things to do this summer that will change your entire school year. So I want to start by painting you a picture of a Monday morning. You walk into school nice and slowly, you're chill, you're not rushing, you're not frantically making copies before the bell rings with five other people in line in front of you. You're not running through your lesson in your head trying to remember like what comes next, what you're doing, all of that stuff. But instead, your copies are made. And if you're type A like me, they're like stacked really nicely, perfectly aligned to the corners of your desk, right? Your lesson plan is printed out. You have your SWBST, students will be able to, and your standards on your board. And you did not think about school once over the weekend. Not Sunday afternoon, not Sunday night, not at 6 a.m. when you woke up with that anxious feeling in your chest. None of that. You just showed up Monday morning ready to go. And if that sounds like a fantasy to you, I promise you that it is not. When I was in the classroom, I lived that Monday morning on a consistent basis. Teachers inside of our membership live that regularly.

Why Batch Planning Works

SPEAKER_00 1:14

And the single practice that creates it, the thing that makes all of it possible, is called batch planning. So today I'm going to give you two specific steps that you can take this summer to start batch planning for next year. There are two steps that will get you out the door when the bell rings and give you your life back. While this isn't everything that batch planning entails, it's definitely a starting point to at least do something different for next year. All right, let's dive into today's episode.

The Support System Behind It

SPEAKER_00 1:42

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.

Debunking Common Planning Beliefs

SPEAKER_00 2:53

Alright, so if batch planning is the answer to all of our woes as teachers, why are more teachers not doing it? And the reason is that there are a few beliefs that I hear all the time. And I want to address them directly because I had some of these beliefs too. And if we can like rewire our brain to have a different belief instead of these, it's gonna support you in moving toward actually being able to batch plan. So the first one that I hear all the time is I can't plan ahead because I don't know my students yet. I can't tell you how many Instagram posts I have comments on my Instagram posts I've had of people saying this. And look, I get this one. Like I totally understand it. In theory, it sounds responsible, right? Like you want to meet your students, you want to understand their needs, and then you want to plan. But here's when I know from my own experience and from working with literally thousands of teachers over the years, planning your foundations in advance and then adapting them for your students are not mutually exclusive. In fact, they go hand in hand. When I was teaching eighth grade, I knew that I was gonna start with the house on Mango Street. I knew my standards, I knew my structure. All of that was mapped out before I met a single student. Okay. But then I met my students, and yeah, I made adjustments. But those adjustments were small tweaks on top of an already solid foundation. That is so much easier than staring at a blank calendar in September while simultaneously managing 35 kids, answering parent emails, and attending faculty meetings, right? You will always be able to adapt a plan. You cannot easily adapt no plan. That is really important. And I would even argue the opposite. It is our duty to plan ahead because you don't know your students yet. Because if you plan ahead, you have more time and you have more white space in order to make adjustments. But if we're flying by the suit of our pants and trying to create lesson plans every single night based on our students, are we actually giving them the best learning experience? I mean, I don't know, everything can be argued, but hopefully you see my point, right? Planning ahead actually helps you differentiate and meet your students where they are more than if you didn't do that. So hopefully that discredits that belief for you. The second one that I hear all the time is that batch planning takes way too much time up front. Yeah. It does. That belief is true, it requires a focused investment. However, I want you to compare that. Let's say we're gonna plan for six hours on a Sunday. Compare that six hours on a Sunday that you're gonna plan for two months worth of school. Compare that to the cumulative hours that you spend planning week to week, night to night, Sunday to Sunday, all year long. The thing about batch planning is that it costs you your time once, twice, maybe three times a year. But day to day, week to week planning costs you time forever. Literally every single day. When I was planning week to week in my first couple of years in the classroom, I was miserable every single week. It's like an hour here, two hours there, three hours on a Sunday, right? If I had just sat down and batch planned, my life would have been so much easier. And so when I went back to the classroom after leaving for a year, and I went to corporate America, the grass is not always greener on the other side. Teaching was way better than corporate America. Let me tell you, when you don't get a vacation day until you've been working there for six months, and you're expecting to teach or to work five days a week, nine to five every single day, and you get an hour lunch break, and you sit at a desk in a cubicle. Uh-uh. No, thank you, ma'am. I never want to do that again. And trust me, like having vacation days, I know that like a lot of us work over our vacations, but it was very different having Christmas and Christmas Eve off than having two weeks off at Christmas or winter, your winter break. Like that was extremely different. I'm going off on a tangent. Let's stay focused. When I went back to the classroom, I knew I could not continue planning like that because that was one of the things that made me miserable about teaching. So what I did is I switched to this concept of batch planning. And I would spend one focused stretch at the start of the semester or each quarter, whatever it is that you have. And then each week I was just making these minor tweaks. So Sunday scaries just aren't a thing, right? All of those evenings, working late and worrying about copies and all that stuff, it literally just doesn't exist anymore. So I want you to think of it like having a personal trainer, right? You could show up at the gym every day and figure out what to do on your own. You can totally do that. Or you could have a plan that your trainer put together for you. This is your program, this is your structure, this is what you're doing, when you're doing it, why you're doing it. And the second approach is so much more effective. And counterintuitively, it actually takes so much less mental energy because you're not making decisions from scratch every single day. And that is what batch planning does for you for your curriculum. So, yes, batch planning takes too much time up front, and also it takes way less time than planning on a day-to-day or week-to-week basis. So that belief is true. But we could say, we could change the belief and say batch planning takes more time up front, but saves me significantly more time on the back end in the long run. Something like that. All right, last one that comes up, another belief that we're gonna bust, is something always comes up and derails my plans, anyways. How many of you have said this to yourself? Raise your hand, it's okay. Yeah, things do come up. That's a reality. And so we plan for them in advance, right? We have assemblies. Some of you have snow days, we don't have those where I live. You have a unit that takes too long, you have to reteach a concept, whatever. Like that happens. That's part of it. So we know that that's gonna happen and we're gonna plan for it. And a teacher with a batch plan knows exactly what to do in that case, and that is called creating floating days. That you're just gonna leave like two or three blank days on your calendar of your scope and sequence every month, or at the end of every unit. And you can just move things as you need to. And sometimes, like what has happened to me in the past, I literally just ran out of time to teach an entire novel at the end of the year. And you know what? My kids were fine. It wasn't the end of the world, right? So I think a lot of these things, too, we've just got to let go. Yes, maybe we made the perfect plans, and also one of the hallmarks of being a teacher is our flexibility, right? And a teacher who is flexible is a teacher who is ultimately resilient in the face of situations like this. So if that is a belief that you have, we're just gonna say, yes, okay, and so what? I can handle that, right? That's such a different way to approach a quote unquote problem. It's much more empowering.

Step One Map Units To Standards

SPEAKER_00 10:32

Okay, so I want to give you two steps to start moving toward batch planning. Step number one, that we teach our teachers inside of our membership, as well as inside of our free workshop that we're doing, as well as at our batch planning live event next week. If you haven't signed up for our free workshop, go to ebteacher.com forward slash workshop. We are in the middle of it right now. We have a couple more days left. It's not too late to join. You'll learn a ton of stuff and get our free batch planning kit too as part of that. But step one is to nail down your big units and align those big units to your standards. And I'm gonna dive into each one of these in more depth. Step two is to create a structure using the into, through, and beyond approach for your units. I talk all about this in depth inside of our free workshop. I have a bonus training on every single aspect of the into, the through, and the beyond pieces of the framework. But we'll dive into it a little bit right now. Those two steps are where you start. So if you do them this summer, you're gonna walk into September with more confidence and more clarity than you have ever had on the first day of school. So if we look at step one, step one is to nail down your big units and align them to your standards. So you can sit down with a blank calendar and you can start mapping out your big units for the first month or two of school. We're not talking about individual lessons, what I'm doing on day one, day two, day three. I'm talking about big units, like novel units, writing units, short story units, et cetera, the major chunks of your curriculum. And so for me, when I taught eighth grade, September was almost always started with the house on Mango Street. That was my anchor text. I'd block it out on the calendar, and then I'd ask myself, okay, what standards do I want to cover inside of this unit? So that's where you pull out all of your grade level ELA standards. You can have a standards checklist. We're giving away our standards checklist for free at our workshop this week. So again, if you haven't come, make sure that you come to get even just that is worth your time. But you have your ELA standards in front of you. And as you map out each unit, you're gonna mark which standard you're covering and when. And this is the step that really changes everything because what it does is it forces you to be intentional instead of reactive. So you don't have to second guess yourself. You can stop chasing like shiny objects on Instagram, like just stop going on Instagram, right? Or teach or TikTok or whatever it is that is a what's the word I'm looking for? A doom scrolling situation, right? Let's stop doing that to ourselves. And instead, we plan with intention, right? We plan with purpose. So I might look at my house on Mango Street unit and I'm gonna say, okay, I'm gonna teach reading for literature 8.3, 8.2, whatever it might be in that particular unit. And I'm gonna know that the activities that I'm gonna do for the house on Mango Street need to ensure that they cover those standards at least once, if not multiple times, to give my students ample opportunity to work with those standards. And that's all I'm putting in this first step. That's all I'm doing on my calendar. So I might pull out September and I might mark off literally three weeks where I just write House on Mango Street, and I'm going to plan my unit so that it only takes three weeks. Right? A novel unit like The Outsiders might take longer than that because it's a longer novel. Or if we're reading Romeo and Juliet, it's Shakespeare, so that's gonna take a little bit longer than that. So you'll start to kind of finesse it as you practice it more. You'll start to understand like these particular units take a little bit longer. However, what I will say to just be very cognizant of is the principle of um, gosh, why can't I think of what it's called? I'm sure you're listening and you're you're saying it and you're like, Caitlin, this is the word. It is a law, Parkinson's law. And basically it says that the amount of time that you give for something is the amount of time that it's gonna take you. So if you give yourself six weeks to teach the house on Mango Street, it's gonna take you six weeks. So if you give yourself three weeks, you're gonna plan differently and it's gonna take you three weeks. And so the thing is, is if you skip this, you're gonna walk into September the same way that you walked into September last year, with like a general sense of what you're gonna cover, but no real map of what you're doing. And by October, we're back in that cycle of life sucks. I hate teaching them looking for jobs in corporate America, right? Which seriously, like, do not go to corporate America. It sucks. All right, step two. After

Step Two Into Through Beyond

SPEAKER_00 14:55

we've done that, we are then when we're planning with this particular unit, right? We've picked our unit, we've decided how long it's gonna take, we've also decided the main core standards that we're gonna cover with that unit. Now we're gonna structure each unit using what is called the into, through, and beyond approach. So once you know those, you're gonna basically create like shape to your unit with this framework. So the into lesson is your hook. This is where you get students engaged, curious, bought in, whatever it might be. The through lessons are the heart of the unit. The majority of your class periods, this is where students are doing actual standards aligned work. So they might be actually reading the text or using an evidence tracker to find evidence from the text to support a claim that they've formulated. They might also be working with theme or inferences, whatever it might be. Those are the heart and meat of your unit. And then the beyond lesson is the application. And this is one or two class periods at the end of the unit where students demonstrate what they've learned. So this is gonna be like a graphic essay or an actual essay, or we might do a one-pager or a music video project, or the house on Mango Street. I did like a maps project, which was really cool. But every single unit is gonna follow that arc of the into through and beyond. And this is again in my free workshop this week that I'm doing. I have a bonus training that's about 20 minutes on each one of these pieces of this lesson planning framework that is immensely helpful. So if you haven't signed up, go to ebteacher.com forward slash workshop, pick one of the main dates to come, but then jump, come join the Facebook group and you're gonna see the bonus trainings. Bonus training number one is all about the into lesson, and I give you an example. Bonus number two through lesson, again, I give you an example, a resource to actually go teach in your classroom. And then bonus number three is actually bonus training number three is actually happening the day that this episode airs. So listen to this episode, go sign up and come be a part of the fun and like learn everything in more depth and get free resources to help you implement this, right? To take this concept of theory and put it into practice in your classroom. And once you internalize this framework, you really stop building lessons kind of without direction or from scratch. And again, instead, rather, you start asking a very simple question. I need an anti-lesson, which one am I gonna use? Do I need a through lesson? What kind of through lesson do I need to use to cover the standard? And what is my beyond lesson gonna be? And that clarity cuts your planning time dramatically because you're not staring at a blank page, right? You're filling in a structure that you already understand. And I want you to think about like this. When we wrote our book, The Empowered ELA Teacher, which also is all about this, ironically, um, when we wrote that, we we bought a course called How to Write a Book in 30 Days. And like, look, I'm not kidding anybody. I'm not an author. I didn't get put on this earth to write books, right? I'm not Taylor Swift like with lyrics. However, this course essentially created frameworks to take the daunting task of writing a book and breaking it down into smaller structures. And it made writing the the long, the actual book itself so much easier than staring at a blank page of paper or a Microsoft Word document with a cursor blinking, right? Which is extraordinarily intimidating. Same thing with lesson planning, right? So you have this structure, you're not staring at a blank piece of paper, not knowing what to do. You just follow this arc. And what's really cool is that you'll start to create like a collection of activities that fall into each one of these pieces of the framework. You'll have your go-to-into lessons that you can rinse and repeat and use over and over again. You'll have your go-to-through or beyond lessons that serve the same purpose. And so in this case, planning is no longer reactive. Instead, you're being proactive and intentional because you have a reliable framework to plug your lessons into.

Summer Next Steps And Wrap

SPEAKER_00 18:58

So let's go ahead and wrap up. I want you to really stay focused with these two um steps that you're gonna take for planning. And if you need our help and you want to be a part of a community and do what we're doing this week and just really hone in this concept and make sure that you truly understand it as you head into the summer so that you can use this time to plan and then have a great year next year. Um, definitely make sure that you sign up for a free workshop. Go to evteacher.com forward slash workshop. And I have all kinds of great stuff for you in there. So it's gonna be worth it. All right. In the meantime, start with step one, pull out your calendar, write down your big units. That's it. Just start there. All right, you guys, thank you so much for joining me today for this episode. I will see you on Thursday for another episode. I hope you've enjoyed this month of June. We have aired, oh my gosh, 10 episodes already. We've got four left in the pipeline. Um, actually, no, it's not true. 11 episodes with this one, four, three more left in the pipeline. And then we've got all kinds of episodes in July focused on writing that I am so excited about. So this month was all about planning engaging lessons, and July's all about writing. All right, you guys, I will see you on Thursday. Have a fabulous rest of your day, and thanks for listening. Bye, everyone.