Episode 424: How to Cut Your Planning Time in Half Without Cutting Corners

In today's Teaching Middle School ELA podcast episode. I walked through four concrete ways to cut your lesson planning time in half without cutting corners. First, I talked about building a truly distraction-free planning block so you can get back into deep focus and actually finish. Then I used Parkinson’s law to your advantage by setting a timer you honor for planning and grading, including a realistic approach to essay feedback that prioritizes targeted comments over marking every mistake. I also tackled decision fatigue by choosing one trusted go-to source for lessons and curriculum so you stop re-shopping for materials every week.

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Transcript

Welcome And Mission

SPEAKER_00 0:00

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.

Portal Registration And June Planning Series

SPEAKER_00 1:11

Well, hello teachers, and welcome back to another episode of the Teaching Middle School ELA podcast. I hope that you have been enjoying this June experience, all focused on planning and our extra mindset episodes. So much good stuff. I mean, I was talking to Anna, who is our marketing assistant today and our head of customer support, and we were like, it's just wild right now, all the stuff we've got going on. And it's kind of fun. So I want to also, before I dive into today's episode, let you know that the portal, our membership, the EB Teachers ELA portal, is open for new members to register until tomorrow night at 9 p.m. California time. So Friday, July, June, June 26th. My brain's working, I promise. Friday, June 26th at 9 p.m. California time is when registration closes. We have a whole welcome call and all of this stuff to get our new teachers set up for success in the membership. So if you have

Planning Versus Searching For Lessons

SPEAKER_00 2:08

been sitting on the fence, now is the time to join. Go to ebteacher.com forward slash portal. All right, we're gonna talk about how to cut your planning time in half without cutting corners. So I'm gonna start by doing a little math with you today. I want you to think about the last time that you sat down to plan a unit or to find a lesson or to prepare for the next day. And I want you to think about like how long it took. Okay, so you have a number in your head. Well, now here's the real question: how much of that time were you actually planning and how much of it were you actually searching? Because in my experience, what we can call sometimes three hours of planning on Sunday is often closer to like 30 minutes of actual planning and two and a half hours of scrolling, distraction, Pinterest, Facebook group, Google, Gemini, TPT, like Instagram, Doom scrolling. Oh my gosh, you get what I'm saying. And by the time you finally are like, okay, this is the thing I'm gonna do, you've spent more time not actually planning and searching for a lesson than you will even spend teaching it. So it's not necessarily a time management problem per se. It might be for some of us. Think of it more like a systems problem. And today, what I want to do is I want to give you four very practical fixes that are gonna change how you spend your time outside of the classroom so that this coming school year you can actually leave when the bell rings instead of staying until the custodian kicks you out. So these are simple, they are actionable, they are things that I use in my own classroom. It's exactly what we teach our EB teachers to do inside of our membership. It's what my staff does, it's how we even function as a staff a lot of the times in what we do here at EB. And these are things that you can start implementing today if you're gonna start planning now, this summer. All right, so let's go ahead and dive into the four hacks.

Hack One Build A Focus Zone

SPEAKER_00 4:04

So the first hack, and this might sound obvious, and some of these are gonna sound obvious, but they're good reminders that we just kind of forget sometimes as life gets crazy. So, hack number one is that you really need to create a distraction-free zone. And I know that sounds almost like insultingly simple, but I want you to think about honestly where are you planning and grading? Is it at your desk after school as students are wondering in or colleagues are wondering in? Is it on the couch with Netflix on? Is it during your prep period while you're doing all kinds of other things at the same time? And so it's like every interruption or everything that's taking your mind away from what your task at hand is, is gonna cost you more time than the interruption itself. So there's a ton of research on cognitive switching, right? What we call just moving back and forth between tasks. And it suggests that it takes, this is crazy, that it takes an average of 23 minutes to fully gain focus after a distraction. So that quick like text that you answered in 30 seconds might have just cost you half an hour of productive work. And I know that sounds crazy, but like if you think about that, I know it happens to me all the time. I'll be like, okay, I'm just gonna do this one thing, and then I'll get back to what I was working on. And that one thing turns into about 10 things, and then I forgot what I was working on in the first place. So you really need to ask yourself, what would it look like to create one truly distraction-free block of time? Close the door, put up a sign, put your phone on do not disturb, have snacks with you, have a drink with you, go to the bathroom beforehand, and give yourself a defined window of time, 45 minutes, an hour, whatever you want to choose, where planning is the only thing that's happening. And you will be amazed at how much you can get done when your brain is fully focused on the task at hand. So, as simple as it sounds, you want to create a distraction-free zone, period.

Hack Two Timers And Faster Grading

SPEAKER_00 6:16

All right, hack number two. This is huge. You want to set a timer and you want to honor it. This works so well for me because I work very well under pressure. If there's no pressure, like breathing down my neck, I'm kind of like, meh, I'll do it later. And then when the pressure comes and I'm super stressed out, then I perform well. So it's almost like for me, this concept of setting a timer creates the illusion of pressure. It also follows Parkinson's law. It's really Parkinson's law in action. And Parkinson's law, if you haven't heard of it, states that work expands to fill the time that you give it. So if you give yourself three hours to plan two weeks of lessons, it's gonna take you three hours. But if you give yourself 45 minutes, you're gonna plan those two weeks of lessons in those 45 minutes. So I want you to pick a specific amount of time for a specific task and then set a timer and commit to finishing within that time period. And so it forces you to be highly efficient and highly focused. So when you know you only have 45 minutes, you're gonna stop second guessing, you're gonna stop tweaking, making decisions here and there, you're just gonna start to move forward. And at least for me, and I don't know that this is a good thing, but it puts a little like what like adrenaline into my body. And I'm like, okay, I gotta go. Start the timer, go. And it's like something shifts in my brain where I'm just like, okay, I gotta get it done. I only have 45 minutes, that's it. And I want to speak directly to grading here because this is where so many teachers lose their entire evenings. And I was that teacher in the first couple of years in the classroom, is like, you don't need to circle every single misspelled word. You do not need to write a paragraph of feedback on every single paper. Extensive written feedback on every single error is often less effective than like targeted specific feedback on one or two things that a student could work on. And so this is really helpful when we're talking about grading within Parkinson's law, is if we set a timer for five minutes per essay and we use a rubric and specific comments, like literally, you're gonna set a timer per essay, five minutes grade, five minutes grade, five minutes grade. And you could, in theory, grade six essays in 30 minutes. And that's a heck of a lot faster than I know some of us are doing. So it's really, really important to think about where you can shave time off in order to also still be effective, but in order to efficiently plan and give you time back outside of the classroom. Because really, at the end of the day, like we need to worry about the harmony of our lives so that we are happy as teachers and we're happy in our jobs and we want to keep showing up and we want to keep coming. Okay.

Hack Three One Trusted Lesson Source

SPEAKER_00 9:05

All right, hack number three is to find your one go-to place for lessons. This is a hack that saves you not just minutes, but entire afternoons, multiple funds, right? All kinds of things. The teachers pay teachers spiral or the Pinterest rabbit hole or the Claude or Chat GPT or Gemini search that leads to a blog post that links to a resource that takes you back to Teachers Pay Teachers or whatever it might be, you know exactly what I'm talking about. I literally was just having a conversation with my friend's mom the other day about this, and she's like probably in her 60s. And here's what I want you to consider. And this is what we do at EB, and like you can decide to be a member or not. And if you are a member, I'm gonna invite you to just really think about if you had one trusted source, right? If you just used EB and it was a place where you knew that you were gonna have quality, consistent content, everything's aligned to what you actually teach, and like that's the place that you went every single time, the first time, that's gonna save you so much decision fatigue. So, like, think about it this way imagine you need a new sweater, and you could walk into a giant department store with every brand imaginable. This is how I feel when I shop on Nordstrom. It's like too much stuff. And you spend hours at the racks, you try things on, you feel overwhelmed, you might not even get what you actually want. Or you could walk straight into the store, the one in downtown where I live, and I know that I love 99% of what they have. And I'm gonna find my sweater in 15 minutes because there are like three to choose from, and I'm gonna go home and I'm gonna be happy. So it's the same outcome, it's a fraction of the time because there's zero decision fatigue. So whether that trusted source is us, right, or a vetted community or something else entirely, once you find it, commit to it and stop searching elsewhere, right? You're doing yourself a favor by just trusting the store that carries the clothes that you like, right? I love my store in town. Kismet is what it's called. All right, hack number four.

Hack Four Use AI For Drafts

SPEAKER_00 11:22

Last but not least, let AI handle some of the grant work for you. Like it's happening. GPT is happening, Claude is happening, Gemini. It's all, it's all happening, right? And there are very specific ones for education as well. But Claude is great. Claude is fantastic in helping you do some of this heavy lifting. So, this is one of the things that's really genuinely changed the game for basically every industry, right? One of my friends is interviewing for all of these jobs in e-commerce at a very high level. And one of the main things that they're asking him about in the interview process is about AI. How do you plan to use AI as a part of your daily work and as a part of your flow with your team? Like it is so integral to what we're doing now. So, like, we gotta just embrace it. It's happening. And if you're not using it yet, like start today. So I want you to think about all of the questions that you in the past have generated for every novel, every short story, every poem, every article, discussion questions, Socratic seminar questions, quiz questions, essential questions. All of that takes a lot of time. And it's the kind of tasks that it's incredibly easy to get stuck in because you want the questions to be good, right? I remember back in the day, I used to use Schmoop in like 18 years ago when I first started teaching. And I would use Schmoop and I would do Google, and it would take me like 30 minutes to find like two or three good questions that I wanted to use for my Socratic seminar. And then I'd have to come up with my own. It was just a whole thing, right? Well, Claude can create a very strong first draft for you in like five seconds. And you can type in the title of the text, the grade level, what it is that you're looking for, even Lexile levels, like it gives you a full set of questions immediately. And if you don't love it, you can adjust it, right? You can adjust to different levels of complexity, you can add your own flair to it, you can even tell the AI bot to do that for you. But it gives you a very strong starting point in a matter of seconds, as opposed to 30 minutes, 60 minutes, hours, right? And editing is always gonna be faster than starting from scratch. So I do not, I think we've moved away from this in the last year, I hope, but I don't want you to consider AI as cheating. I want you to consider it a tool, the same way that a calculator is a tool, the same way that a rubric or a template is a tool. It handles like the mechanical parts so your brain can focus on the parts that actually require you. It is really important though, I will say, that you are still using your brain, right? We don't want our brains to atrophy because we're having AI do all of the work for us, right? That's why I write in some capacity every single day, just from my own brain, from my own mind, and that I continue reading texts from, you know, 50 years ago, 100 years ago, so that my brain doesn't atrophy, right? I still want to make sure that it stays sharp. But I just think it's such an incredible resource that we can be harnessing to make our lives a heck of a lot easier as teachers.

Your One Hack Challenge And Wrap

SPEAKER_00 14:32

All right, so the question I want to leave you with today is what kind of teacher do you want to be this coming school year? Not just in your classroom, but in your life, right? The teacher who leaves when the bell rings, who doesn't spend Sunday buried in lost and planning, who grades efficiently and goes to dinner with your friends, who shows up Monday rested and ready because you built systems that actually protect your time. That teacher is not a fantasy. That teacher is a choice. She is a teacher of a series of small, consistent decisions, just like the four that we talked about today. And those small, consistent decisions add up to a completely different experience of this profession. So here's your challenge before we close. I want you to pick one of those four hacks, just one, and I want you to commit to it this week while you lesson plan. So create a distraction-free zone, set a timer on your next planning session, identify your one to go-to lesson source, a K E B Academics, open Chat GPT or Claude or AI or whatever it is that you're doing, and try it on one text that you're going to be teaching next year. And that is how change actually happens. It's not in like one massive thing, although it can be, but a lot of the times it's in one small decision that we make and that we continue to keep making over and over and over again. All right, and if you want support in doing all of this, I would invite you to just join our membership. It's the best. evteacher.com forward slash portal. All right, you guys, thank you so much for joining me today. And that's a wrap really on our June episodes focused on planning. We're going to shift now to focusing on writing. Let me double check that what I'm saying to you is true. It is that it is because next Tuesday we're gonna be talking about writing and we're gonna be focusing the month of July all on writing. We have a writing workshop coming up. I'm getting all the details and information for that built out so that you guys can register for that here soon. So hopefully you've enjoyed your time together with us in the month of June. Cannot believe that it's almost over and we are transitioning into our next fabulous month of the summer, all about writing. All right, you guys, now go enjoy your summer. Take a little break, and I'll see you in the next episode. Have a good one, everyone.