003 | How Teachers can Capture Mistakes in Lesson Planning in Real Time

Are you tired of repeating the same mistakes in your lessons year after year? Do you find yourself constantly promising to fix that confusing worksheet or update that outdated quiz, only to forget when the time comes? As teachers, we often struggle with the cycle of identifying issues in our lessons but failing to address them effectively before we forget. It's time to break this pattern and reclaim valuable time and energy.

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Transcript

Hi teacher friends. Welcome to the Productivity for Teachers podcast. The show where I teach educators how to organize materials, curate activities, and save time by creating simple personalized systems. If you are looking for quick action steps you can take to gain back valuable time, you are in the right place. I am your host, Dr. Sarah. I am a teacher, ed tech coach, and productivity enthusiast. I understand just how valuable your time is and how short those planning periods are. Join me as we talk about strategies you can implement today to free up time so you can focus on what matters. Hi teacher friends. Dr. Sarah here. I hope you're having a great week so far as I record this episode. It is February in Ohio, which means that even my nicest students are going to be mean and the others, who used to be super engaged are going to stop participating altogether. And some students will suddenly decide that homework is optional and others will forget how to study. It's the joy of February, right? And so all we can do is hang in together until the next three day weekend, which here in the US would be President's Day weekend. And then after that it's a long haul till spring break. So hang tight friends. We've got this February, it's the best. So today to help us get through February, let's talk about one of my favorite methods for saving time. And that is tracking how things are going in your lesson in real time. And to be honest, I feel a little silly devoting an entire episode to this concept because it's not rocket science. But I think few of us do this effectively or even at all. And it means that we have these vicious cycles that just keep repeating year after year and it wastes a lot of time and it's super frustrating. So what do I mean exactly by tracking? Let's talk about a couple of scenarios and see if those sound familiar to you. So let's say you have this amazing worksheet, but the directions on it are just not clear. And every time you use it, you remind yourself, you tell yourself, you promise yourself you're going to change those directions so that your students aren't confused. And then at the end of the day you forget, and then you forget at the end of the week to fix it. And then next year rolls around, if you're a high school teacher and you want to use that same worksheet again and you forget that you need to fix it and you have the same issue over and over again. I've been there. I'm sure this sounds familiar to some of you, or maybe it's an assignment in your textbook, website or another website that you use that looks great at first glance, but it's just not quite aligned with how you teach the concept or how the concept is presented in your textbook. And it looks great, but it just doesn't work, it's confusing for the students. And you tell yourself, I am never going to assign this thing again, but then you forget and the next year rolls around and you assign it again and get frustrated that you didn't remember and it just keeps going on like that. I've also done this. I am speaking from personal experience with all these scenarios. Or maybe it's a concept that you think is easy or relatively easy to understand and so you only plan for maybe 20 or 30 minutes to teach it and you're wrong. And it just takes the students maybe two classes to really understand and be able to replicate what you've taught them or do it correctly. And you just keep making that same mistake year after year. You don't fix your unit plan or however you map out your units. And every year you get behind because you haven't planned for this to take as long as it does in reality. And you get frustrated and you tell yourself you're going to fix it. And then you forget. I've also been there. Or maybe it's just as simple as a quiz has a typo in it and you just keep forgetting to fix it. And year after year your students have this quiz with a typo in it. Or on the flip side, maybe it's an activity that you designed, you created, it went really, really well and you just want to remind yourself, hey, this thing went really well. It's awesome. I want to do this again. Don't forget about it, future self. And you just want to make a note of that. So all of these things are opportunities for us to track things in real time and then fix the issue or have a note to remind ourselves of something next year when that same topic rolls around again. So when I'm talking about tracking in real time, it's actually a two part process. The first one is very simple and it involves paper of all things. Here I am an ed tech coach and all up in the technology business, but this one you have to revert to old paper. Old fashioned paper, I think anyway, because most of the time when we are teaching, our laptops are being mirrored or extended to a big screen in the classroom, whether that's a smart board or a tv. And we can take notes electronically when things happen. But it would involve disconnecting from that sharp board or freezing the sharp board and then taking a note and things like that. And all of those things are just barriers to you being able to jot things down in real time to keep track of an issue. Because we don't want to interrupt the lesson to track something, and we're not going to. If we're honest with ourselves, it's not going to happen. And so if you have paper in front of of you, even if it's just a simple table that you made that has you can write today's date and the issue and just jot it down in real time, that does not interrupt your lesson nearly as much as it would to do all the other things we just talked about. You just jot it down real quick in real time. And then that's step one. So some of us travel to different classrooms or even different buildings. So this would involve having some kind of binder or something that you carry with you where you can jot things down quickly. If you do have your own classroom, then I would just have this printed out and just have it on your desk at all times with a pen handy. So that's step one. Step two, then, is at the end of the week, you have to set time aside to do some kind of review or time to capture those notes that you took in real time into your system. And I do this as part of my weekly review that I do on every Friday or sometimes Saturday morning. We'll talk about my weekly review process in another episode so that you can kind of tweak it to your own needs. But even if you don't do a weekly review, at the very least, you have to somehow capture these handwritten notes into your system, into your unit plan, or into wherever you keep track of what you're going to teach from year to year. So it's just as simple as typing it into your system at the end of the week. And then if it's something that you can fix that needs to be fixed, like the worksheet directions or the typo in the quiz, go ahead and do that now. So go ahead and fix that worksheet, save it, re, upload it to wherever it needs to be uploaded to delete the old one, and then in your unit plan, just go ahead and write what the issue was and that you fixed it and that you've saved a new version. That way you know you've already taken care of it and you've tracked that process. If it is not something that you physically need to fix, but it is something that you need to remember for next year, like, hey, this thing took two classes to teach instead of 20 minutes. Then go ahead and adjust your unit plan, go ahead and fix that part of what was wrong and again, have that note in there. This takes longer to teach. I adjusted the lesson plan for it to take two classes, whatever it is, and then that way, you know, oh yeah, I've already fixed that issue. I don't need to worry about it anymore. So that two step process just to recap is to have paper handy with you where you're teaching with a pen at the ready so you can jot things down quickly and then at the end of the week importing that into your lesson planning system and go ahead and taking care of the issue and making note of that that you've already fixed it and your future self will thank you big time. So you might be thinking to yourself right now, oh gosh, this is going to take time. Who has time at the end of the week to review stuff and fix stuff? And the reality is you just have to make the time to do it. I've been doing that weekly review which includes this process for a couple years. And yes, it takes time at the end of the week to do it, but it saves me so much time in the future and so much frustration and it frees up all those things that are floating around in my head that I know I need to do. I've tracked them, I've captured them on paper, they're no longer floating around in my head. And it frees me up to think about other things that are more important and focus on what matters. So yes, it does take time, but it does save you even more time in the future. So the action step for this week is really kind of have to do both. I would hate for you to just capture it on paper and then that paper gets lost. So I'm gonna say this week we have two action steps, friends, if you're willing. The first one would be create some kind of quick table that you can use to capture things on paper and then commit to a few minutes at the end of the week to fix those things that need to be fixed and adjust the other things that need to be adjusted. Or just as simple as having that note in there that, hey, this activity was awesome and don't forget about it. So that's it for this week, teacher friends. I hope this was helpful and let me know if you have any questions. Thanks for listening, teacher friends. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe or follow the show so you don't miss a thing. Have a great week and I hope you will consider implementing one thing you heard today. Small steps have a big impact over time. Happy, productive teaching. See you next week.