Before I carved out time for lesson planning without any pressure or deadlines, I was drowning in the vast sea of an empty plan book.
And there’s nothing I want more than for your life to feel a bit more easy when you finally sit down to finalize the dreaded lesson planning treasure hunt.
Let’s start with the basics, shall we? Here are some of my top lesson planning tips for busy teachers:
Haha, I know….easier said than done. I see you, Sunday night scrambling. We’ve all been there. When you are panicking to complete your lesson plans by Monday morning, your creativity and energy turns into dread.
You soon find yourself caught in a vortex of indecision and chasing rabbit holes all over the internet hoping the next link you click on will finally be the lesson plan idea you are looking for.
Before you know it, you’ve been searching all your time away and either end up picking something that’s just not great or deciding to close your laptop and figure it out later (even if that later is tomorrow morning five minutes before you students arrive).
Or you’ve convinced yourself that you’ll just make something yourself but then fall asleep on the couch with an unfinished lesson that you are in denial about having time and energy to finish. Does this perhaps explain a fraction of why teachers are just so tired?
Instead, work on beefing up your plans when you are refreshed, well rested and not on a time crunch. My best time to do this is with my favorite cup of coffee on a Saturday morning in the summer before my kids wake up. I feel inspired to get creative when I’m on my own terms to plan. But of course, you do you!
Getting ahead of your planning (whether it’s a week ahead or a month ahead) will also give you breathing space to not feel the frantic stress of a deadline looming over you. Batching is an excellent way to find your flow, and conquer your time management. It is by far one of the best ways to practice teacher time management in the classroom.
Lesson plan batching is one of my ultimate teacher time management hacks. However, if someone had even suggested batching during my first year of teaching, I would have thought they needed a dose of teacher time reality. I finally got some planning stress relief when I started doing this my second year teaching before I even knew there was a name for this strategy.
Batching is when you focus on just one subject area for a block of time and plan ahead (for any amount of time you can handle) instead of planning day by day. I like to batch each subject area by units of study. I stay one unit ahead in my planning so I’m not ever scrambling (for the most part!)
I keep all my units in notebooks so I can easily keep track of my pacing guide, notes from previous years and all the materials and plans needed all in one place when I sit down to batch my plans.
Getting ahead can seem overwhelming when you are living the day by day lesson plan life but investing some extra time whenever you can in larger blocks of planning time will help you really think through the unit. This actually saves you time because you are reducing your transition into the lesson planning mindset over and over. You can get really focused and start to feel the tension lifting from your shoulders as you remember that you are ready and confident about what and how you’ll teach for the next chunk of time.
Of course this doesn’t mean that you can’t make tweaks and changes anytime, but the mental space of being ahead will give you the flexibility to prepare meaningful lessons that your students will love. It’s simple tips for teacher time management like batching that can make such a difference in your work/ life balance.
One year my class was obsessed with making google slides projects about any topic they could research. They couldn’t wait to work on their social studies projects when I assigned google slide projects. Talk about how to engage authentically without searching high and low for a teaching magic trick!
There is something about unleashing the choices of font, colors, graphics, etc. that hooks student’s engagement without even having to try. I even make it more enticing because they have to finish typing the content in their google slides student project before selecting all those design elements.
This allowed me to integrate in technology, writing, reading, speaking, and listening standards to my lesson plan success sandwich. Before I knew it, students were working on their google slides at home, on the weekends, on the bus (if they had the wifi bus) and anywhere they could open some slides and start creating. They even wanted to start learning the proper way to type so they could write faster online to create more slides!
I love to take my family on day trips around North Carolina to cultural events. The photos, mementos and stories I bring back to the classroom intrigue my students to hear about. Anytime you reveal something about your life outside of school that connects with what you are teaching, you instantly start to draw your students in.
You can add photos to your slides of real life experiences that relate to the topic or pass around an object that you acquired to give some context to the content.
Sometimes you or your students will have an object or book at home that directly fits with the unit of study. Start by surveying family members to see what connections they have with guest instructor experts willing to contribute to the topics you plan to teach for the year.
By opening the door for opportunities for sharing from families, you might find that some families can bring in something to show and share even if they aren’t able to come in person to talk about it. Be sure to get enough information about the object ahead of the share and use it as an opportunity to involve the student in speaking as a guest expert for the classroom.
Or if someone else has an experience or information to share about your topic, asking an expert guest speaker for class is always a student favorite. Especially if this is someone’s family member, or someone they know coming in to share.
Zooms can be good options for busy speakers that may not have the time to arrive in your classroom in person. Sometimes authors, government officials, or other speakers that are geographically far away will consider a short zoom with your class when you ask.
Not only do your students love to know what interests you, but they love to know about your learning and experiences outside the four walls of your classroom cave! They also love to hear about what other experts know about what they are studying. Your student’s enthusiasm will grow with any of these strategies! Best of all, they will be authentically engaged.
Do you have a winning lesson planning routine? If you need some inspiration to get started, check out this FREEBIE and let me know if any of these tips help make your planning a smoother ride this year!
