As dedicated educators, we pour our hearts into lesson planning! We spend hours crafting engaging lessons to provide quality education for our students. However, it’s no secret that the demands of lesson planning, activity selection, and paperwork can consume an exorbitant amount of our time, leaving little for cherished moments with family and friends. The solution lies in an effective time management strategy: batching your lesson planning. By dedicating focused chunks of time to plan for an extended period, you can free up more of your valuable time outside of school. In this blog post, we’ll explore this time-saving approach and offer practical tips to help you get started.
In its simplest form, batching means grouping similar tasks together. This saves time and reduces errors by eliminating the need to switch between different activities constantly. Pioneered by software developers, marketers, and manufacturers, this technique can also be applied to lesson planning and preparation. Instead of planning day-by-day, teachers can plan and prepare their lessons in batches.
Batch lesson planning involves dedicating specific blocks of time to plan for a more extended period, be it a month, quarter, or even a semester. It works on the power or momentum. Since you’ll be working on similar tasks, the repetition of the task makes it go faster and faster. This strategy allows for increased efficiency, improved focus, fewer errors, and ultimately, more time for yourself and your loved ones.
1. Set the Stage for Successful Batching
Design or Choose Flexible Lesson Planning Template:
Instead of lesson planning for each day in detail, create a flexible framework for your plan book that will allow you to outline the overarching themes, main activities, and assessments for the period (you’ll add details later). This provides a solid structure without sacrificing adaptability. Digital lesson planning tools and templates can help you organize your materials efficiently. Plus they make it oh-so-easy to cut and paste when you need to move lessons or activities from one day to another.
Dedicate Designated Batching Time:
Allocate a specific block of time for batching. If you’re going to plan for a whole month, you might choose one day to stay late after school, order Uber Eats for dinner (because you deserve a reward for your hard work), and knock out your lesson planning, knowing that your spending time on this one night, to free yourself up for the other 29 days this month!
Limit Distractions:
Find a quiet, focused space, and turn off notifications to maintain concentration. Minimizing interruptions during batching sessions is crucial. Let everyone in your circle know that this block of time is a do-not-disturb-unless-it’s-an-emergency time period. Remind them that giving you this uninterrupted time now for lesson planning means you’ll be able to give them your undivided attention for the rest of the month
2. Get Into Lesson Planning
Set Clear Objectives:
Before you dive in, establish clear learning objectives for the period you’re planning. If you are required to follow a curriculum calendar for your school or district, you’ll want to keep those objectives in mind. What are the key concepts and skills you want to cover? This will serve as your roadmap. This is also a good time to go through your plan book and mark the days there will be no school, important dates like parent-teacher conferences or report cards, as well as any special events like field trips.
Gather Lesson Planning Resources:
Collect all necessary materials, textbook teacher’s guides, worksheets, and online resources before your batching session. Having everything at your fingertips minimizes interruptions and keeps you in the flow. It can also be helpful to create a bank of resources that you can use throughout the entire school year.
For example, these year-long math curriculums save me tons of time. The first year I used them, I spent a little extra time laminating and filing away the reusable games and peer practice cards, so now all I have to do is copy and paste the activities into my lesson plans and then hit print to make the copies I need for student work.
To streamline my grammar lessons I use these year-long language reviews. There is one for each day of the school year. I let the students spend a little time working on each review independently, then we go over it together as a class. This gives me the opportunity to teach and model all the necessary grammar and language skills for the year. You can try these out for yourself with these freebies.
To make batching reading lessons a breeze, I like to utilize novel studies. It usually takes us about a month to read a book and flexible novel studies like this one allow me to cover any reading skill that happens to be on the curriculum calendar during the month.
Draft Your Plans:
Here’s where the magic happens! Start with the subject area that you spend the most of your time teaching and lay out all that needs to be taught for the next month. We will start with the broadest part of lesson planning and work our way down to the most granular parts.
Write the main concept or stand for each week across all the days that you have set aside to teach that concept. In the example below, I am spending the week of January 15th on telling time and elapsed time. Go through all the weeks of the month and assign the overarching standard.
Now that you have big idea for each week determined, break the concepts down into teachable chunks and assign one main idea to each day. Do this for all the days of the month.
Next up, use your resources to help you outline your plans and determine the material you’ll need for each day. While you are looking at individual days and the resources you have available, go ahead and start your “to be copied”. My strategy is to put a small sticky note on each page that needs to be copied with the number of copies needed and the day those copies are needed in your plans (i.e. Th 1/25) . If it’s a digital file, go ahead and press print! You should still make a sticky note for each digital file you print, but you’ll need to write the name of the page on the note (you’ll see why in the next step).
If being in the classroom over the past 20 years has taught me anything, it’s that PLANS CHANGE, so be sure to build in a couple of catch-up days during each month.
Congratulations! You now have a month’s worth of lesson plans ready to go!
Prep Work and Copies:
To maximize the power of batching even further, grab that pile of papers to be copied along with the loose sticky notes for your digital files and head to the workroom. You’ll probably find a copier full of all the digital files that you’ve already printed waiting for you on the copier. Run all your paper originals through the copier. While you are waiting on those, you can sort the digital files and add the matching sticky note. Do the same for the paper copies once those are finished.
Head back to your room and stash your copies until you need them using whatever organizational strategy works for you. Personally, I like to use 5 good-sized tubs, one designated for each day of the week. Then I would just put all the Monday material in the Monday bucket, and so on. That made it easy to adjust when plans changed!
3. Reflect and Adjust
Periodically review and adjust your plans as needed. This ensures that your lessons remain relevant and effective. Once you get the hang of batching your plans, you’ll find yourself batching out 6-weeks at a time or even a whole quarter.
Batching lesson planning is a transformative strategy that empowers upper elementary teachers to reclaim their time and strike a balance between work and personal life. By streamlining your planning process you can unlock more opportunities for joy and connection outside of the classroom. Implementing this approach may take some initial adjustment, but the long-term benefits are well worth the effort. Embrace the power of batching, and watch as your productivity soars and your well-being flourishes.