Back to School: Five Ways to Improve Teacher Lesson Prep Time
It’s Back to School time! And you know what that means: planning. Lots and lots of planning. Lesson prep and grading are the two most time-consuming parts of a teacher’s job. How can you free up more time in the day so you can focus more on the actual teaching and not bring work home with you? Here are five ways to free up more time.
5. Grade During Prep Time
Despite the fact that it is called “Prep Time”, your one or two (if you’re lucky!) alloted periods to prepare lessons are not the best time to plan lessons. You will have students coming in and out, you may not be able to print what you need for the class coming up in thirty minutes, and you won’t have enough time to dedicate to an uninterrupted plan. But you know what is perfect for that time? Grading. Especially if you teach English, those essays are time-consuming to mark. Use this time in which you can grade a paper, be interrupted by a student’s question, and go back to grading in small chunks (just like you can watch several YouTube Shorts with interruptions, but can’t do so with a full Netflix Documentary). I’m a firm believer in not taking work home with you, which means no grading at home. Get your grading down during prep so you can provide more immediate feedback to students.
4. Don’t Work After Contract Hours
Burn out kills good teachers. If you aren’t paid to work-from-home, don’t work at home. Many teachers will claim that if they don’t grade or plan at home, they won’t get their job finished. My philosophy is that if a school is not giving you enough time in a day to finish your job, that is an admin problem, not a teacher problem. But let’s say you really feel like you are drowning in work, but adhere to rule four. How do you get everything done in time so you can adhere to rule 4?
3. Use Online Resources
There’s no need to re-invent the wheel! If there’s a worksheet available online that covers the material you want to cover, use it! If if it only covers 90% of what you want to teach, you can easily add that extra 10% by winging it in the classroom without planning. There are tons of resources online for free! Of course, you get what you pay for, so free doesn’t always mean best. If you can find an entire unit for $10, and that saves you an entire month of prep time, it’s worth it.
Just do the math: assume only one hour a day of prep time means five hours a week you’d be planning. With four weeks per month and five days a week, that’s 20 hours of time you would be planning that you’ve now freed up to grade so you don’t have to take work home with you to take your free time back. That means you are only spending 0.50 cents per hour on that resource, where-as if you plan and grade at home, you are LOSING $34 EACH HOUR YOU WORK which you could using to relax (assuming a $50k annual salary and 183 work days per contract year). You are being paid a teacher salary, not a curriculum developer salary, so you don’t need to develop your own curriculum! There are Entire Year English Curriculum’s available that come out to less than $1 per day! If you are a new AP teacher, you can buy an entire year’s lessons with accompanying tests, worksheets, and reading materials for both AP Language & Composition and for AP Psychology! Don’t feel like you need to make these materials yourself to be a good teacher. Your skills come from teaching the materials and making them understandable for a student, not in graphic design. Lean into your skill and take back your time by using resources others have made so you can get back to teaching.
2. Collaborate
Does another teacher have materials on a unit you need? Ask for help! Is a student struggling with spelling on their essays? Bring it up to the Social Studies teacher so they can mark it on their papers, too. Because my Master’s Thesis was a study on Plagiarism and AI-detection in education, my co-workers come to me if they suspect a student has plagiarized using Chat GPT to look over papers in Social Studies and Biology. (A skill you can learn in just a few hours with an asynchronous Professional Development course proven to improve detection by 67% without the risk of false-positives like software-based detection); likewise, I come to them when I need assistence in an area where I may feel weaker. Don’t treat your classroom as an island. You are part of a team. Ask for help from your co-workers when needed.
1. Clasroom Management: Less Discipline
Don’t sweat the small stuff. My worst year as a teacher was one in which I decided I would turn a misbehaved class around and really get everyone to follow all of the rules–all of the time. They hated me, and I hated them.
Does a school allow you to hand out detentions (but with the expectation that you will have to supervise them during lunch in your classroom)? Do not give out detentions!
Does writing a student up require hours of documentation? Only mark the serious issues. Sometimes a student is watching a Youtube video in class when they should be working. I don’t write up every single instance in ManageBac; instead, I re-direct the student gently, and only write documentation if the problem persists at the end of the week. Save write-ups for anything less than physical or verbal assault for an end-of the week note home. Create a document with a few pre-written elements to copy-and-paste into a note–very time-saving when needing to write the same comments for a classroom of thirty.
Look at this famous movie scene:
Remember: Even Dead Poet’s Society didn’t get 100% engagement! Did you notice that half of the class remained seated? No matter what you do, some kids won’t care. In a student-centered learning model: if a student doesn’t want to learn, they won’t! Just be engaging for the ones who are ready, and be ready for the others when they are.
Your job is to teach, not discipline. That’s admins’ job. Save detention duty for them!
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