As teachers, our time is often sucked up by ‘non-teaching’ tasks. In this blog series I’ll cover some effective ways to ‘hack’ your lesson planning to help you be more efficient a manage your time for other ‘teaching’ tasks.
Tip #1: Use a long-range planner
Using a long-range planner is a simple but effective way to help your planning be more efficient and help you guide your daily and weekly planning. You can set up a long-range planner using a variety of tools including Google sheets or Excel. Typically you’re going to follow a somewhat standard routine in your lessons so, setting up your long-range planner to reflect that routine will help streamline the planning process.
I typically spend the first part of my year before school starts planning out my rough draft of my use a long-range planner. I have it broken down into 4 marking periods that are 9 weeks each. As you can see in the example on below, I have it set up by week and then by day so that I can go back and adjust any daily planned activity easily. I find this to be an especially effective tool when it comes to your daily planning. You can also track your classes progress and monitor what topics or skills they are mastering within a long-range planner document.
This long-range planner document (pictured above) features a tab for each grading period. The far-left column is frozen and the whole sheet scrolls to easily see planned activities and lesson from week to week. This template is available in an Excel format as well as a Google Sheets format.
For those of you that are less tech savvy there are a lot of different ways to use quote low tech unquote solutions. This could be finding a paper planner that works for you. One that is highly recommended is the Blue Sky Planners available on Amazon (affiliate). You can also get an editable long-range planner template on The Busy Band Director teachers pay teachers store. It looks exactly like the one pictured above but the fields are empty for you to enter in your own information .
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