The 3 Steps to Take This School Year If You’re Always Saying “I Wish I Had More Time”

Hey, there and welcome back. I’m your host, Sara Marye, and I am so excited about today’s episode. If you are new to the podcast, welcome. And if you are a longtime listener, thank you so much for your support, you really have no idea how much it means to me that you tune in every single week. I sincerely so appreciate you. And I just love connecting with you on a weekly basis.

And today we are going to talk about something that I I feel like it’s an ongoing life struggle. And that is this idea of like time management. Now, in full disclosure, I’ve gotten a whole lot better with how I use my time. And I’ve got some tips I’m going to share with you today. But at the end of the day, I always find myself saying I wish I had more time like that is I feel like the story of my life.

And I remember I said that phrase a million times when I was teaching in the classroom. I wish I had more time for our lessons. I wish I had more time for planning. I wish I had more time for prep work. I wish I had more time just to have fun with my kids, whatever it was, I always wish I had more time I wish I had more time to go to the bathroom. I mean, I feel like teachers feel crunched for time in the classroom.

And I said that phrase just as often when I was working as an assistant principal, again, I never felt like I had enough time. And while at first when I first left working in a school to work on my own business at home, I was like, You know what, finally, I’m going to have enough time and I’m going to stop sort of like this feeling of never feeling like I had enough time. And I thought that I would just sort of like constantly be at peace and you know, have like good workflows and everything.

But I quickly realized that even when I am 100% in control of my schedule, I find myself wishing that I had more time. And I’m sure you can relate to that. I feel like when I ask teachers just sort of like, you know, what are they struggling with? What do they need help with? Whether it is time, time management, planning, we just wish we had more time.

And while I cannot give you more hours in the day, I really so wish I could, that would be like the most amazing magic power. What I can give you, though, are three tips that are going to help you save time this upcoming school year.

And these are things that I figured out to do when I was in the classroom. These are things that I utilized when I was an assistant principal. And these are things that I do on a regular basis in my business, and they are things that I do and then I stopped doing them. And I’m like, wait a minute, why did I stop doing them?

Because when I put these three things into place, I have more time. And not only do I have more time, I have a lot more mental clarity and sort of just this idea of like that white space in your brain, right, because like, at the end of the day, we all just have 24 hours a day. And I know that I don’t want to spend the bulk of those hours working. And I’m sure you don’t want to spend the bulk of those hours working or even thinking about work or even thinking about all of the things that we didn’t get done with work.

And so these three tips are going to help you figure out how you can use your time in a really effective way. But also, when you implement these three tips, it is going to free up your brain space. So hopefully you don’t have to think as much about work, especially the planning side of teaching. So let’s go ahead and jump right in.

Okay, so the first tip is for you to automate and systematize your teaching. And maybe you’re thinking okay, what does that look like? And so when you automate your teaching, what this really means is that you are going to create a system for how you will teach your reading lessons, or really, you can create a system for all parts of your reading block, and your entire instructional day.

And a system is simply a process. It’s a routine. It’s a set of steps that you can rinse and repeat over and over again. It is predictable it is it’s a system. And if you think about it, your instructional day is a series of time blocks. And there’s this idea of like decision fatigue, right? I’m sure you felt it because I don’t know if like at the end of the day you’re like I don’t even know what to have for dinner or what to watch on TV.

Sometimes making the smallest decisions can feel really over whelming simply because you’ve had to make so many decisions all throughout the day. But I feel like I read a study somewhere that talks about just like the number of decisions in real time that teachers have to make. It’s insane. It’s crazy.

So rather than you deciding how to use your time blocks on a daily basis, or even a weekly basis, and then constantly having to think about and change, okay, how am I going to teach this lesson? What am I going to do? How are we going to set up this time? You know, how am I going to break apart this lesson?

You are simply going to make a decision ahead of time on what the best use of each time block is, you are going to create a system a routine a process, a set of steps for teaching, that you can use for the entire year. And you’re thinking I do that, that’s my schedule. That’s my lesson plan.

But what you want to do is you want to take your schedule, and you want to even maybe take your lesson plan and you want to really break it down and almost like come up with a set of micro steps like you really want to have this system be really clear, because the clearer and more specific your system is also the simple it is. We’re not talking like a complex system here. But the more specific your system is, the easier it’s going to be for you to automate.

And I’m going to share an example of what a system you know of how your your teaching could be automated here in a minute.

But when you create the system, ultimately what is going to happen is you are going to be removing the daily decision of you having to decide how am I going to teach this lesson? Or what materials do I need? Or how am I going to engage my students? Because your system that you’ve intentionally created, even before the school year begins, is already going to have a plan that answers those questions for you. So you are going to basically be relieving yourself of any sort of decision fatigue.

So let me share an example of what one system could look like. And the reality of it is throughout your day, and even throughout your reading block, you’re going to have to have multiple systems, for the various parts. You’re gonna have to have a system for your whole group lessons, you’re gonna have to have a system for Word Study. You know, if you think about it, like your reading centers, that really is a system for how you set up and structure your small group lessons, but you’re gonna have to have multiple systems.

So let me share an example of how you could really automate and systematize your whole group lessons. And this idea of really systematizing your teaching is one of the things that we really tried to do for the teachers inside the Stellar Teacher Reading membership. We want to create, you know, systems and structures and processes for the various parts of your reading block.

And when you do this, and you know, the reason why that we do this within the membership is it makes it easier for teachers to plan because they know exactly how long each lesson is going to take, they know exactly, you know what each materials they need to find and use. It makes it easier to teach when you’re following a system because you follow the same process, you can predict how long your lessons are going to take, you can come up with a system for how you communicate your content.

So you’re not going to worry if you’re being clear or concise, because your system helps you do that. And having a system really helps your students because they are able to anticipate and predict where you are going in your lessons.

So one of the systems that we have for our whole group reading lessons really is kind of centered around this idea of we have created a set of teaching slides, that’s a big part of the system that teachers can display. And really each slide is a part of the system and it walks teachers through basically their lesson. And so for the whole group lessons, teachers get a lesson plan, they get a set of teaching slides, and then they get you know, graphic organizer or student response page.

But the slides really shows teachers the system for their whole group lesson. And not that this is revolutionary in any sort of way. But they’re going to start with an intro. And they’re going to connect the lesson to either some prior learning or share an analogy that connects to the lesson and they’re going to introduce the objective.

Then they’re going to teach the objective. And for each sort of portion of this, we call it a teaching slide. But there is a teaching slide that really has all of the information related to the objective. So if there is a definition of a term, if there are questions that students need to ask, if there’s a step by step process, you know, if there’s some sort of visual they need to have, really whatever details need to be communicated to the students about this particular objective, it is included on the teaching slide.

And then there is an example slide. And teachers are going to show an example that they can use to help model and demonstrate this objective. And it might be a chart or diagram. It might be a short text, it might be you know, an example of sentences or phrases. And really the example is going to vary depending on the objective, but it is going to be something concrete that teachers can use to model it to their students.

And then we have a discus and engage slide. And in this part of the lesson, we always give teachers two turn and talk questions that are related to the objective so that way, you know they’ve taught something, they’ve given an example and now they can kind of check in with their students and engage them and let their students participate in two different discussion questions.

And then we really have an extended slide where the teachers are going to provide details on an assignment and then we give them a short graphic organizer that they can give to their students to help them extend this objective into their independent practice.

And so this is not necessarily a like a revolutionary system. But it is a very specific system with very specific each, you know, there’s an intro, there is a teaching slide, there’s an example slide, there’s a turn and talk slide, there’s an extended slide. And the benefit of this is now as a teacher, you do not need to guess how you’re going to teach your objective.

You know that you’re going to introduce your objective by either connecting it to prior learning or sharing an analogy. You know that you are going to use this visual on a slide to help introduce and teach the objective. You know that you’re going to have one short example that you can use to model to your students. You know that you’re going to have two questions. It’s very predictable for the teachers.

And it’s very predictable for the students, which means you have in essence, eliminated all of the decision fatigue around planning, and teaching your whole group lessons. And now all you have to do is execute the plan. And this system really becomes you’re planning to do lists. You’re going to plan your introduction, you’re going to create your teaching slide, you’re going to find an example, you’re going to write two questions, and you’re going to find your assignment. It really is your sort of like to do list for your planning.

Now, obviously, if you’re a teacher inside the reading membership, all of the planning is done for you. And all you have to do is print the lessons and add the size to your Google Drive and you’re ready to go. But otherwise, if if you’re doing this on your own, like I said, it eliminates the decision fatigue, and you know exactly what you need to have in order to have a successful lesson.

And maybe you’re thinking, Okay, but what if this system, this really simple system doesn’t work for every single objective. And that’s fine, because more than likely, you’re gonna have a lesson or two throughout the year that you want to teach in maybe a different way. Or you really want to beef up your example. Or if you want to teach beyond having a slide, that’s fine.

But that means that you’re really only having to think creatively then make decisions for just a handful of lessons. Rather than having to come up with something brand new for every single lesson. Think about what is the easiest way for you to teach and communicate the new content to your students, and turn that into your teaching system.

And then when you’re feeling really creative, or like you want to do something a little fancy, do that for one or two lessons. Rather than putting this sort of like burden of like every single lesson has to be super creative and unique.

And if you want to see an example of what our slides system looks like, you can check them out at stellarteacher.com/slides. We’ll link to that in the show notes. But there’s a free sample that you can check out and try and either, you know use those or sort of use that as an idea to come up with your own system.

Now, this is an example of how you can automate your whole group instruction. And like I said, you’re really going to have to come up with systems for really all parts of your reading block. But you can automate and systematize your small group lessons, your word study lessons, your morning routine, your centers, your writing block, your end of day routine.

You can even systematize how you use your planning time your before school starts your end of day, you can create a system and automation for really your entire instructional day. And you know, like I said, basically, coming up with a system means that you are getting really strategic and you are developing a simple set of steps that are easy to plan and execute for each part of your reading block. They’re easy to prepare for and it’s eliminating the decision fatigue.

Your goal is to come up with a way for you to teach that all you have to do is rinse and repeat all year long. So easy. Now, I’ve said this before, but some of the benefits of automating your teaching. I think the biggest one honestly is it eliminates decision fatigue. That is something that I feel like I have felt this on so many levels for so long.

But you know, it’s like an I don’t know how you are. But for me, if I have to make a last minute decision, it literally stresses me out. And it’s like, you know, the closer I get to that deadline, the more panic I get or the longer it takes me to make a decision. And I typically try to meal plan. I’ve done this for many, many years. And I try to use Sundays as my day to plan out all of the meals for the week breakfast lunch dinners, I make my grocery list, I do a little bit of prep.

And when I do that, like coming up with you know dinner for the week, it’s easy. It’s like a It’s a non thing. If I skip meal planning and prep on Sunday, then I become like paralyzed trying to figure out what to do for dinner. You know, it’s like I cannot make a decision. And if I tried to go simple, then I’m like, No, I’m bored with this. We did this last night and if I tried to go complex, I’m like, No, I’m tired. I don’t want to cook. And then if it’s like okay, let’s just go out to eat. I’m like, I can’t think of a restaurant.

You know, because I’m trying to make a decision for like dinner tonight. It becomes so difficult to do for whatever reason. But if I can plan ahead, it’s like I’ve removed the emotion from it and just make decisions and the same is true with our teaching. It is going to be so much easier for you and you are going to be so much more effective with your planning if you are able to make decisions about your teaching far enough in advance, and that’s really one of the benefits of automating your teaching.

The other benefit, like I said, is that it is predictable for your students, which means they’re going to be able to know exactly what to expect and how to interact with your lessons, which I think is a plus.

But also, another benefit of having a system like this, you know, for really all parts of your instructional day is that it makes it so much easier for you to take a sick day, or a vacation day, because planning for a sub is going to be so easy when your instruction is automated. And also your students are going to know exactly what to expect and how to behave during each part of your instructional day. And so when you’re gone, your students can basically run the classroom for you because they know exactly how each lesson is going to flow.

One final sort of thing I want to say on this, before we move on to the second tip. Some people might argue and say that well systemizing your teaching and teaching everything in the exact same way is boring. But here’s the thing, it’s only going to be boring if you let it be boring.

You know, I think the thing to remember is that with your teaching, you still get to decide what books you’re going to read what texts you’re going to teach with, who your students are going to collaborate. And really, you get to decide how much energy and excitement you bring to your lesson. And there are ways that you can create really engaging lessons, while also letting your classroom run on autopilot. So tip number one, automate and systematize your teaching.

Okay, tip number two is for you to batch your lesson planning. And really, you want to try to batch everything in your teacher life and just batch your entire life if, if possible, because batching really makes such a difference.

Now honestly, before I get into explain what batching is, and what this looks like in your classroom, let me just be upfront that this is going to be the one tip or the one sort of aspect of saving time that is going to require a little bit more of commitment, it’s going to require some self discipline on your part.

But if you can commit to batching for a few weeks, you are going to start to see how beneficial it is. And you’re going to love not having to do things like lesson planning and copying grading every single day or even every single week, because you’re going to have gotten really good at batching it ahead of time.

So if you are not familiar with the term of batching, what batching is or what it is when you are batching out your lesson planning, you’re basically doing a series of like things or similar tasks in one setting. So maybe if you’re going to batch out all of your, you know, maybe you want to batch out all of your whole group lesson plans for the entire week.

So rather than being like, Okay, I’m gonna write Monday’s lesson plan on Monday. And then Tuesday’s lesson plan on Tuesday, and Wednesday lesson plan on Wednesday, for the following week, you’re gonna say I’m going to sit down for an hour, and I’m going to knock out all of my plans for the next week.

Which means you’re going to write all your lesson plans, you’re going to create all your teaching slides, you’re going to generate all your questions for your whole group discussion, you’re going to find all your examples and other materials, basically, whatever systems you have come up with, you’re gonna plan out and prepare for every single step in your system. But you’re doing it for an entire week, or an entire two weeks. Or if you get really good at it, you could do it for an entire month, in one sitting.

And the thing that’s really magical is, when you’re doing the same thing over and over again, you become more efficient at it, you get a lot of momentum in it. So rather than having to come up with just two turn and talk questions, which if you’re coming up with two just two questions, you’re gonna have a lot more pressure and expectation to be like, okay, these two questions have to be really, really good. But if you’re like, great, I’ve got to come up with 10 questions, you sort of have less pressure on yourself, because you have more opportunities to make the questions really good and meaningful.

So the more you do something really just the more efficient your brain becomes at doing it. And if you are batching, you can also be really way more intentional and reflective on what you’re doing. And so just that simple question of coming up with discussion questions. If you’re looking at your questions over two weeks, you can be a lot more intentional with the question stems that you were using, the types of questions, the level of difficulty, how often you’re spiraling them, you know, different skills in or different concepts.

You know, so it’s going to go a lot quicker, and it’s going to be a lot more efficient, because you are not just looking at questions for one lesson, you’re looking at questions for 10 lessons over two weeks. That’s just a really simple example.

But some of the things that you can do when you are batch planning. And I think when you start to batch plan, you really see how beneficial it is to have a system for your teaching because if you’ve created a clear system for your whole group lessons, your small group lessons, your word study routines, whatever it is, now that you have your systems, you simply are going to batch out and prep and do the you know the prep work for your systems far in advance.

So if you know what objectives you’re teaching for the entire month, there’s really no reason why you can’t plan out two to three weeks worth of lessons in one sitting. And I think sometimes teachers are like, well, I want to be responsive to my students. needs and I want to make sure that I’m you know, reflective and teaching in real time, you can still do that.

But if you have your lessons planned out for, you know, two to three weeks or a month, but you realize your students need a little more time reviewing or on one specific objective. Whenever you’re ready to move on your lesson plans are done. So you can still teach in real time, but be planned out. Because eventually, you know, you’re gonna get to those objectives anyways.

A couple of things that you could consider batching, you could batch all of your lesson plans. So you could write all of your lesson plans in one sitting, you could batch out your like material prep. So whether that’s finding passages or articles or picture books from the library, you could do all of that for an entire week, or even an entire month in one sitting.

You know, if you create anchor charts, or slides or student resources rather than going through and you know, lesson planning for one lesson and finding the text and then creating the materials, create all your anchor charts in one sitting for like an entire week or an entire two weeks. You can also batch things like your grading, your paper filing and making copies is probably one of the most effective things to batch.

And I honestly used to be really horrible at this. And I used to be that teacher that was going to the copier every morning and again at lunch and just making copies for what I needed next. And honestly, that was such a waste of my time because first of all, I was usually in the hallway that was farthest from the copier. So I would waste time walking back and forth between my classroom.

And inevitably, you probably have experienced this, the copier is going to be jammed, it’s going to be broken or somebody else’s there. But because I needed the copies for that next lesson or that day, I had to wait until I could make the copies. And I just ended up using so much of my planning time waiting for the copier.

Eventually, I got a little smarter. And I figured out how to batch and I would get to the habit of making all of my copies for the entire week, either on Friday evening or Sunday evening. But I started the week with every single copy made. And eventually I got to the point where I would often make my copies for two or three weeks in advance.

Now, obviously, you’re still going to have the one off thing that you need to copy. But you’re going to save so much time if you batch out your lessons and your materials so then you can batch your copies for you know more than just a week.

So benefits of batch planning, it’s going to save you tons of time. But also you’re going to become so much more efficient at whatever it is you are doing. Because you are doing that same thing over and over and over again. And the momentum is just going to increase your efficiency.

But I think one of the biggest benefits of batch planning is it gives you a peace of mind it is really going to free up your mental space because you’re not going to be worried about immediate deadlines. You’re not going to be driving to school or getting there thinking oh my gosh, I have to make copies for today or what am I teaching this afternoon, because you’ve already made that decision ahead of time, and you’ve prepped your materials.

When you’re planning and you’re thinking a week or two weeks down the road. And you’ll have so much more mental free space to think about that. And so I think you know, when you are not worried about last minute deadlines or tasks, you’re just going to have a much calmer brain. At least that’s been my experience with it. And I think it’ll be yours as well.

Last tip, tip number three is to repurpose materials when possible. And when you’re repurposing materials, what you are doing is you are being intentional about selecting resources that can be used in a variety of ways, and to teach a variety of objectives.

So what does this look like? You know, maybe you have a text that you want to use for a shared read aloud, and maybe you want to read it aloud just for fun, or use it as like a cold read for your students. But then later, you’re going to use that same text and you’re going to connect back to it to show your students maybe how to summarize. And then you know, maybe in that same text, you have two or three words that have the exact same prefix or suffix you’re currently focusing on.

And then also maybe there’s a few examples of complex sentences in that text. And you’re going to use those sentences as mentor sentences, and help your students learn how to deconstruct a sentence. And then also, maybe this picture book happens to be a historical fiction, and you’re going to connect it to your social studies objective.

So rather than finding five different texts, or five different examples for five different objectives, you found one text that you can use for the five different objectives. So that’s just kind of one way that you can repurpose materials.

Another thing that you could do is repurpose your anchor charts or your slides. So let’s say you created an anchor chart that you want to use to teach a lesson. You could also then create a fill in the blank template using that same anchor chart structure for your students to take notes on during the lesson. Or you could really just take a picture of the anchor chart and print off a copy of that anchor chart. If you do it by hand or if it’s digital, give the students copy of it and they can glue it in their journals.

You could also email that photo of the anchor chart at home to parents so they know what you’re currently teaching and you’ve tackled some parent communication. You could also use that same anchor chart as a reference material and a workstation. If you have a student that was absent, you could attach a picture of that anchor charts so they know what they missed. You could attach it to your lesson plan so that way you’re showing what how you’re going to teach this objective.

So you’re taking one thing that you’ve created, but you’re repurposing it and using it in multiple ways, just to make your planning and your teacher life a little bit easier.

Other things that you could consider repurposing, you know, my favorite is really thinking about how you can repurpose text, you can find one text and you can use it for multiple objectives. Whatever you are teaching in literacy, whether that is reading, writing comprehension, vocabulary, word recognition, sentence structures, writing, whatever it is, you can connect all of those objectives back to a shared text, whether it’s a picture book, a passage, a chapter from a novel.

You know, you can just be intentional about finding one text that you can use in multiple ways. But you can also repurpose texts for fluency practice or for a research center, or, you know, if you’ve done some sort of task card or word sort, you can repurpose that as a reading center or a workstation.

You know, if your students are doing hands on word sorts for their word study, you can have them use the same words and have them sort them into different ways. They could sort them by vowel pattern spellings, they could sort them by the types of syllables, they could sort them by prefixes and suffixes. So it’s the same word list, but they’re using it in different ways.

And I think this last little tip here is really where you can start to see how all three of these tips come together. Because if you’ve created your system for teaching, you know the exact types of materials and resources you need for your lessons, and for your students to practice. And if you are batching out your lessons and planning, you know, one to two weeks of content at a time, when it comes time for you to create or search for materials, you are able to think about okay, how can I find something that is going to help me for multiple objectives over the next week or two weeks.

And so repurposing materials is really going to be so much easier for you if you are batching out your planning, because you’re going to see how your lessons and objectives connect to each other. But also, you’re going to be saving time because you’re not looking for you know, a passage for every single assignment in every single lesson, you’re not looking for a ton of different books, you’re not having to make you know, new word lists for every single thing students are doing, you are just being really intentional about using materials in more than one way.

So let’s review these three simple steps. If you want to save time this next year, I want you to consider automating and systematizing your teaching. I want you to batch plan your lessons and batch all of the prep work, and then consider how you can repurpose content in more than one way.

And I think even if you just did one of these things, you would get some value and you would start saving time. But if you start the year with a commitment to all three of these, I promise that you are going to save a ton of time and you are going to have a lot more mental clarity this year.

I hope that you are just squeezing in the last little bit of summer and just know that I am so excited to continue to support you and cheer you on this next school year. And I truly truly hope that you can spend a little less time at school or thinking about school this year. Okay, I hope you have a stellar week and I will see you back here next Monday.