Planning smarter, not harder – advice for the new school year

Last week, I wrote about my feelings of imposter syndrome that I deal with every year as a teacher when I start planning my lessons for the first week. Even though I’ve been in the classroom for 30 years now, that doesn’t make me immune to it. I’ve found some ways to help make my life easier at the start of each school year and I wanted to share them with teachers who may have years ahead of them and are looking for ways to make back to school easier.

Planning with an electronic lesson plan book

I will say that the number one thing that helped me deal with the idea of planning an entire year of classes ahead of me is a system that makes it easy to copy from previous years. When I first started teaching, I would buy a new planbook each year. Yes, a paper planbook. It was such a nice feeling to have that brand new, fresh planbook. Until it came time to actually start doing the planning! That beautiful, unmarked plan book wasn’t so exciting once I realized that it was empty and it was my job to fill it out with plans! It became a task to do each week rather than a chance for a fresh start.

I switched to using an online planbook about a decade ago. My choice is Planbook – it does everything I need it to do, allows for a lot of customization, and I can import last year’s plans into the new year!

Of course there are some things that will have to be adjusted each year – my school has gone from Monday iDays (at home for students, at school for teachers) right after COVID to two block days per week to no block days and 50 minute classes in the past few years, so I’ve had to adjust a lot of things. But for the most part, it gives me an idea of what to do each week and I can look at last year’s plans to see what I did and have a comparison with this year.

The real difference – planning vs. building and reusing courses

For my actual courses, the gamechanger was using Canvas. My district made it available a while ago but I wasn’t using it – instead I was using TEAMS during covid because the students were familiar with it. But when we were getting ready to go back in person, I started playing around with Canvas and realized that it is much easier than TEAMS and does so much more – it’s meant for schools, while Teams was kind of forced into the role. Doing the planning for my lessons and assignments once and using it again year after year has taken a lot of stress out of my life.

The first year that I used Canvas was a bit of extra work. I had to take all of the old assignments and convert them into Canvas assignments. I also had to learn how to use the basic functions of Canvas. But once I did, it was pretty simple. It also allows for self-grading assignments – so all of those listening, matching, fill in the blank type assignments became easier for me because I didn’t have to do anything at all to grade them!

You do need to do a bit of pre-planning for how you want to arrange your courses – by week? by unit? by topic? Luckily, it’s easy to move things around if you later decide to change things up. make weekly modules and color-code them by unit.

Once the bulk of the course-building was done, life got much easier. The following year, I just imported the previous course into the new course. The great thing about Canvas is that you can drag/drop or remove things if you decide that you don’t want them, or if the timing is slightly different. I went from having to spend time planning out each week to just looking to see what I had built for that week already and basing my plans on that.

There are a lot of features on Canvas that I haven’t really used much, but if I still had a few years to go I would spend some time on them. You can make mastery paths that give students a quick quiz, then can send them to different pages or activities based on their scores. This is a great way to prepare for exams, or just to differentiate. It does take a bit of time to set them up, though – so I don’t know that I will bother at this point.

Of course, you don’t have to use Canvas to build your course. I know some teachers who did the same thing in Teams and it works just fine for them. Others use Google classroom. Whatever you have access to and you are comfortable with, you should use. The whole goal is to work smarter, not harder! A combination of an electronic planbook and a course management system turn planning into a minor issue of clicking a button or two rather than hours of drudgery.