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Today is the last installment of the Planning Series! Over the past few weeks, I hope that you’ve not only picked up on some great planning strategies, but have renewed your mindset by throwing out those old limiting beliefs so that you can show up as an empowered leader in your school community. First, a necessary mindset shift From personal experience, I know the following to be true: “Covering” content lowers engagement and achievement. And I believe the quickest way to drive up student engagement and build students’ skills is to stop trying to cover the traditional curriculum map and, instead, create 4 justice-centered units. Student engagement is way more likely to come from creating lessons that have students explore their skills, make mistakes, revise their work, learn from feedback, collaborate, and learn deeply. The mindset shift we need to make is to have a goal that is more than “fit it all in”. How about we instead find what really motivates students to explore what they're interested in? So before doing anything else, the most important shift is to move your lesson plan goal from “covering content” to developing independent learners. I found when I used terms like “cover content” and “get through,” the students weren’t retaining what I wanted them to anyways. It was better to focus on doing less, but make sure students were actually learning it. The things that may have been important to teach 50 years ago are Google-able now. Therefore, it’s more important students are able to find, analyze, and apply new information than memorize a predetermined list of facts. “Once I made that mindset shift, that was a huge shift in advancing my student’s learning and definitely an increase in their engagement.” Cut down on time If you find yourself spending hours making mini lessons, you might ask yourself: How could I teach the same content and have the students practice a different skill than listening and note-taking? For example, when I prepped for lectures, I would read through a textbook, make a slide deck, and create a guided worksheet. This took about 4 hours per lesson. But if you want to make this lesson more student-centered then you need to find a text(s), generate 1-2 big questions to answer, and choose a text-based protocol from my resource bank. This process only takes about 30 minutes which saves you 3 and a half hours compared to the original method! If you stay dedicated to student-centered learning, planning will be easier, and your students will develop great text analysis skills. If you feel like your lesson plans need to be formal or by the book, you might be spending too much time on the surface when you need to dig down to the root of your curriculum, the purpose of it. We want to plan from the lens of hitting the broader course goals. To me, an effective lesson plan is one that works for you. It’s an outline of your ideas and a check for alignment with your larger unit or course goals. It is the basis from which your lesson materials emerge. A more streamlined lesson plan You get to put your own spin on it, but here are the core elements of a lesson that I think serve the needs of both teachers and administrators: The End Goal Know exactly what students need to do for your summative assessment at the end of the unit. What are you working towards? Lesson Focus Narrow it down to ONE thing you want students to walk away knowing or being able to do. Students who are able to focus on 1 or 2 topics are going to learn more deeply than trying to get them to take on several skills. If the goal is to help them master and retain the knowledge, then giving them too many things will work against this goal. Phase of Learning Make sure there’s at least one lesson per phase for each unit. Consider whether students’ students are new to this skill or have been previously introduced. If they have been previously introduced, there are multiple ways you can have them practice or expand so that they feel they are really advancing in this area. These guidelines will help keep your expectations for student performance in line with the amount of time students have had to work on a skill. There’s a tendency to provide less time than is needed for students to really master a skill, and cite a need to “cover content” as our rationale. Don’t have time? Focus on fewer skills and content. Depth over breadth! Lesson Flow [The Activities] These are your core protocols for the lesson. Stick with one main activity for student work time. Then, you can add in a hook and assessment activity to bookend the main activity. Within this section of the plan, you may want to note 1-2 key questions that students are answering during each protocol. For example, how much time do you think each activity will take, and what resources are needed? If you like to lecture, you may want to decrease your talk time so that students can have more time to do independent work where they can apply what they’ve learned. I have found that trying to limit my number of slides helps me narrow my focus to one core concept—try using 10 slides per mini lesson with a maximum teacher talk time of 15 minutes. It’s not a hard and fast rule, but pick numbers that work for you and stretch yourself to streamline your mini lessons. Certainly, there are more things that could go into your lesson plan, but odds are, you’re probably already thinking about those things as you plan. If not, add them to your lesson plan, but only write down what you need to organize your ideas and ensure this lesson gets students where they need to go. To help you write a lesson plan with just the essential elements, I’ve made you a template called the Streamlined Lesson Planning Template. Thanks for following along with this series. Please share some of your highlights from this episode and the past episodes or something you were excited to learn. And if you want me to take you on an in-depth walkthrough of how I saved 700 hours of planning time in one year as a teacher, my self paced online course, Work Less Teach More, is now open for enrollment. The course is $197. What's your professional and mental wellbeing worth to you? For me, my wellbeing is worth way more than $200. Enroll in the self-paced online course today at bit.ly/wltmcourse If you’re a school leader wanting to help your teachers free up the time and energy to tackle big transformative things, you can purchase this course for your teachers as a pilot for one department or grade team or for the whole school. Want to chat to see if the course would be a good fit? Connect with me at [email protected]
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Why is wellness something we should dig deeper into? Well-being is critically important for school culture and student success. Researchers found that employee health directly impacts the success of organizational success. The second reason is that a principal’s sense of well-being is related to the well-being of students and teachers. Similarly, educators report that they flourish when their students flourish. So many schools have high turnover rates and are feeling the time crunch to improve scores quickly. Schools that are flourishing are doing these five things: 1. Filling the culture with trust, hope, compassion, and purpose 2. Engaging in their work and connecting purpose to it 3. Having a shared leadership mindset 4. Adapting to any situation and 5. Prioritizing their well-being. How wellness contributes to high performance The well-being of an entire organization can only come from the bottom up. So an individual stakeholder’s well-being is an essential part of the process. Schools that are performing at an amazing level are:
All of the work that school leaders put into their own growth and helping others around them can have a profound ripple effect on the school as a whole. That’s why it’s important to also support the well-being of those around you. Make sure your organizational environment is reinforcing healthy behaviors (not as an add-on, but as part of the fabric of how you do things). Foster well-being through positive interpersonal communication.These teachers and leaders are not afraid to have difficult conversations and speak up for social justice. So lean into your own values, because they will get you far. You have a choice as a school leader, you can choose to promote well-being, or you can choose to harm well-being and perpetuate oppression. The reality is that many schools today are facing high turnover rates. The turnover rate in the nation’s K–12 schools is an increasingly acknowledged but still poorly understood crisis. Teachers are feeling more crunched for time. There is high demand to get students to retain their information and perform well on standardized tests. There’s too much focus on making sure the public data looks right. Teachers can definitely get stressed out by following this model too closely. We know that teacher stress has a big effect on student’s performance and well-being. So there is good reason to turn to wellness. If schools instead put more energy into cultivating wellness in teachers, there is more potential for them to feel supported and meaningful in their work. Types of Wellness The National Wellness Institute breaks down wellness into 6 dimensions. Those are:
Here’s what they say about wellness: “it is an active process through which people become aware of and make choices toward a more successful existence.” It is simply making choices consistently towards a healthy and fulfilling life. It’s important to remember that a single habit like exercise, only fulfills one or a few dimensions of wellbeing. So the key is to think about how you can achieve wellness in each area. For example, to work on my emotional well-being, I check in with how I’m feeling in my body. I lower my shoulders and try to connect to emotions that are coming up. These could look completely different for you. You could hit multiple pieces of wellness by engaging in movement and socializing at the same time. You could connect spiritual to emotional with deep reflection and writing. Or perhaps think of something you’ve done an incredible job with this week to really fuel yourself up. Once you’ve thought about what types you want to hit, set a monthly wellness goal with three concrete actions that are listed underneath it. After that, how will you plan to track that progress? If you don’t have something set up, feel free to use my wellness tracker below! Think about how you can fulfill each month’s goal. There are plenty of opportunities to merge one well-being with another type so that you don’t have to spend more time than you have trying to hit all of them. Let it come naturally and in all the ways that bring you happiness or peace. This entire planning series was made to help you reconnect to wellness and plan ahead for more satisfaction and growth. Make wellness the priority more consistently and you’ll be so excited with the results you get. Be sure to come back for the last part of the planning series next week! And if you want me to take you on an in-depth walkthrough of how I saved 700 hours of planning time in one year as a teacher, my self paced online course, Work Less Teach More, is now open for enrollment. The course is $197 and I don’t know about you, but my professional and mental wellbeing is worth way more to me than $200. You can enroll today at bit.ly/wltmcourse If you’re a school leader wanting to help your teachers free up the time and energy to tackle big transformative things, you can purchase this course for your teachers as a pilot for one department or grade team or for the whole school. Want to chat to see if the course would be a good fit? Connect with me at [email protected]
A clear mind can provide you with so many great benefits. Two big ones that we would all love to have are more energy and more creativity. We want to have a mind that’s not so cluttered with all the crazy to-do lists and worries, but how do we achieve this when there’s so much to think about? Let’s take the same approach as schools who have a 4 day school week or those entrepreneurs that inspire us with their 4 day work week. First you need to figure out what is essential in your work and your goals. Greg McKeown’s podcast episode 23 talks about the magic of a 4 Day Workweek using essentialism. Essentialism is the view that certain properties of things are an essential part of that thing’s identity and function. “By having a culture focused on essentialism, it actually democratizes the workplace.” Ask: What’s essential? Make sure your school leaders are on board with helping you increase your productivity and reduce stress. So the next time your boss asks you to stop what you’re doing for another task, you can ask whether it’s more important than the project you’re trying to get done. This can change the culture and help everyone realize what’s really moving the needle forward. I coached a leader last year who did an exercise with her team to determine what tasks are in alignment with their goals. All it requires is writing on some post-its or a padlet of all things you are doing. Once you’ve done that, categorize what is essential and in line with your purpose and categorize what can be taken off the plate. If it’s something you still want to get done you can move the task to someone else or automate it. Team brainstorming will still have a time and place for you and your team. Just be thoughtful about when that’s most helpful vs. just meeting to meet. A Productivity System David’s Allen’s Getting Things Done approach involves having a place that each idea is documented. To figure out how to document these, he tells us to ask: Is it actionable? If it's not actionable, it goes into a long-term list we look at less frequently. If it is actionable in 2 minutes, do it now. If it will take longer, you can delegate it or defer it (on a next action list or—my favorite—on your calendar. Multi-step actions go in a projects list. “You need no new skills to increase your productivity and reduce your stress—just an enhanced set of systemic behaviors with which to apply them.” - David Allen Here’s my approach:
-Reference - appropriately categorized Doc in relevant folder If your tasks will take less than two minutes, then do it now. But for everything else that takes longer, you can either delegate it or put it into a system that you will come back to next week. It’s good to put those deferred things on the calendar because otherwise, you’re not going to have it fitted into your day like everything else on the calendar. These are all going to contribute to a mind that is more clear. When you have things on your mind, get it onto paper or into your files so that it has a place to go besides taking up valuable space in your brain. David Allen, the creator of Getting Things Done says that 80% of the things you keep thinking of can be resolved with just listing an outcome and next action while the other 15% will require a little brainstorming first. Only the last 5% will take longer project planning steps. This practice is called distributed cognition and it will help you cultivate more creativity overall. To help you get your energy and creativity back in hand, I’m sharing the Productive Planning Template as this week’s freebie. Next week we will talk about advancing wellness in part 5 of the planning series. Also, if you want me to take you on an in-depth walkthrough of how I saved 700 hours of planning time in one year as a teacher, my self paced online course, Work Less Teach More, is now open for enrollment. The course is $197 and I don’t know about you, but my professional and mental wellbeing is worth way more to me than $200. You can enroll today at bit.ly/wltmcourse If you’re a school leader wanting to help your teachers free up the time and energy to tackle big transformative things, you can purchase this course for your teachers as a pilot for one department or grade team or for the whole school. Want to chat to see if the course would be a good fit? Connect with me at [email protected]
Have you ever told yourself that there isn’t enough time to get to professional development or create original curriculum? You imagine that your students will suffer if you don’t spend more than 2 hours grading and planning lessons. But here’s the thing: you have the time, you just don’t believe in using it for the possibilities. This is something I still struggle with too. There’s that tunnel vision telling you to focus on the concrete—on whatever’s in front of you demanding attention. Excuses keep you stuck I’ll share the 2 most common responses I hear from teachers when presented with a PD opportunity. Here’s one: The “I can’t take time from grading/lesson planning” response. So, how can we reframe that initial response? Try asking yourself these reframing questions: What if the professional development I spend time on teaches me how to plan efficiently and grade faster and it actually saves me time in the long run? What if it helps me build engaging learning activities so that students are on-task and excited to learn every day? What if it means I would be able to stop taking work home—the planning/grading work and the mental stress? Here’s another one: The “I can’t miss class for PD” response. When teachers are offered a chance to attend a school-day PD (like visiting another school or a curriculum planning day or a workshop off-site), I often hear teachers say: I can’t leave my kids; they’ll miss out on a day of learning. How might we reframe this? Try asking yourself these reframing questions: Would I sacrifice one day of student learning and the time it takes to prep sub plans (which is often harder than prepping your own lessons) if it meant me and my students would be energized and engaged for the rest of the year? What if it just increased engagement for a semester? One unit? What if the thing I could accomplish by missing ONE day of class could drastically improve student engagement and achievement? My biggest growth spurts as a teacher came from taking the time to learn a new approach and try it out. “Don’t underestimate the power of investing in your learning, even if (or maybe especially if) it seems like your time or energy is stretched too thin to take on one more thing!” In general, we only have so many hours in a day, so it really comes down to spending our time in ways that get us the big results and the life we ultimately want. Another belief that might be holding you back is thinking that you owe your time to other people. Remember, there is always an opportunity cost to saying, “Yes.” You need to determine if the cost is worth it. For example, if I agree to stay after school, I won’t be able to run today or cook dinner with my family or fill-in-the-blank-here. Am I willing to sacrifice that? Learn to say “No” so that you can say “Yes” to something else. That something else may be spending time with family, exercising, sleeping, whatever it is, your “No”s make room for “Yes”es in the areas that matter most to you. David Bayer talks about the limiting beliefs we hold put us in a state of inner conflict, which steals our time, energy, & presence. We can lose hours of time each day here, years of our life! We’ll talk more in the next episode about clearing the mind to create more energy and creativity. Determine Your 3 Priorities Take a moment to brainstorm and list your top 3 priorities. What do you want to spend more time doing? This list will help you say “No.” You can use the list as a litmus test by asking yourself if saying ”Yes” to something will take too much away from your priorities. Consider how your list of priorities can help you actually say, “No” to something. Write your script! I’ve heard different iterations of the following script: Thank you for asking. I’m excited about what you’re doing. My current priorities are: ____, ____, and ____. I’m unable to say yes to anything outside of these right now. Most people are not going to feel rejected by this kind of answer. In fact, most people I’ve heard share their feelings of this experience say they felt inspired. I should note, you can suggest a way to integrate one of your priority areas with the ask if it’s possible. Here’s an example: If you want to join me on my afternoon run/walk, then I would be able to have that meeting. Alternatively, you could say “No” as a full sentence. Count to 10 in your head afterwards to fill the awkward silence if it bothers you. In Emilie Aries’ book, Bossed Up, she notes a moment when Anderson Cooper asked Hillary Clinton if she wanted to respond to a comment, and she simply replied, “No.” Complete sentence. Boom. We don’t always need to explain ourselves! As we begin doing this work for ourselves, we’ll also be modeling for those around us, this is a great additional benefit! By doing this for YOU, you can transform your workplace culture. Transform your limiting beliefs David Bayer suggests rewriting a limiting belief (e.g., “I can’t say no to people”) as an empowering belief, and checking our thinking and decision-making against that belief. What are the beliefs getting in the way of you living the life you want to live? How can we take action on the beliefs that limit us? Take a moment to rewrite your limiting belief to an empowering one or list out the top 3 priorities in your life right now and use this list to make decisions for the rest of the month. To help you, I’m sharing some Boundary Reminder Images as this week’s freebie. You can print or save on your phone or computer to remind you of living into your values. (bit.ly/boundaryreminders). Next week we will examine the topic of clearing the mind. Also, if you want me to take you on an in-depth walkthrough of how I saved 700 hours of planning time in one year as a teacher, my self paced online course, Work Less Teach More, is now open for enrollment. The course is $197 and I don’t know about you, but my professional and mental wellbeing is worth way more to me than $200. You can enroll today at bit.ly/wltmcourse If you’re a school leader wanting to help your teachers free up the time and energy to tackle big transformative things, you can purchase this course for your teachers as a pilot for one department or grade team or for the whole school. Want to chat to see if the course would be a good fit? Connect with me at [email protected]
Welcome back to Planning Series part 2. When getting started with behavior change, many have said to start with one change or one step. It’s what you may gravitate towards because one sounds easy enough. But here’s why I’m recommending you take three steps instead: when you take just one step, your motivation and enthusiastic energy to get to your goal is more likely to fizzle out. If you commit to three steps, you can keep up the momentum and give yourself a better chance of making some changes. So when it comes to creating these three habits, here are some guidelines you should follow:
Set a Deadline One week is generally enough time to get your three steps completed without feeling pinched for time. For example, you decide to have a 30 minute reflection time with a journal for one of your steps. On Monday you have such a busy day and realize you won’t be able to get to it, but because you stayed flexible with the deadline, you know you can still get it done the next day. Whatever you choose as your deadline, make sure it is soon enough that you won’t put it off until “tomorrow,” which in my experience quickly becomes much later. Make the Action Doable When thinking about your steps, make sure you feel like each is something that feels manageable within your day, week, etc. You don’t want to commit hours of your time to learning or doing something if you still have errands to run, dinner to cook, and other things that you need to get done still. Aim for actions that will take 2 to 5 minutes. For example, if my desired habit is to practice on Duolingo every day, I can complete a lesson in two minutes and still continue my daily streak of practice. This will help prevent you from staying up later or getting overwhelmed. Write Out Your Plan I used to write down two big things I wanted to accomplish each day and focus on completing those tasks. Now, it feels more powerful to tie each of those tasks to a larger goal. Pinpoint the big overarching vision you have in mind today and ask yourself what tasks are directly contributing to that? Connect to your purpose! Connect These Steps to Your Identity James Clear talks about linking our habits to our identities as a way to ensure we follow through on our goals. He talks about conducting a yearly “Integrity Report” in which he asks: What are the core values that drive my life and work? How am I living and working with integrity right now? How can I set a higher standard in the future? He says this work helps “revisit my desired identity and consider how my habits are helping me become the type of person I wish to be.” Think about your own core values. How will your steps connect back to who you want to be? Day to Day Work/Scheduling Tips Wondering how to manage your to do list when it keeps growing? Here are some tips:
Boundaries Working from home is tough because it’s easier than usual to just keep working. You never leave your place of work! (If you can, designate a space just for work or put your work-related papers out of sight at the end of the day.) Scheduling-wise, try to limit yourself to 40 hours a week. That means 8 hour work days and no-work weekends. I know this is hard—I’ve launched an entire course around this premise, but the goal here is to set boundaries, so choose boundaries that work for you. Energy efficiency For me, aligning my day with my energy means tackling creation-based tasks in the morning when my energy is fresh, and saving my meetings and menial tasks, like email, for the afternoon. Your energy may be the opposite, so you may want to make time for lesson or activity creation towards the end of the day. We’re all used to a school day that starts early in the morning, but if you don’t have live classes to host or meetings to attend at that time, start your work day later if you’re more productive later in the day! Batch your work Batching your work is productivity gold. My preference is 4-hour chunks of time, but that may not be realistic if you have scheduled times you need to host a live class or staff meetings to work around. I recommend spending at least one concentrated hour on a task (aside from something like email or short “check the box” kinds of To Dos). Batching is great because once you get in the zone, you are far more efficient than when you first start a task. We often restart when we’re interrupted (by ourselves or someone else) to do an unrelated task. “I like creating in the morning. When I was teaching full time, I liked having back to back prep and lunch time because I was often able to finish what I started working on instead of wasting 10-15 minutes later on to remember where I left off and what I was doing.” Remember to get breaks in During your breaks make sure you get up and move. Emilie Aries, the host of the Bossed Up podcast, did an episode on Zoom fatigue in which she shares the expert recommendation for breaks is 10-15 minutes of break time for every 2 hours of work. I’ve been scheduling at least one mid-day walk break for myself to make sure I get up and move around and get out of work mode. To be transparent, this is still a struggle for me. I often listen to educational podcasts during this time so I’m still doing research for work, but this is how I convince myself to take the break! Keep calm and add to calendar Here’s what you can do to keep the to do list small and complete everything on it: put it on the calendar! There may be big goals for each day, but the specific tasks you need to accomplish can go in as events on your calendar. First, estimate the amount of time it will take to complete the task. Once the day’s filled up you can add any remaining tasks to the next day. If something comes up that absolutely has to be done today, move the tasks that got ousted to open slots later in the week. This practice will allow you to get things done without deleting anything or extending the work day. Our freebie for the week is a Scheduling Template (bit.ly/workfromhomeschedule) that you can use to write down your steps. Stay tuned for the next part of this series! These were just a fraction of the time-saving techniques I teach in my online course Work Less, Teach More. The course is $197 and I don’t know about you, but my professional and mental wellbeing is worth way more to me than $200. If you want to learn the same strategies that saved me 700 hours in a single year as a teacher, you can register for the course today at bit.ly/wltmcourse. If you’re a school leader wanting to help your teachers free up the time and energy to tackle big transformative things, you can purchase this course for your teachers as a pilot for one department or grade team or for the whole school. Want to chat to see if the course would be a good fit? Connect with me at [email protected]
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AuthorLindsay Lyons (she/her) is an educational justice coach who works with teachers and school leaders to inspire educational innovation for racial and gender justice, design curricula grounded in student voice, and build capacity for shared leadership. Lindsay taught in NYC public schools, holds a PhD in Leadership and Change, and is the founder of the educational blog and podcast, Time for Teachership. Archives
August 2024
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