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8/1/2022 The Work Less, Teach More Planner: How to Plan Your Day, Week, Month and Year for Maximum ImpactRead Now
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Do you ever feel like you’re working to your max—maybe even more than that!—and still don’t get through your list of to-dos? Or despite all that work, you’re not seeing any tangible impact in your classroom and student outcomes? Most educators will feel this way at some point. Enter: Work Less, Teach More. It’s our signature course and a philosophy discussed many times on the Time for Teachership podcast. In this episode, I break down how to use the Work Less, Teach More planner to maximize your planning time, protect your mental health, and reach your goals. The Work Less Teach More planner is available for purchase, but you can also work on these exercises independently and use a notebook or your computer to keep track of things. Each section of the planner addresses daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly goals and priorities. Let’s look at the highlights for each. Yearly Planning We’re starting with the yearly planning because there is some big-picture goal-setting activities to do at the beginning of each school year: Clarify Your Vision: Before the school year starts, get clear on your vision and goals for the year. Do this by asking the following questions:
Take Stock of Your Health: At the root of almost any conflict are unmet needs. We have needs in four areas, which you can remember with the BASE acronym: Belonging, Autonomy, Survival, and Enjoyment. Within each category, reflect on three questions:
Monthly Planning Each month, you’ll set priorities and goals. For example, in September your first and only goal might be for everyone to feel welcomed and included in the class. For January, it might be to re-focus on establishing a routine after a holiday break. Each month you can also:
Weekly Planning Weekly planning and reflection are essential to managing your time and reaching goals. There are a few key areas in which you’ll do this: 50-40-10 Planning: You have limited planning time each week, so focus on what is proven to make the most impact on your students. This includes:
Clear Your Plate: Each week, eliminate eight unnecessary tasks from your to-do list. This can be in both your personal and work life. Be specific about what it is and how you’ll pass it off to someone else. This is part of self-care, which is preventative—you must plan ahead to protect your time and mental energy. Daily Planning Your daily responsibility is simple. Ask yourself these two questions:
There it is—the Work Less Teach More planner in a nutshell! But there is so much more to the approach. Work Less Teach More is backed by research and has helped so many educators claim back their time while making maximum impact. You can learn more about Work Less Teach More here and follow along with the Time for Teachership podcast as part of your commitment to professional learning. TRANSCRIPT educational justice coach lindsey Lyons and here on the time for Teacher ship podcast, we learn how to inspire educational innovation for racial and gender justice design curricula grounded in student voice and build capacity for shared leadership? I'm a former teacher leader turned instructional coach. I'm striving to live a life full of learning, running, baking, traveling and parenting because we can be rockstar educators and be full human beings if you're a principal assistant superintendent, curriculum director instructional coach or teacher who enjoys nursing out about co creating curriculum students, I made this show for you. Here we go. Hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of the time for teacher ship podcast. This is a solo episode. I am back recording from parental leave. This is airing far after I've returned from parental leave but I'm really excited to dive back into it. This coming season that's going to start this fall is going to be having a lot more Solo shows and kind of many teachings like we did early on in the podcast. 00:01:08 So we'll rotate guests and solo shows, but a lot more solo tutorials and this episode, I am so thrilled to talk to you about our work. Less teach more planners which are brand new this school year. So the 2022, 2023 school year, if you have not grabbed one grab one now we only printed a few of these. So they are a hot commodity. They are quite large. I immediately opened up the box and was like, whoa, these are robust so we definitely want some feedback, I can't wait to hear. Does it feel useful? What pages do not feel useful? What can we take out for next year's printing? How do we make it however, you know, you want to experience the planner in a way that's better for you in the coming years. So please grab your planners. I will link in the show notes to where you can grab that and I'll tell you again at the end, but I'm really excited to just see how they go out into the world and how you experience life as a result of using them. 00:02:12 Now, if you do not have the funds to purchase this, a planner this year, I also want you to benefit from all of the wisdom within it. So it is really a lifestyle kind of shift that the planner lends itself to. It asks you to do these things each day each week, each month, each semester to be able to actually shift your practices to teach and plan in a more sustainable way. So we avoid burnout. We show up as our best selves each day to school. We bring joy into the class and we remember why we got into this job in the first place. So that's all that the work less teach more planner aspires to do for you. You don't have to have a planner to be able to do these. So the work last teach more course is kind of the first piece of this puzzle. That's that's what I created first. Then I was like, oh, it would be so helpful to have a planner where each day I could open up and actually put into practice all the things I'm talking about in the work last teach more course. 00:03:13 So it's kind of an additional support to be able to routinized or regularly practice all the things I talked about in there. Now, you can still do it as I said, without the planner, open up a blank journal or use the notes app of your phone, whatever it is that you want to do to make these practices a regular routine in your day, week, month semester. That's what I encourage you to do. So I'm going to kind of walk you through the planner and then if you again don't have one kind of think about what's the mechanism with which I can practice these things because you can absolutely do it on your own. So here we go, at the very start of a planner, there's kind of an overview. So if you have the planner in your hands, you ordered one, you're like, how do I use this thing I want you to orient to the very start, there's also a ton of episodes that you can go back and listen to around the work. Let's teach more course that you can dive deeper into the research, you can dive deeper into what exactly does this mean? Why she asked me to do that each day. 00:04:14 So, I first want to ground what we're gonna do in the fact that there's so much more out there for you um including for free episodes that exist on this podcast in season one that you can go check out. So the first thing that we are going to do within the planner is we're going to clarify our vision. So I'm gonna open up the planner as I am sitting here talking to you and the very first thing it asks you to fill out is your vision for the year. So work goals. I will feel, right? Let's start with the feeling. How do I want to feel? I will spend most of my time doing this. So what is it that you actually want to spend the majority of your time doing? I will learn. What is it that you want to learn this year? I will embody the values of who do you want to be. How do you want to show up? What do you want your students to say about you to describe you as how do you want them to name your class values, right? And the values that you bring as an educator, my students are experiencing. 00:05:18 So what do you want your students to experience life goals? Again, I will feel I will spend most of my time doing. I will learn. I will embody the values of and my loved ones, Maybe not my students, right? My loved ones in my life are experiencing this and then I want you to think about the big shifts that you need to make to be able to achieve that goal. So I want to somewhere along the line and I don't remember where I apologize for not giving appropriate credit. I heard about the have doobie categories, so what do I want to have? What do I want to do as an activities that I want to regularly do and what I want to be? Right, who do I want to be? What do I want to be? So when I think about you know 3 to 4 game changing shifts for each one of those, when I talk about what I want to have, what I want to do, what I want to be. What are the 3 to 4 game changing shifts that will enable me to have do and be those things for example, I might want work free weekends, right? 00:06:20 I might want to have a dog, I might want to have a house on the lake, right? I might want to have these things I might want to do, could include, I wanna read 100 books this year. I want to create a justice based unit that's brand new for my students this year. I want to be might include, I might want to be an educational blogger. I might want to be a keynote speaker at a conference this year. Right? So what are the things you want to be? I want to be peaceful, right? What are the things that you want to have do and be? And then think about the big chefs that are going to get you there next. I want you to take stock of your health and I use the acronym based needs because this is what I have used before. I've talked about it in the blog before before we even had the podcast. Right? And this is belonging, autonomy, survival and enjoyment. And so when we think about the core needs of any person, I use these with conflict resolution and I teach these two students often at the source of the conflict, whether it's a student, student conflict, student teacher, conflict teacher, teacher, conflict, family conflict one of those B A. 00:07:27 S. E base needs a present again, belonging autonomy, survival and enjoyment. So I want you to think about and take stock of how am I doing right? So for belonging to, what degree is my need for belonging met right now in my life, What would it look like if I were thriving? If I had a ton of belonging, what would that actually look like for me? And then what actions can you take to make this happen to make the thriving happen within this component? So same questions for all four needs again, what degrees it meant now, what would it look like to thrive in this area and what actions can I take to make it happen? Okay, and then I want you to prioritize one of those because if we are pulled in several different directions, we are not going to make as much progress as we want. So let's highlight or prioritize one area, one need this year. You can prioritize a different need next year. But what is one area this year that you really want to prioritize? Um, and then speaking of priorities, we have a two page kind of monthly priority sheet in there in the planner as well. 00:08:32 So determine what your big priority for september, maybe that's just building class culture. I want everyone in my class to feel valued by the end of september. That is the goal. I don't care if anything else gets done. If I had to pick one thing, that is the primary goal, right? Something like that. As I'm flipping through, I'm seeing there are tabs for each month, you can kind of quickly orient yourself to a month, there's some extra notes space throughout which is fine and at the start of each month there is an inspirational quote which is just I think so fun. Uh, there's also a calendar and asks you as we prioritized for the year, a base need each month you get to prioritize a base need as well and each month you get two priors, what do I want to have do and be for this month what is coming up most important? So if I want a lake house down the road, um, that might not be my first month school. I'm just gonna get a lake house next month, right? Maybe my have for this month is um, I want to have a new shirt, right? A new shirt is a smaller goal for me, Right? 00:09:34 And so that's this month's priority. So the next pieces that we want to clear our plates as much as possible. We want to give away tasks that do not need to be on our plates. This could be at work, this could be at home, ideally both. But each week I'm going to ask you to clear out eight tasks, eight tasks each week. So that is more than one each day. If you can't quite get to eight at first, start with one, start with to start with three, whatever, wherever feels comfortable. But eventually I want you having like three a day, that's the ultimate goal. But we're gonna, we're gonna do eight as the goal for the week. I want you to name the action. So what is it? So maybe, um, you know, it is doing the dishes. So the action for, let's say monday's dishes, I'm going to assign this to another member of my household. I'm going to determine when and how I want to tell them or ask them to do this and I'm going to write it all down. Right? So I might say the action is monday's dishes. I'm assigning it to my partner when I'm going to tell them is um sunday night. 00:10:45 And how is I'm going to say, Hey, I am feeling really overwhelmed and stressed and I feel myself starting to get sick and so I don't really want to crash. Right? I need to take care of myself. And I know that self care is actually preventative, right? It's not responsive, it's not reactive. So I need to say tomorrow I need maybe like 20 more minutes to myself. So anything related to the dishes tomorrow, I need to hand off to you. Can you take that on for me please. Right. So I'm going to probably not have that much space to write all that down, but I'm going to write some notes down in the planner to prepare myself to ask or to give away that task. All right, Once we have cleared our plates, we're gonna use 50 40 10 planning. I've talked about this a ton on the podcast. This is the basis for my freebie, My 50 40 10 packet as well as the course work. Let's teach more. So what we want to do is choose activities that are going to help us make the most of the limited planning time that we have. I know we don't have as much as we want, but the goal is to not take work home? 00:11:47 So each week we're gonna have a top priority, We're gonna name it And then we're going to say, what are the key ideas that I'm going to take with me to plan lessons? 50% of my planning time. I want to spend planning lessons. So what are the big things that I need to do? What are the tasks, what are the activities I can leverage? And I list several for you? So for example, I want to plan lessons in less time 50% of the time, let's say I have, I don't know, um for easy math, let's say four hours a week for planning time. So I'm going to say that I have again 50% of that two hours just to plan my lessons for the whole week. So that means I need some lessons that are going to be quick to plan, but high impact. So Socratic seminars are always a good one. If I've been doing a lot of text stuff, I've introduced a lot of texts, videos, um content to students now, I just want them to discuss it to put it together to respond to an interesting, engaging question. I'm gonna use the Socratic seminar that's in my activity bank on this page, it reminds me, oh, I can just do that, right? 00:12:51 Oh, student presentations, so that's less work for me. Right? Students have been given a lot of stuff lately. I'm going to leverage a student presentation day, I'm going to ask them to present on a question or a topic or just to synthesize, right? You can use something else. Maybe a jigsaw. Another protocol that you usually use that is high leverage, high impact, but it's low prepped for you. Again, professional learning is going to be 40% of this time and then giving feedback is 10%. So for professional learning, identify where you're going to learn. Maybe I want to listen to a podcast as I walk to get my lunch on my lunch hour. And so that could be time that you spend and kind of do double duty there. Um giving feedback, How do you basically this one is how do you lessen the feedback? We're always giving feedback, but how do we give it more efficiently? Maybe we use auto graded quizzes. If we're giving feedback on content that has a right or wrong answer, we don't need to manually grade that right. The next piece of this planner is we have to ask what is most essential and I love this question, Greg Mcewan has a whole podcast or had a whole podcast. 00:13:57 He just recently changed his podcast. But about this question right, what is most essential? If we had to pick one thing? Just one, we cannot have two, what would it be, what is your priority for each day? So each day you're going to say what is most essential today at the start of the day. Well you could actually do it the night before, whatever, whatever works for you. Um Sometimes I do all of mine for the week at the beginning of the week. But then I usually have to edit the end of the day. How do you feel in one word you're going to focus on your feelings over how productive you were and you're gonna see a big shift in how you approach your work, in, your reflections on your work and how you change your work and are willing to let go of things when I don't do this when I forget to do this and I think about more productivity based goals than feeling goals for my workday, radical shift. I feel more burnt out. I am constantly feeling behind. I usually get sick right, these are important. So beginning of each day, what is most essential today? 00:15:02 End of each day I feel in one word at the end of the week. So that's going to happen each week. Each day you kind of have to check in around these things at the end of the week. I want you to do a time audit and inventory of how you spend your planning time. So you can do it kind of throughout the week. Just kind of noting how many hours did I spend less than planning this day. What about professional learning? Giving feedback. What's the other stuff I spent time on, how much time did I spend on it? And what was it, what got in the way, what's in the other stuff category And I want you to come up with a percentage. So how much of your time are you spending on lesson planning, professional learning, giving feedback and other stuff is your other stuff category? Like 60% of your planning time because that's nuts. That's bananas. Right? We need to clarify what that is. We need to potentially talk to our boss, figure out what it is we know based on the research, what is high impact for our students and that is spending time on lesson planning and professional learning and giving feedback. Those are the three big categories. If we are pulled in to do other things that are not supporting student instruction. 00:16:08 We have to figure out how to take them off our plates so that might necessitate a conversation with the boss. It's going to be way easier if you can identify weeks of having inventory, how you spend your planning time and note this is the next activity, how these activities are or are not affecting your big wins, your student achievement. Right? So at the end of each week you're going to write down all the things that you have done again. You can continue to do this throughout the week and just kind of note them as you go so that you don't have to try to remember things you did monday on friday. That can be hard sometimes for me and then I want you to draw a line from the activities to big wins. You categorize all you list all the things that you did, all the big wins you had this week and then you draw a line from the activity to the win. What gave you the big win, The activities that have the most wins connected to them. They get to stay, you want to do those a lot right? There's like 80, principle 80% of the results come from 20% of the things, we do. We want to keep the 20%. So this is kind of, how do I identify those? 00:17:10 20 and you want to make this a regular practice now at the end of each month it's gonna flip to the end of the month here you're going to do those things each week that we just talked about the end of the month. You are going to categorize the challenges that you had. What are the big challenges for the month? Which of them are technical. So this is from adaptive leadership scholarship here. Technical being I can fix it if I learned how to uh you know for example I have technical challenge. I spent an extra three hours trying to figure out how to do this special thing with google forms. I watched a tutorial youtube video when I fixed it. Right. So that was a huge challenge but it was technical, I just had to learn the skill to get a little tutorial fixed and which of the challenges. So that's one part or one option for challenges. The second option for challenges is that they are not technical, they are adaptive and that is about an underlying belief, have it or loyalty, it is not about learning how to, but it is stirring up intense emotion, it is something that is causing friction at a much deeper level than just not knowing how to do something. 00:18:18 So you're kind of not living in alignment with your values where there's a clash of values somewhere something is not being spoken about, it is going unspoken, a lot of organizational challenges are often unspoken adaptive challenges and that's why we don't make progress. We want to identify at the end of each month, where are our challenges lying, technical, adaptive, what's kind of the percent of each. And then at the very back of the planner, this is so exciting. I always find myself thinking kind of daydreaming about all of the potential things that I could do in the future. Unit ideas, um ideas for what I uh you know, might use as a quote for a circle that I am holding at a particular time, um professional development. I want to lead for my peers, Maybe an idea for a specific student or an idea for you know, physical wellness, I want to, you know, try this in my in my workout plan next week ideas for family activities, um maybe you're on a particular committee and you want to bring a particular idea to that committee. 00:19:28 So I have all these ideas and I just constantly want to write them down, but I never have the concrete space that's like centralized to write them down. So often I will have things in my phone in my notes app, I have some things in a google doc, some things in a different google doc, something's in google, keep some things that I email to myself, it's like, I don't know where to find all of the things and then I lose them and I have these great ideas. I come across years later when they're no longer relevant and I say, oh my gosh, I really wish I was able to find that when I actually needed it. So at the end you have several pages with all sorts of categories, so you can kind of categorize all the fun ideas that you have in your day in one central location and when you want to go back to remember them, you just flip to the end of the book and you find them there and you can implement. So I hope this was helpful as you gear up for another school year for many of you, I know you have weeks left to go. So nowhere is enjoy your summer. But if you are listening to this when it airs, um you know, the year is coming at some point and whenever you are ready to implement these ideas, I can't wait to hear how they go. 00:20:40 Whether you have the planner or not again, if you do want to act fast because there are a very, very limited supply. In fact, I'm hoping by the time this airs that we actually still have some left, you can check that information out, you can grab your calendar today and an calendar planner at bit dot li slash work less planner. So that's B I T dot L Y slash work less planner. All lower case. Thank you so much for listening. I am so excited to hear how this planner works for you. I am so excited to get all the feedback. Send me an email at hello at lindsey Beth Lyons dot com. If you want to preorder for your team next year for your staff, please let me know we are going to try to get those the order in early this year for the upcoming years. Calendars, enjoy the rest of your summer, have a wonderful school year when you get there and remember all of these strategies to implement so that you can work. I didn't teach more if you're leaving this episode, wanting more. 00:21:44 You're going to love my live coaching intensive curriculum bootcamp. I help one department or grade team create feminist anti racist curricula that challenges affirms and inspires all students. We leave current events into course content and amplify student voices, which skyrockets engagement and academic achievement. It energizes educators feeling burns out and it's just two days plus you can reuse the same process any time you create a new unit, which saves time and money. If you can't wait to bring this to your staff, I'm inviting you to sign up for a 20 minute call with me, grab a spot on my calendar at www dot lindsey beth Lyons dot com slash contact Until next time leaders continue to think Big act brave and be your best self. This podcast is a proud member of the teach Better podcast network, better today, better tomorrow and the podcast. To get you there, explore more podcasts at teach better dot com slash podcasts and we'll see you at the next episode.
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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
March 2025
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