Time-Management: Planning Out Your "Ideal Week" of Course Activities

Vicki Davis wrote this week about a time-management technique that involves planning out your “ideal week”, plugging it into your calendar not as absolute commitments, but for easy reference, and using that reference to try to spend your time as best as you possibly can. 

I’ve operated this year on a system similar to Vicki’s, for class time as well as out-of-class time.

Let me start with a few disclaimers. Feel free to skip these if you’re basically just willing to cut me some slack:

1. (The don’t tell Grant Wiggins on me disclaimer): I don’t pretend for a second that your ideal week should look like mine! In fact, my ideal week has changed since I completed the exercise below, and it needs to continue to change. This post is about a time-management trick, not curriculum- and lesson-planning. Teachers really ought to plan how we spend class-time on a unit-by-unit basis, not once a year! I’m a deep believer in (often practitioner of, always aspirant to) backward design.  
2. (The rephrasing disclaimer #1 disclaimer): As Vicki suggests, the “ideal week” is not  an absolute. It mustn’t be! it’s a handy way of reminding myself to cover all my bases. 
3. (The alternate universe disclaimer): At my school we’re on an eight-day rotating block schedule (A-day through H-day), and actual days of the week (Monday-Friday) bear no relevance to our class schedule. So I’ll demonstrate an ideal rotation, not an ideal week. It’s just about confusing to us as it likely will be to you!
4. (The nerdy disclaimer): Hi, my name is Ted, and (especially for an English teacher) I’m addicted to spreadsheets. I use them for applications like this where they work but are pretty unnecessary. Forgive the nerdy madness that follows, and if the concept appeals to you, find a process to make it work for you.

STEP 1: Prioritizing time, and distinguishing class work from home work:

1. I broke out the major work of our course into categories, far left.
2. Then I asked, in an ideal week, what percent of our total minutes (class work and homework) would be spent on that category of work?
3. Of that percentage, what percent would be spent in class, and what percent would be spent at home?
4. Then using the available time in a single rotation, I translated those percentages into minutes of coursework and homework

STEP 2: Divvying out the minutes across an ideal rotation, considering:

1. Lengths of class periods and intervals between them
2. Spaced and interleaved practice (If you haven’t yet read Make it Stick, stop reading this and start reading that)
3. Regularity of assessment

STEP 3: Creating those ideal days as templates on Planboard (where I do most of my lesson planning)

Then how do I use it?

When planning a lesson on Planboard, I start with the template for that rotation day:

Occasionally, I’ll use this template as a bare-bones outline for my class, filling in my precise plans for each component. More often than not, I’ll fill in something slightly or completely different.

The point is, the template prompts me to cover my bases. I’m an English teacher: I live for classroom discussion. Left to my own devices (as I was in the first couple years of my career), I would do little else. With this little hack, I’m doing a whole lot better by my curriculum and my students.