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.  

Ethical Education and the Liberal Arts

In "This is Water," an address David Foster Wallace delivered at Kenyon College's 2005 commencement (available here excerpted and as audio; here as abridged text; and here complete for purchase; it is so very worth the read), Wallace argued that a liberal arts education offers not so much lessons in how to think, as the freedom to choose what to think about.

Humankind's "natural default setting," he suggested, is total self-absorption: "Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence." Such thinking can only lead to misery: "If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you . . . probably won't consider possibilities that aren't annoying and miserable."

As an alternative, Wallace said, the liberal arts bestow a "most precious" freedom: "attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day."

I remember the teachers who summoned me to think this way, who took time away from rote content to have us confront issues and perspectives far beyond our limited experiences. At the same time, they never trivialized our experience. Rather, they offered us the space and attention to work through our issues--which felt very real to us!--and to explore connections between our experiences and others'.

Perhaps that was easier at Moses Brown, a Friends school with traditions like Meeting for Worship, open community forums, and an "Opinion Board" to which students posted positions on all the major issues of the day. (Invited at a recent alumni event to reflect on the school's traditional values and suggest future priorities, another alumna suggested "ethical leadership" was "granted" as a priority). Oh, what a world! (I despair sometimes when students at my current school get themselves excused from presentations by guest speakers like Tim Wise and Sheryl WuDunn, taking the opportunity for an early weekend; but those failures are ours, not theirs).

How can I--how can we--become like those ethical teachers? How will our liberal arts education live up to Wallace's promise? (And how will it do so at secular schools, within communities predicated at least in part on what Wallace deemed "the so-called real world of men and money and power"?)

It takes committing to ethical education, right alongside skills and content and college preparedness, as a preeminent goal. At secular institutions, we must be especially forthright about that commitment, lest we be accused of covertly proselytizing, and steadfast about it, lest we be accused of paying lip service. (To pay lip service to ethics is perhaps the most damaging behavior we can model). Why not, for instance, put ethical questions on par with essential questions?

It takes affording that commitment time: time away from the traditional skills and content, time for students to confront the real world outside our classrooms, time for self-reflection, for them to see themselves as a part of that real world rather than apart from it. I know myself, and I know if I don't write that time into my curriculum, I'll never find it along the way. Reading a post by John Spencer, I was struck by a class ritual he alluded to called "Philosophical Fridays." Perhaps that's what it takes; perhaps as well we need "Worldly Wednesdays." As true believers in and practitioners of the liberal arts, we have to be able to help students connect such discussions to the skills and content of our courses.

It takes giving our students voice, and agency, and reason to trust that we are listening. We cannot raise adults by infantilizing students. "Education," John Dewey reminds us, ". . . is a process of living, and not preparation for future living." Students need space to try on identities, to take stands, to thrash out their conflicts. That's what those Moses Brown traditions achieved, and though there they were founded on Quaker beliefs in The Light Within and the Inner Voice, such commitments needn't be doctrinal.

"In the day-to day trenches of adult life," Wallace told the Kenyon graduates, "there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice is what to worship."

To live up to Wallace's promise for the liberal arts, we have to decide what our schools and our courses will worship, and we have to build structures for keeping those objects in focus.

When I began this career, I justified it saying that the students we teach in independent schools, almost irrespective of the choices they make, will end up in positions of power, and that for the sake of our society they had better arrive there with a conscience.

It's a challenge every day not to forget that mission amidst the swirl of metaphor, characterization, and argumentative topic sentences. It's a challenge not to revert to my natural default setting, not to sacrifice the liberal arts' promise on the altars of content and college preparation. It's a challenge worth struggling with.

Over/under: How much planning is really necessary? Part II: Under

Five years into my career now, I must've passed the 1,000 class mark a while back. I've over-prepared for some, and yea, I've underprepared for plenty. Under-preparing doesn't have to be the end of the world: I pride myself at being good on my feet, and often the best discussions result when I just surrender the reins, zip my mouth, and let the kids hash out meaning themselves. But it's still not a good habit to get into.

I'm guilty of a different kind of under-planning this year, though, and it's a mistake I'll never make again.

The week leading up to the first day of school is so frenetic. There are classrooms and offices to arrange, meetings, meetings, meetings, units to plan, meetings, and to top it all off, there's just a little summer left, so I'm trying to savor late evenings, late mornings, and as much time as possible by the water. This year I was beginning a new position as Technology Coordinator, which meant group trainings, more meetings, and colleagues dropping in with questions just frequently enough to keep me from completing any task of my own so long as I was in the building. (And to my colleagues: I loved every second of it, so please don't stop!!)

As the first day of classes loomed nearer and nearer, I knew I should be thinking about my course outline and expectations. My handouts always had been traditional, describing the course, promoting respect above all, outlining the late policy, the revision policy, etc. I recall thinking I wanted to democratize the expectations: allow the kids to define what it means to be prepared, what our discussion rules would be, when it's appropriate to leave for the bathroom. Sounds great, right?

I'm sure it could have been, had I committed myself to doing it. I could have written it down, devoted some time to it in planning the first few sessions. But in that frenetic week before school started, and through the electrifying first week that followed, I forgot. I just jumped right in to classes, and didn't look back.

That was poor planning.

Successful classroom management begins and ends with clear expectations. This is not a corner to cut. We would have been far better off with undemocratic expectations than we were with unclear ones. Time spent early on to establish expectations and rituals, to build a classroom community, is never time wasted.

Lesson learned.

Over/under: How much planning is really necessary? Part I: Over

It was September 2008. I was fewer than four months out of college, and a night away from beginning the teaching career I'd aspired to for years. I would teach three sections the next day: two of sophomore (Form IV) Humanities, and one of Form V American Literature....And I was going to be prepared.

The sophomore summer reader at this school was just a little book (only a poem, really!): The Aeneid. The juniors had "read" Huckleberry Finn. You know, a couple lightweight texts, no worries about leaving students alone with dense Classical allusion or satire on America's racist past...

I planned every five minutes of those classes: I knew, following a trip through the detailed syllabus, all the questions I'd ask, and everywhere I'd lead the discussion. I bet I even planned my jokes.

And then, of course, the kids hadn't read. Or they hadn't read well. And I adapted, and we all adjusted, and after a few weeks we got to know each other and started to learn.

I taught at that school for two years, and continued to plan heavily--but I'd learned I had to be just as prepared to improvise.

Fast forward two years. New school, new material--this time of my own choosing. I had let go of planning every minute of my classes, but I still knew everything I wanted us to cover and the order I hoped we'd cover it in.

The kids were so enthusiastic. It was going great!

...for me.

After a few weeks I got feedback that the students felt I was stifling them.

And they were right. As always, I'd known where I wanted the conversation to go; and as it turns out, I'd taken all that enthusiasm, that excitement over the vibrant texts we were reading, and I'd tried to wrangle it, to wrestle and shape it toward my ends, regardless of what the students really were thinking and wanted to say. I had them excited, and I was wasting it, because my excitement was more important to me than theirs was.

Fast forward another couple years, to now. Most days, I plan one question, and I give it to students for a blog reflection ahead of class. When it turns out to be the right question--it doesn't always--we spend long enough on it in the first part of discussion to send us in plenty of productive directions for the rest of the period. I can't help but have some ideas of where I'd like things to go, but I'm trying hard to let go of the reins and allow the students to follow their own ideas. On days when it wasn't the right question, I diagnose: where did I lose them? I try to find something that we all did understand, and build from there. This is an act of improvisation. It's harried, it's exhausting; but it's genuine. In that same spirit, I don't bother planning my discussion questions (except the unit's essential questions) weeks ahead of time, because they have to come out of the progress we've made recently, which can't be predicted.

I expect I'll write a great deal more in this space about leading discussion. There's so much more for me to learn! But I've learned for sure it's a waste of time--and worse, a pedagogical sin--to plan too much, and to prioritize the plan over the students' understanding.