Maximizing Efficiency: How to Unleash the Power of Batching as a Teacher

 Have you heard of batching that idea of doing the same or similar task all at once? You’re just doing the same thing over and over and over again. Kind of like a factory, but it is very efficient because you are just. Not having to switch your brain tasks and your thinking. Well, today we are going to be talking about unleashing your power of batching because Crystal gave me a question the.

Asked, what regular weekly routine do you follow for batching? And that is what we are answering today. Welcome to the Secondary Teacher Podcast, the podcast for middle and high school teachers juggling multiple preps to get the strategies to reduce overwhelm so that you don’t have to choose between being an effective teacher and prioritizing important relationships.

I’m your host, Khristen Masek, a 10-year high school engineering teacher, former middle school assistant principal and teacher coach. Every week, we will discuss strategies, systems, and time-saving tips to help you not only survive, but thrive as a multiple prep teacher. With full transparency, I’m going to let you know that I am much better at batching now than I was even five years ago, and when I started teaching, I don’t even, I’m sure batching was a thing, but I don’t think we ever.

Talked about it in the realm of teaching, but especially now that I have moved into administration and the only way I can get things done is to batch. We’re going to be talking about batching. And specifically when we’re talking about your weekly routines, and I’m going to kind of zoom in for Crystal and I’m going to be talking about batching during your prep or planning periods and some things that I’ve learned over the years, and then also things that I have learned from other people.

The first thing is that when batching, I like to batch all of my planning during the same time and. It looks different depending on how much I can get done, but it could be that I am batching an entire week’s worth of lessons for one or two preps, depending on once again how much time I have. And I really like to do that together because when I’m looking at a week’s worth of lessons for a prep or for a class, then I can see how it’s going to be adding on to one another.

And it also allows me, when I’m doing that planning and then I’m going to be doing that teaching, I know where I’m going, this is going to be something I teach on Tuesday. This is what I’m gonna do on Wednesday, this is on Thursday, and then I’m reviewing and. Comparing all of them. As I’m planning, I can look and say, this is what the skills they should have learned.

Here’s how the bell work. All works together. And that’s how I like to do my planning in batches. Is I on a weekly basis and if I can then get one or more preps done during a planning period, and then that gives me more time to do my prep. Now I’ve also heard. Of people who will do planning on a particular day, which that’s something that I like to do as well.

I like to have my planning done so that I can enjoy my weekend. And I’ve talked about this before, but I like to plan a Tuesday to a Tuesday, Wednesday, Wednesday, or Thursday to Thursday so that by the time I get to Friday, if I’m trying to do planning on Friday, it’s really hard because I’m exhausted.

And then. I have Sunday scaries if I’m doing Monday, Monday because then I am up late at night on Sunday, which I like to rest on Sundays, and that makes it kind of difficult when I’m worried about what I’m going to teach on Monday. I like to have through Monday, through all of Monday already planned by the time Friday hits.

That is one strategy that I really enjoy. The other one that I’ve heard people doing is grading on certain days. They grade Tuesdays and Thursdays. Now I have an episode 54 that talks about some mind shifts. In grading and that might work for you. I personally hated grading. I don’t like it. I think it takes a ton of time and I would spend a lot of time grading, the first handful of papers or assignments or whatever, and then I literally would just get bored and I wasn’t doing.

My due diligence in giving feedback and it just wasn’t really working for me. If you do have grading and if you don’t like to grade like me, do not put it all on one day. Don’t set those because you’re just setting yourself up for failure. I know from experience that I would put it off, I would take home things in hopes of grading.

And so I’d grade while I was doing Netflix, and once again, not very good feedback. My students weren’t getting anything from me when it comes to me grading. And then the other thing is that I would procrastinate it, so I would try to come up with a million other things to do so that I didn’t have to grade.

If you have grading or grade marks that need to be done on a regular basis, I would say that when you are batching those, it’s still good to grade all of it together, but instead of having a day devoted to grading that you set aside 30 minutes per. Planning period or 30 minutes and you set a timer and you decide, Hey, I’m gonna do this much on this day, this much on this day.

And then you just work your little heart out for that 30 minutes and then you’re good to go. This same strategy can apply to email as well. I would set a timer and decide when you are going to check your email, whether that’s a once a day, once every other day, once a week. What? How are you going to do that?

And, Plug that in so you still can batch it. You can still be doing all of them at once, and there are other ways that you can make it so that it’s more efficient on doing your email as far as flagging or only answering emails that you can answer in less than two minutes, or kind of strategizing for your energy level.

When is going to be the best time Monday mornings? I did tend to check my emails on Monday mornings that made it so that I didn’t look at them over the weekend. Although you can totally cheat and you can totally look at your emails if you want over the weekend, but I would recommend that if you feel like you need to respond to them, that you do.

A response that’s going to ascend on a later date. People don’t know that you are checking your email over the weekend. And that’s another random thing. It has nothing to do with batching, but you can batch those tasks to gather.

My recommendation when it comes to batching, Would be to prioritize your lesson planning, because that’s what’s going to be. To the benefit of you and your students and batch an entire week at a time. And then see how that fits in with your multiple preps, if you can fit all of that into one prep period.

Awesome. Or even if just Tuesday, whenever you have time, whether that’s before school, during your prep period after school, and that day is devoted to lesson planning. And then the rest of your week can be the prepping part of it, creating any sort of resources so you could create all of your assignments or all of your assessments on a certain day.

Now, that also helps with batching as well because you could have a similar project or assignment that goes through all of your multiple preps, but you are just changing. Up your prompts or your content, and that will save you a ton of time as well. If you are having students play a game like Taboo, then you could have those resources that you’re developing for that game, or if you find something somewhere online that you can actually have all of that ready so that you know that when you are giving that lesson in class.

Today is the taboo day. You can batch your planning, but you can also batch what you’re doing inside of class so that you don’t have that mental fatigue and that it maximizes your efficiency. Crystal, I hope that helped you out kind of knowing what my bathroom routine looks like. Some dos and don’ts and it can help you figure out what you want your weekly routine to look like.