A teachers’ guide to taking control of your planning workload
Last year’s Reducing Teachers’ Workload reports clearly outline that it is everyone’s responsibility to reduce teacher workload. Using points from the Government’s Reducing Teacher Workload poster, we identify steps you can take to reduce your planning workload.
1. Give lesson plans the proportionate status they merit, and no more
Look objectively at the planning you are doing and whether the effort you are putting in will have a genuine impact on learning or could your time be better spent? Can you reduce the detail, adapt previous plans or those of a colleague?
2. Look to identify blocks of time to allow for proper collaborative planning
Whilst the timetable and your PPP time are fixed, are there opportunities for you and your colleagues to plan schemes of work collaboratively? Identify elements of the syllabus you or your colleagues are strong in — judging this by learner outcome, and allocate these to each other.
3. Remember planning together needs to be accompanied by regular and professional discussion which focuses on the outcomes for pupils
Be careful that collaborative planning doesn’t resemble house building with everyone responsible for a specific task and never working together or learning from each other. Build in opportunities for professional discussion about why certain approaches positively impact on pupil outcomes to support the whole team to develop.
4. Have high quality resources and schemes of work already in place and easily accessible
Be confident in your planning and do your bit to develop a culture of sharing, remembering not to hide planning away in filing cabinets or private folders. Colleagues will adapt your schemes of work for the needs of their specific pupils but this isn’t a reflection of their quality.
5. Reminders of what not to do
Don’t do more work than pupils, make excessively detailed daily or weekly plans a routine expectation at the expense of collaboratively produced schemes of work or plan to please external organisations.
And finally
Print the poster and put it where you can see it
The poster is designed as a reminder to everyone of clear dos and don’ts from the three workload review groups as well as what inspectors expect and don’t expect to see. Putting it somewhere you can see it, such as in your planner, will help keep its points at the front of your mind.
As a teacher, Atif Mahmood saw the burden of planning first-hand and how, well-designed technology could support teachers. From this, he developed Lumici — collaborative lesson planning software to, save teachers time every day, meet the recommendations of the white paper and improve learner outcomes.
Find out more about how Teacherly can reduce your workload https://teacherly.io/
