Tips For Balancing The Workload Among Multiple Preps

You may be the most organized and well-prepared teacher in the world…until you’re juggling balancing multiple preps. When I first started at my current school I was responsible for seven different ELA courses in a school year, five different preps each semester. My first year felt like a marathon (especially since I was pregnant with my first child the entire time!). I taught each class each day, went home and took a nap, ate a meal, then started planning.

Truth time: planning took longer than three hours most nights. I also left no time for grading, so weekends were filled with grading for those five preps. I bet I worked 60 hours a week, looking back.

Now that I think about that year, I know that it was not sustainable. A certain amount of prep work is expected with every first-year teacher, but the effort I was putting in was avoidable.

Last year I found myself teaching five preps each semester again, including several new courses. But this time, I had plans and tools in place that kept me from working terrible hours and spending weekends doing schoolwork.

Here are some tips you can follow to protect your time and be as efficient as possible when juggling multiple preps.

Disclaimer: This blog post is from the experience of teaching numerous high school preps in the same subject level. While there are many teachers juggling preps for different subjects and grades, I don’t have as much experience there, so not all these tips may apply to you. And, you have my sympathy!

1: Write everything down

One of my biggest regrets in that first year of teaching was that so many of my lesson plans were jotted onto scrap sheets of paper. I used them, then tossed them. Then, I relied on my notoriously terrible memory to replicate that plan again next year.

Now, I’ve learned my lesson. Everything gets written down.

All my notes are in the form of PowerPoints, which I save. All my handouts are in Word or PDF, also saved. Even my brainstorming is written in my teacher planner (see tip #2) or even hashed out in a Word doc and saved as a brainstorming document. When I must approach the unit or exercise the next year or semester, I turn to these documents and see what I did and think about what must change.

This doesn’t mean I have “one-and-done” lessons. I love to change, swap, and update materials all the time. But I absolutely hate to start from scratch. In the past two school years I’ve been given a new course to teach each year (first Journalism, then World Lit). I was able to devote 2-4 hours per week, mostly during my at-school prep hours, to preparing those lessons because all the lessons for my other classes were saved and written down.

Tip number 1.5 shouldn’t have to be said but it will: Save everything, and not just on your computer. I’ve seen many teachers lose years of work because their hard drive got fried and they’re met with only wry laughter when IT learns they didn’t save it to the cloud or an online space.

2: Treat your planner like a journal

I like to tell new teachers to reflect on their lessons and units after teaching them, but honestly who has the time! So, rather than asking you to take an hour each day to reflect, I’d ask you to try the post-it method. If you encountered a hiccup in your lesson or unit, jot it on a post-it and stick it to the page where that happened. When you look at that planner next year, you’ll see your note to self and make appropriate changes.

Why would you do this? Because your planner is your journal. It’s your most valuable reflection of what you did, what worked, what failed, and what you forgot from a full year of teaching. When planning out a unit, I ALWAYS consult last year’s lessons in my planning book. I’ll often see scribbles, arrows, and my infamous post-its, which remind me that Hamlet needs another week or that I need to find a different short story for my thematic unit on disillusionment.

These notes help me make better lessons each year and save me from making similar mistakes as year before.

3: Balance your workload between multiple preps

I like to plan out unit by unit, so you won’t find my teacher planner filled for months in advance. Instead, I’ll know what I’m doing four weeks out for one class and only a couple of days for another.  As a teacher of multiple preps, I’ve learned that I need to ebb and flow between big workloads in my classes.

A “big” unit is one that requires a lot of grading on my end, either during the unit or at the end. My sophomores write two research papers each year, one per semester. These lessons require teaching mini-lessons, reading drafts during class time (and on my prep hours), and lengthy research papers to grade at the end.

Knowing that these 4-6 week units will take up more of my time, I try to balance my other classes to avoid too much grading during that time. For example, my AP Lit students almost always read Frankenstein during my sophomores’ career paper. I know Frankenstein inside and out and don’t need to read it each year. My teaching materials are solid and grading is pretty light during the unit. It’s a perfect counterweight to the extra efforts needed in my other classes.

When planning, try to find some balance between your various classes. If one class requires lots of effort and creativity, try to find something easier on your end for your other classes to avoid burnout.

I have found that literary circles, projects, and speech units tend to be lighter on the workload and offer more in-class work days. You can devote those days to working on other preps to keep the balance.

4: Use independent reading time for renewal

One of the greatest gifts to my sanity has been implementing independent reading. I don’t do it when I’m tired or need a break. My classes each have regularly scheduled independent reading time scheduled each week, between 30-45 minutes for each section. Because my students know to use this time wisely and quietly, I’m gifted 30-45 minutes to breathe and catch up on all of my planning.

I’ve heard good teachers say that you should use independent reading to read yourself, which I did try for a few weeks. However, I doubt that teacher juggled 3-5 preps each day. So I no longer feel guilt for using that time to catch up on grading or planning for myself. Once the program has been running for a while, I can even run and make copies during independent reading!

Helpful tip: A good independent reading program gives students lots of reading offerings and incentives for using reading time wisely. It may also require some kind of assessments depending on how or why you’re using them. Therefore, be sure not to set it up well and treat it with respect.

5: Beg, borrow, or buy

My last tip is to use ready-made curriculum, units, lessons, resources, and anything else you can get your hands on.

Personally, this has always been an issue with me. If you haven’t figured it out yet, I LOVE creating curriculum. Relying on someone else’s work has always felt unnatural to me. However, I know that had I been given some starting curriculum when I was hired, I would have used it. As your preps increase, so does your planning time. This means that you can only devote so much time to perfecting each class without burning out. In the meantime, you can find some help to hold you over.

Curriculum help can take several forms:

1. You can rely on any materials handed down by a previous teacher.
2. You can use materials shared by other members of your department. If you share a class offered by another teacher, I recommend sharing with them at least for your first year.
3. You can buy curriculum from Teachers Pay Teachers or textbook companies. *

*One quick footnote on Number 3. If you are buying curriculum because you’re teaching multiple preps, it is imperative that you ask your administrator for help in paying for any materials you need. If multiple preps are putting this strain on you, it’s more than reasonable to expect your administration to help you. Basically, I’m saying do whatever you can to avoid paying out of pocket for needs created by your difficult schedule.

I’d love to hear any other suggestions you have for surviving a difficult teacher workload caused by multiple preps. Drop be an email or comment to let me know how you cope!