How to Automate Your Classroom for a Stress-Free Teaching Experience

Looking for a way to automate your classroom without spending your weekends and evenings working after contract hours? In this video I share what my automated classroom looks like and the top 3 steps I took to get there.

These teacher time-saving strategies will help you confidently save time as a teacher, minimize teacher overwhelm, prevent you from staying late and start leaving work on time, and prevent teacher burnout.

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I’m Helena, a coach for new and first-year teachers sharing knowledge on how to have a thriving career and personal life.

The Present Teacher Podcast is a resource for classroom management, classroom organization, time management, and teacher wellness. Follow along and learn how to thrive in the classroom and in life.

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Transcript

Helena Hains: 0:00

So you've heard about automating your classroom and you've been struggling with managing your teacher workload and you're wondering how you can go about making things run more smoothly and you want to find out more on how to do that.

Helena Hains: 0:14

In today's content, I'll be sharing everything on what is automating your classroom and how to go about doing it. So, with that being said, let's dive in. Hey, teacher Bestie, my name is Helena and I'm the creator of the Present Teacher Podcast. I'm a first-year teacher coach and in this podcast you are going to learn everything from simple, actionable classroom management, socialist learning and teacher wellness strategies. You know that impact you want to make in the classroom we're going to make it happen here. Want to make in the classroom we're going to make it happen here. So the first question you might be asking yourself is what is automation? Automation is where you run your classroom on autopilot. I like to think about it like this If you were to sit back and just let your kids or the classroom run itself, what would that be like? That's essentially what having your classroom run on autopilot is. It's where you have strong systems in place that you could sit back and just kind of watch the school day go by and everything would run smoothly. Now you might think that the main thing I'm talking about is classroom management, but that's not necessarily always the case. There are multiple different systems that run your classroom, and so having each system running effectively is going to really help you in having a classroom that's running on autopilot, to the point where you don't have to think about it or do anything. It just runs by itself. So you might be wondering how do we get there? How do we have a classroom running on autopilot?

Helena Hains: 1:52

Well, see, what I often see whether it's from other teachers that I'm coaching or my own story is I see a lot of teachers have a long to-do list with a bunch of random tasks attached to them. There could be things like a typical school day could look like respond to that parent email, write next week's newsletter, finish the lesson plans from last week, don't forget to copy the assessments for later today, don't forget to reach out to the coworker about that field trip coming up, and then also I need to make a copy of that homework for that student who was missing their homework for this week, and et cetera. You see, when you have long to-do lists like this energetically, it can feel very draining. It could feel like you're being pulled in multiple directions at once and by the end of the day you're completely exhausted, only to look at your to-do list to have more things to do before the end of the day. So here's what I recommend doing instead and what I found energetically works better for me, and that is batching. So batching is where you do like-minded tasks at a similar time to eliminate task switching.

Helena Hains: 3:09

So task switching is it takes anywhere from seven to 21 minutes for you to be at a full focus level of performance in order to carry on a task, and every time you switch from one task to another that's unreal, unlinked or not similar then it's going to take you those seven minutes to fully focus. So pause. A good example of this could be if you're going from lesson planning to writing that newsletter, to printing something out, to prepping for tomorrow's small group, to responding to that email. All of these things is going to take some time and energy for you to go from one activity to another. However, if I were to sit you down and say okay for the next hour, I want you to write out as many lesson plans as you can for the upcoming days or weeks. That feels better energetically and you're not task switching from one activity to another. Instead, you just have one focus for the day and you don't feel like you're being pulled in opposite directions. You just have one main focus and you're able to fully focus on that one thing, and again energetically. This just feels better than being pulled into multiple directions. So that's why I recommend theming your days, which is a form of batching, where you just have one main focus for each day, like I talked about earlier.

Helena Hains: 4:32

Maybe one day it's lesson planning talked about earlier, maybe one day it's lesson planning. So when you work on one main thing each day, it helps you to focus and to get more of your to-do list done quicker, instead of doing lesson plans for just this week. If I sat down for an hour, I might be able to get the next two weeks done, and then eventually I'll get even faster and be three or four weeks done at a time, and then I'm weeks out in my planning and prepping. So you might be wondering how do I know what to focus on each day? Well, you can just pick something, like I talked about earlier. But if you want to find out more in regards to how I like to run my classroom running activities, or how I like to run my classroom and theme my days. Next week, I'll be taking you behind the scenes to show you exactly what I do in order to theme and batch my days. All right, so that wraps up everything you should know about automating your classroom.

Helena Hains: 5:30

If you found this useful, make sure to like and subscribe. And if you want to take it a step further, you can check out the Ultimate First Year Teacher Guide here. In this guide, I share the top 10 questions and answers I answer, or the top questions I get in regards to being a first year teacher and automating your classroom. And then, if you want to take it an even step further, I want to invite you to join the Ultimate Present Teacher or the Present Teacher Circle. In the Present Teacher Circle, I share everything in regards to what systems I have in the classroom and how I run them, so that you can take what's working for me and morph them into your own. We cover things like classroom management, planning, prepping, data collection, communication with families, communication with admin and co-workers and work-life balance and everything in between. So if there's something you want to learn more about, make sure to check out the link in the description down below.

Helena Hains: 6:31

As always, remember we are stronger together and I'll see you in the next one. Teacher Bestie Bye. Always remember we are stronger together and I'll see you in the next one. Teacher bestie bye. Thank you so much for joining me on today's episode. I hope that you were able to take away some value that will help you thrive inside and out of the classroom. It would mean the world to me if you could take five seconds right now and leave a review on this podcast. And if you found this podcast especially helpful, make sure to take a screenshot of this episode right now and tag me on your socials to let me know you're listening. As always, remember that we are stronger together. With all the love in the world. Helena, aka the Present Teacher, see you next time. Teacher Bestie. Teacher bestie.