My Secrets Revealed: Make Teaching Easier with Classroom Running Activities

Wondering how to get everything done as a first-year or new teacher? In this video, I share which classroom running activities I focus on in my class to get weeks out in advance.

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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Chapters

• 0:00 Efficient Classroom Running Activities
• 11:18 Building Community Through Podcast Engagement

Transcript

Helena Hains: 0:00

So you're wondering how to go about making your classroom run more efficiently and to save time managing your teacher workload. Well, last week, I shared more about what automating your classroom is and what it might look like in your classroom. Well, today, I'm going to be sharing more about what classroom running activities are. 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, social learning and teacher wellness strategies. You know that impact you want to make in the classroom. We're going to make it happen here.

Helena Hains: 0:43

If you are unfamiliar with that term, I actually came up with it. Classroom running activities are the activities you need to do to keep your classroom running. Now a quick backstory. I started the Present Teacher a couple of years ago, while I was teaching full-time and in order to keep my business running, or community running, I had to come up with income producing activities. So these are the activities that you really have to focus on as a business owner and a community builder to keep your business going and your community going strong. Well, I applied a lot of business practices to teaching and that's when I came up with the classroom running activities. So classroom running activities, like I said, are the things that you need to keep your classroom running efficiently, and I like to think of them as if you sat back and let your classroom run without doing these things for a month. Your classroom would completely fall apart.

Helena Hains: 1:48

So now that you know what classroom running activities are, you might be wondering how can you go about coming up with them. Well, there's a couple different ways you can go about coming up with them. You can just start answering the question what activities do I need to do on a month-to-month basis or week-to-week or day-to-day basis to keep my classroom running? What you'll often find is some of the activities that you're listing are things like lesson planning, grading, communications, prepping, printing stuff out, et cetera. What you probably won't find are things like fixing your bulletin board and changing out the book of the month, stuff like that.

Helena Hains: 2:30

While all those things are great, they're not necessary to do on a day-to-day or week-to-week basis to keep your classroom running. And this kind of goes back to one of the experiments done by Stephen Covey, and it was the rock in the jar method, and essentially what Stephen Covey did is he put a jar and he filled it with water, pebbles and then big rocks and sand, and when he did it that way, all of the contents in the jar was overflowing. However, he found that if he put the big rocks first, smaller pebbles, sand and then water, all the contents fit into the jar. Essentially, putting your main rocks, or main activities, first is going to give you space to do more smaller tasks during in between. That way, you have time to get everything done and better manage your workload and manage the things that absolutely need to get done versus the things that are just nice to have.

Helena Hains: 3:32

Here's another activity to help you come up with your classroom running activities. First, I want you to take a thing of sticky notes. It can be whatever color and I want you to write one activity you do each week on your sticky note, and it's going to be one sticky note per activity. So on this one I might write lesson planning. On this one it might be grading. On this one it might be inputting data. This one might be responding to parents' emails. This one might be reaching out to my team to make sure we're aligned. This one might be updating the behavior plan and etc. So you want to list out one activity per sticky note, set a timer for two to five minutes this shouldn't take too long and start brain dumping all of the things that you do on a week-to-week basis to keep your classroom running.

Helena Hains: 4:24

Now that you have a huge thing of sticky notes, I want you to take some time and start grouping tasks together. Some things might be oh, printing out worksheets is very similar to printing out this week's homework, or printing out the assessments are the same things as printing out the papers for small groups this week. Either way, all of start grouping like-minded tasks together. Essentially, you want anywhere from about four to five groups. Now, after you've come up with your groups, you're going to have these four major buckets.

Helena Hains: 5:01

If you're wondering what mine looks like, when I did this activity, I found that a majority of my buckets, or my four main buckets, were the following Planning, prepping, communication, data and grading. So when I came up with these major buckets, I then started matching each main bucket to one day of the week. So, for example, when I go about my to-do list for the week on Mondays, I'm planning. That means I'm planning my lesson plans for the week and I'm planning out my small groups for the week or the next week and then eventually, the faster I get at it, I might be doing two weeks out in advance or three weeks out into it in advance. The second day, on Tuesdays, I'll be prepping. So everything that I just planned out the week before I'm now going to go out and print and prep for the upcoming weeks. That way when it's time to do these activities they're already printed out ready to go. So essentially what I'm saying is on Tuesdays my poor staff had to worry about me being at the printer printing out all my copies for the next two or three weeks. Sorry about that.

Helena Hains: 6:11

On Wednesdays were my communication day, so any emails or newsletters or admin PDs I didn't respond to or get to I would finish on Wednesdays and then on Thursdays were my data and grading days. Everything that I did that week I would then grade and put in my students' folders to take home and then anything that I need to input data on whether that was grades or things like small group data, monthly assessments, behavior data, stuff like that I would then input on this day. Notice I only have four days done this week and that's because on Fridays I always made a catch up day. If you notice, I do a lot of energy. I work with a lot of energetics when it comes to my schedule. So on Mondays I would just simply start planning, because that took the most energy and the most brain power. And I noticed on Mondays I feel refreshed from the weekend, so I have more brain power, as opposed to like Fridays, where I honestly feel like doing nothing and just kind of spacing out and taking some me time and then it slowly goes from there. Prepping takes a little more brainpower, but not too much. And then on Wednesdays it's just communication and responding to emails and finishing PDs and then grading. It doesn't really take a lot of brainpower so I don't necessarily end up putting data. It's pretty mundane stuff, so I don't have to worry about using my full capacity.

Helena Hains: 7:44

And then on Fridays are my catch-up days. So let's say on Monday I have an assembly and I don't have a prep that day. It's not that big of a deal because I can just shift everything down or to the next day. Or if I did have a prep and I got everything done for the week, then I can use that day simply for me, whether that's going on a walk or, you know, relaxing or what, catching up with a friend, whatever it is it gives me the energy to kind of just chill and relax and do any odds and ends things that I didn't get to throughout the week. So when you do this, so in order to do this, I recommend that you theme your day, aka just pick one focus per day. What you'll notice is, when you have one focus per day, energetically it feels way better than just planning and doing a bunch of things in one single day, like planning and grading and responding to parents and all of that. It can be really hard energetically and feel like you're being pulled in 20 different directions. When you do it that way, by focusing on one main thing for that day, energetically it feels way better because you just have one focus you need to get done.

Helena Hains: 8:58

So that wraps up how I create classroom running activities and how I use them in my classroom to make teaching easier. If you want to take learn more about automating your classroom, I want to invite you to a couple different resources. The first one is I want to invite you to check out the Ultimate First-Year Teacher Guide. This answers the top questions I get in regards to being a first-year teacher and how to create systems in your classroom. The second place I would invite you to join us is the Present Teacher Circle. Now, the Present Teacher Circle works with the Thriving Teacher Framework that I created and essentially those four buckets or classroom running activities I had you come up with earlier. If it matched mine or something different I cover in the present teacher circle. Essentially, I'm showing you behind the scenes all the systems I create and how I put them on autopilot.

Helena Hains: 9:55

So in there we cover things like planning how are you going to lesson plan weeks out in advance at a time? We cover prepping how can you prep out two or three weeks out in advance and how can you create that system so it's effortless? We cover things like organization. How can you organize your resources so they're easy to grab and you can reuse them time and time again and they're easy to find for future years to come? We also cover communication. How are you building positive relationships, not only with your admin and your staff, but with the families as well, so you can have a very supported school year? We also talk about things like data and grading. What data and grading hacks do I have that help me save time and how can I make that easier?

Helena Hains: 10:42

All of these things we cover in the present teacher circle, and what I love about it is it's very much. It's 12 modules and you can check out any of them at any time, meaning, if you really want to focus on grading this month, you can check those two modules out and start using those ASAP. If you then want to start working on classroom management next, you can focus on that. Next. It's all open to you so you can focus on wherever you are in your journey right away. As always, remember we are stronger together and I will see you in the next one, teacher Bestie.

Helena Hains: 11:18

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.