Time-Saving Back to School Tips for World Language Teachers
It is no secret that the Back to School season is one of the busiest for teachers. Between setting up our classrooms, making photocopies, lesson planning, attending what sometimes feels like an interminable chain of back-to-back meetings…it’s a lot! It is so easy for us to lose steam during the first few days and weeks of school despite having had a restful summer break. In this post, I’m going to share some tips and ideas to save you some time and energy so that you can start the school year off being fully present with your students and not feeling tired or exhausted from all of the tasks you’ve got piled up on your plate!
Create a To-Do List and Focus on High-Priority Items
I always say that teaching is work that is never truly done. Even if we worked 24 hours a day–which sounds absolutely nightmarish!--we still would not be able to check off every task on our never-ending To-Do List. There’s always a lesson that can be tweaked, papers that need to be graded, forms/reports that our admin are expecting us to fill out… in a word, our job is never fully done! In order to avoid losing momentum in the first few days and weeks of school, it is important to create a To-Do List and, more importantly, arrange items on your list in order of importance. Sure, it would be LOVELY to redo that bulletin board that hasn’t gotten much love in a few years, but is it a high-priority item in September? Absolutely not!
Here are some high-priority items that you can realistically justify being on your To-Do list during the first few days of pre-planning:
Setting up my classroom to include basic essentials: seating, functional classroom computer & projector, teacher desk, basic classroom decor (think valuable items like question word posters and verb charts)
Syllabus & Course Expectations - Document drafted, edited, printed, photocopied for my students.
First week of school lesson plans, materials, and photocopies
Attend required meetings
Print student rosters and create seating charts
Create a To-Don’t List!
This tip goes hand-in-hand with my previous tip. As teachers, we want to do all of the things so that we can deliver the best learning experience possible to our students; however, our energy tank is limited, as is our time. We can’t do all of the things, despite our best wishes and intentions!
A few years ago, I stumbled across this tip from a teacher on Twitter: create a To-Don’t List. These are tasks that you would really LOVE to do, ideally, in a perfect world; however, given the finite time, energy, and bandwidth you’ve got, these tasks are just simply going to have to be put on the back burner until later.
At the beginning of the year, I create a list of 3 or 4 things that I know for sure I am NOT going to be working on in the first few days or weeks of school because they are not high-priority items and simply don’t have to get done right away. When a new idea crosses my mind, I evaluate it: is it a Must-Do (it goes on my To-Do List) or is it a Would-Be-Nice-To-Do (it goes on my To-Don’t List).
Items on your To-Don’t List could be highly ambitious tasks like “I’m going to edit all of my Marking Period 1 quizzes” or fairly minute tasks like “I’m going to laminate these vocabulary flashcards.” If it’s not going to positively impact student learning during week one of school, I’m not doing it!
What’s great about a To-Don’t List is that it ultimately can become your To-Do list! Sure, those quizzes do need to be updated at some point. Yes, I do need to laminate those flashcards before I hand them out to my students. Eventually. Hold on to your To-Don’t List and when you have some pockets of time–for me, it’s the 3 hours on Back to School Night between when the school day is over and when parents start showing up–you can work on hammering out some of those tasks.
Don’t Reinvent the Wheel
I am totally guilty of this, and this is one area of my teaching that I have had to really get control over during the last few years… for my own sanity! There are fabulous resource creators out there who have already put together the resources that you need for the first month of your French, Spanish, or Italian class! Why spend countless hours creating Google Slides presentations and worksheets, using your precious creative energy conceiving practice games for your students to play, finding the willpower to sit down and type up the exit tickets and quizzes you’ll be using to formatively assess your students… when the work has already been done for you?
There are resources that you will absolutely want to make for your students. Maybe you’ve got a unique idea that has not already been created/shared by a teacher. Maybe you’ve got a personalized activity that is unique to you, your students, your school, or your community. Maybe you do have some extra time or creative energy the last week or two before school starts. But if not, it’s okay to use high-quality resources that other teachers have already made. You do not, in fact, need to reinvent the wheel in order to be an effective teacher.
Looking for some help? I offer Freebies for the First Month of French, Spanish and Italian Class in my Free Resource Library. All you have to do is sign up using the form below, and you’ll receive a password to access my library! In addition to those freebies, I have over 10 other resources that you can download to help save you some time during Back to School season!
I send a few emails every month providing you with time-saving tips, strategies, and resources for your World Language classroom! Additionally, I have three comprehensive bundles in my TpT Store that will nearly eliminate your prep time during the First Month of French, Spanish, or Italian Class. Check them out below:
Give Yourself Grace
Being a World Language Teacher is hard work! And it can be exhausting. As someone who is still in the classroom and right there in the trenches with you, I totally get it. There are way too many tasks piled on our plate–it seems like the pile gets larger and larger every year, but the plate stays the same size!--and we simply don’t have the time to do it all.
Working ourselves to the bone comes from the best of intentions, but perhaps contrary to our intuition, it is not what’s best for our students, and it’s certainly not what’s best for us and our families. Students will learn language better from teachers who are well-rested and not stressed out. Staying up until midnight working during the first month of school does not make you a better teacher: it makes you a tired, stressed-out teacher, and that’s not what’s best for anyone. I don’t want you to burn out by October. Remember, the school year is a marathon: it is NOT a sprint. Give yourself grace by prioritizing what needs to get done, and saving everything else for another day.
Continue following this blog for more time-saving tips and strategies that will help you stay sane this back-to-school season and beyond!
