The BEST Way to Minimize Prep Time as a World Language Teacher
A few years ago, I was a mentor teacher for a first-year French teacher, and throughout that year I tried to infuse as many opportunities to discuss time-saving tips into our mentoring sessions as I possibly could. Saving time and “working smarter, not harder” are the cornerstones of my teaching practice, and I see so many teachers burning out because they are working too hard. Whether you are a French, Spanish, Italian, or German teacher, I think we can all agree that minimizing prep time is a good thing, and it’s something that we don’t talk about enough in faculty, department, and PLC meetings…and yet, when we do find ways to work more efficiently, our stress levels go down and our quality of life at school improves.
I learned very early on in my career that there simply aren’t enough hours in the day to get done everything I need to get done as a classroom teacher. This is a career in which the work is never truly finished, and so it is incumbent upon each of us to set boundaries and limitations for our work, including how long and to what extent we will work outside of our contracted hours.
For me personally, I don’t work outside of my contracted hours, because I have spent many years developing systems and processes which allow me to get done all of my work between the hours of 8 a.m. and 3 p.m. In this blog post, I’m going to share the BEST tip that I have for minimizing prep time. This tip will save you a TON of time in your lesson planning, which will free up time for you to complete other tasks (e.g. grading papers, inputting grades, attending meetings, completing paperwork, etc.) and hopefully reduce (or eliminate) your need for taking work home with you on evenings and weekends.
It’s not magic, but it will be magical
This tip is not rocket science, nor is it some magic spell that will miraculously free up all of your time. The tip is simple: rather than thinking about resource creation and curation, think about resource implementation and resource repurposing. That’s it. That’s the tip. Instead of creating and/or finding new activities for your students to work on, think about how you can repurpose the resources you have already implemented so that they go farther, give you a “bigger bang for your buck,” and target different skills and competencies.
The problem with incessant resource creation and curation
Look, instructional design in general and resource creation in particular are two of my favorite elements of teaching. I love the creative process of imagining new activities, creating the worksheets and handouts, and testing new resources in my World Language classroom. However, constant resource creation and curation can be extremely time-consuming and mentally taxing.
I see a lot of teachers who feel like they need to find more and more content to keep their students busy and engaged. Even if you purchase resources on TpT or have a textbook suite with a plethora of activities for you to pull from, putting together new assignments can be super tedious and time-consuming, and I’m here to tell you that if you want to save time during planning, you’ll need to focus less on producing and curating activities for your students and more time thinking about ways in which you can repurpose activities that you already have in meaningful and engaging ways.
What is resource repurposing, and how do I do it?
When you repurpose a resource, you find new and innovative ways to extend the resource so that it satisfies new learning objectives. Essentially, you’re taking what you already have and finding new ways of implementing it so that you can review content and extend student thinking while massively cutting down on your own prep work.
Let me give you a quick example of a lesson that is presented and then fades away into non-existence, and then let me show you how you can repurpose the lesson’s activities to fill up more instructional time with high-quality and rigorous practice for your students.
Scenario: Christine is a Spanish teacher who is reviewing Greetings with her Spanish 1 students during the first month of Spanish. During her lesson, she presents information via Google Slides while students take notes, and then she has them work on two practice worksheets. Toward the end of the class, she will review the practice worksheets with her students and then give them an exit ticket before the bell rings.
Christine, at this point, would most likely continue moving forward with instruction or finding new activities for her Spanish 1 students to keep them busy during the following class. However, this will require Christine to produce or curate new content, which is insanely time-consuming. Instead, here’s what Christine can do:
Resource Repurposing: Christine already has a fantastic Google Slides presentation with images, text, notes, and translations. She’s going to spend 5 minutes doing the following: she’s going to take that Google Slides presentation and make a new copy. In the new copy, she will remove key words and replace them with ______’s. During class, she will push out this new copy to her students on Google Classroom. For the first 5 minutes of the following class, Christine is going to have her students review the Google Slides presentation and, working in pairs, fill in the blanks with the missing words that they remember from the previous class. After 5 minutes, she’s going to allow them to open up to their class notes and fill in any words they may have missed and check their work.
She’s then going to have them take out one of the worksheets from the previous class. This was a simple matching worksheet, in which students had to match English and Spanish greetings. She’s going to have students quiz each other: one student will give an expression in Spanish, and the other student will translate it into English. They’ll take turns until all expressions have been reviewed. Then, she’s going to have students flip their papers over and create a short dialogue using the expressions from the front of the sheet.
Next, she’s going to give students some time to work in pairs and proofread each other’s dialogues. Finally, she’s going to have students work in small groups of 4 and take turns presenting each group member’s dialogue to the class. If there’s extra time remaining, she may have a few volunteers come up to the front of the room and present their dialogues to the class.
When Christine is ready to transition, she’s going to pass out the Exit Tickets she collected from the prior lesson and she’s going to have students check their own work and then peer review each other’s exit tickets. (Notice that Christine did NOT spend time grading these exit tickets; instead, she’s letting her students do the heavy lifting!) She’s going to have them flip the exit tickets over and create their own exit tickets, with 4 or 5 new questions. Then, she’s going to have each student find a partner and exchange exit tickets. Partners will then work together to check each other’s work.
Let’s debrief: Whoa! Christine was able to essentially DOUBLE her mileage with the resources she used during her previous lesson, and it took her what? 10 minutes of prep time to consider how she was going to use what she already had in new, inventive ways?
Here’s what I see in Christine’s new lesson: there is a TON of review of previously taught vocabulary, which is exactly what her students need at this moment. Christine consistently has students working collaboratively, using different types of grouping strategies to ensure students get to work with different peers. She has them recalling prior knowledge throughout the entirety of the lesson. She has them editing and proofreading, which are new, critical skills that she is throwing into the mix. She takes a simple worksheet and turns it into a writing, reading, proofreading, and speaking activity! She gives students opportunities to practice speaking in low-stakes settings (i.e. small groups), and even challenges her students to present in front of the whole class. She asks her students to be creative by creating their own exit tickets, and then once again gives students an opportunity to work collaboratively in completing each other’s exit tickets.
Final Thoughts
I’m not sure where or when teaching became so heavily centered around resource creation and curation. A lot of my colleagues feel this constant pressure to produce more and more content for their students, but I feel like this can be detrimental. Students become so used to working on the next new, shiny task that they work quickly but not deeply. And because we feel like our students need to constantly be working on something new, it requires us to spend a lot of prep time creating and finding new resources, making photocopies, etc.
The way I save massive amounts of prep time is through repurposing old content in new, innovative, and engaging ways. I find this practice to be effective because it affords me time to work on other tasks, but more importantly, I have found that my students respond really well to this practice. Why? Well, there’s a level of familiarity associated with going back to worksheets and activities from last class, last week, last month, or last marking period.
If I tell students to take out the worksheet from last class because we need it for today’s activity, I am highlighting the importance of the material on that worksheet. It wasn’t just a quick 10-minute in-class activity that got filed away in their binders; instead, it has now become a new entry point into today’s lesson, and because I have asked them to take that old worksheet back out because we will be using it today in a new and different way, they see the inherent value of the content presented on that worksheet.
And maybe some of my students didn’t learn the material on that worksheet last class, or maybe they have different learning preferences, and filling in blanks on a worksheet isn’t their favorite way of learning… by repurposing, I’m giving them another opportunity to explore, practice, and gain mastery of the target content.
It must also be stated that because I do this so frequently, students know that they need to keep an organized binder and come to class prepared every single day, because they never know when I will ask them to take out an older assignment for today’s brand new lesson.
I hope that my explanation of resource repurposing motivates you to spend some time thinking about how you can use what you already have in new and exciting ways. Many of us are squeezing our lemons once or twice, but those lemons have much more juice to be squeezed! Do you use resources for multiple purposes and over multiple class periods? What are your favorite types of activities to repurpose? I’d love it if you could share your ideas in the comments below!
Happy language teaching,
~ Michael
