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8 Steps to Craft a Perfect Daily Schedule for Your Elementary Classroom [episode 140]

daily-classroom-schedule

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Overview of episode 140:

There’s a lot that goes into creating your daily classroom schedule. Trying to figure out how to effectively fit all the events you can’t control, where to put instructional time, and the smaller transitional moments can be extremely tricky. But don’t worry, we’re here to help! In today’s episode, we’re sharing eight steps to intentionally craft your daily classroom schedule.

With so many different events and activities to add to your daily classroom schedule, it can feel overwhelming to create. But we’ve taken all the guesswork out of it and provided you with the tools, steps, and information to develop a schedule that benefits you and your students. We discuss each fixed, adjacent fixed, and flexible event you need to include, along with the smaller aspects that fill your schedule as well. 

Whether you’re in charge of crafting your daily classroom schedule or not, we have elements for you to consider or take to your administration. Putting various events, activities, and instructional time in certain time slots makes a big difference in a student’s educational success. So, take some time to evaluate our eight steps to develop a schedule that’s serving you instead of driving you.

Highlights from the episode:

[00:51] Today’s morning message: Things you would never hear a teacher in the 90’s say.

[04:08] First step in an intentional classroom schedule. 

[06:30] Second step in an intentional classroom schedule. 

[07:44] Third step in an intentional classroom schedule. 

[08:38] Fourth step in an intentional classroom schedule. 

[13:06] Fifth step in an intentional classroom schedule. 

[14:14] Sixth step in an intentional classroom schedule. 

[14:51] Seventh step in an intentional classroom schedule. 

[15:57] Eighth step in an intentional classroom schedule.

[18:59] Today’s teacher-approved tip for making a schedule for your short weeks.

Resources:

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Read the transcript for episode 140, 8 Steps to Craft a Perfect Daily Schedule for Your Elementary Classroom:

Emily  0:36

Hey there. Thanks for joining us today. In today’s episode, we’re sharing our strategies for crafting the perfect daily classroom schedule, and sharing a teacher approved tip for planning your schedule for short weeks.

Heidi  0:51

We start our episodes with a morning message just like we used to do at morning meeting in our classrooms. This week’s morning message is things you would never hear and teacher in the 90s say. Emily, do you got one for this?

Emily  1:05

Yeah, well, I immediately thought no Chat GPT. I can’t even imagine what it’s like for secondary teachers battling AI these days. Must be non stop. Yeah. Do you have anything Heidi?

Heidi  1:17

I was thinking make sure to fill up your water bottle.

Emily  1:20

Oh, yeah. Like the thought of bringing your water bottle to school in the 90s in elementary school? No, no. And all my kids take water bottles to school. And I’m glad they do. It just does sometimes seem crazy. Like we didn’t die. We probably went all day without know much of a drink at all.

Emily  1:41

Well, we had some fun responses from our community. Naomi said, grab your Chromebook and log into Google Classroom. That would have just sounded like jibber jabber Yeah. Absolutely. Gina said please put your computer on mute. And I can’t hear you. Please unmute yourself. Megan said, Remember to click turn in after you finish your assignment. We’ve come so far I know all these digital classroom issues.

Emily  2:09

Kathy said put your phone away. It doesn’t matter if it’s your mom. She knows you’re in class. The idea of students in elementary school having phones or my mother texting me at school as a child. Like no, not even fathom. Leslie said no flossing in the hallway. Tanika said Bruh. Oh no. Which I have a teen that says that sometimes. And it’s not my fave. Karen said flexible seating.

Emily  2:39

And Megan said anything to do with skipiddi toilet. Oh no. Which I only like just recently heard about. So you can tell we’re not currently in the classroom that we didn’t already know this one. But I’ve just started to hear this one from children about and it’s not no, I don’t like it. We’d love to have you join the conversation over in our teacher approved Facebook group.

Heidi  3:04

Today we are talking about how to intentionally craft your daily classroom schedule. We’ve got some great suggestions for how you can make sure your schedule is serving you instead of driving you.

Speaker 1  3:14

Hopefully you get a lot of say and how your daily schedule is structured. Because let me get out my soapbox for a minute. You are a trained professional, who doesn’t need to be micromanaged.

Heidi  3:30

Yeah, that makes my blood boil a little bit. But even if you are at a school where your schedule is set by someone else, maybe by the administration or by a scheduling team, or maybe you’re at a school where your whole team has to have identical schedules, keep listening anyway, there might be some meaningful changes that you can suggest to the schedule makers in charge that will help make everyone’s day run a little smoother.

Emily  3:55

You can use these tips to plan your first day of school. But before you start planning your first day, it’s probably easier to plan a regular day. What will a random Tuesday in October look like in your classroom?

Emily  4:08

And to figure that out, let’s dive into the first step of making an intentional daily classroom schedule. And that is to schedule your fixed events. So tell us about that, Heidi.

Heidi  4:18

Even if you have a lot of control over your class schedule, you don’t have total control. You don’t get a say in when school starts or when it ends. Even though that would be so nice. And you likely don’t get a say about when recess and lunch and specialty classes will happen.

Emily  4:36

Yeah, wouldn’t it be nice if you just got to decide what all those things were going to happen? According to how you wanted them to go. That’d be sweet.

Heidi  4:44

Yeah, that would. We call all of these activities that have to happen at a certain time fixed events. The timings for these events are likely set by someone else and you don’t get to decide when or if they happen. So they are fixed point In your schedule.

Emily  5:01

And it only makes sense to start creating your schedule with the fixed points.

Heidi  5:05

So when you are looking at your blank schedule, you first have to add all of those fixed events. We have a fun resource to help you do this with paper where you can cut and paste and play around with your schedule using little papers. Or you can do it digitally.

Emily  5:19

Yes, we have a fun interactive scheduling magic tool that’s available for this. It is kind of like magic. It’s currently set up in JAM Board, which is an awesome tool to use for something like this. But Google is crazy. And they’re retiring jam board in a few months. So you can still use it on jam board for now. But we are in the process of switching it over to Google Slides.

Heidi  5:43

And maybe fingers crossed by the time this episode airs, we will already have it done. Maybe that’s wishful thinking. But you could buy it now and find out if we did it or not.

Emily  5:54

Yeah, mystery for you all to unravel. The interactive scheduling magic tool is part of our first day of school planning guide, you can definitely use it to schedule your first week of school, and you should, but it will also help you schedule the other 179 days of school. There’s a link to it in our show notes.

Heidi  6:14

So with your little papers or in slides, start by scheduling your fixed events. Those include when school starts and ends, recess time, lunch time, specialty classes, special ed, pullout times, intervention times, and any other time that is scheduled for you.

Heidi  6:30

Once you have your fixed events in place, we need to do step two, which is account for our adjacent fixed events. What are we going to call these?

Emily  6:40

Maybe hinge events because our fixed events hinge on them.

Heidi  6:44

There you go. Hinge events works. These are the events that have to happen in order for your fixed events to happen. Take lunch, for example, that is likely a fixed event for most teachers, I’m guessing most teachers don’t get to decide when to go to lunch. What does a successful lunchtime hinge on?

Heidi  7:03

Well, you have to get the kids where they need to be when they need to be there and with what they need to have. So that means you need to last five to 10 minutes before lunch to get the kids washed, packed up and ready to go.

Emily  7:16

And after lunch has its own hinge events, too. So does starting the day and ending the day. Going out to recess maybe needs a set bathroom break and coming back from specialty classes might need its own transition. Add all of these hinge events before and after your fixed events.

Heidi  7:33

At the start of the school year, your hinge events are going to take way way more time than they will later in the year. So keep that in mind when you are planning your first few weeks of school.

Emily  7:44

Okay, now that our fixed events are fixed in place, and we’ve accounted for the hinge events needed to make those fixed events happen. Let’s move on to the things we can control which are our flexible events. But before you start plugging your flexible events into your handy dandy schedule, start by just listing them all. Don’t schedule them yet, just get a good list. That’s step three in creating an intentional schedule.

Heidi  8:14

Assumming you’re not required to teach math and language arts at a certain time. Those are flexible events. Science, social studies, morning meetings, small group time, anything that you need to teach and that can happen at any time are flexible events.

Emily  8:29

You also might want to jot down how long each flexible event needs to last. If you have to do 60 minutes of math time, write 60 minutes next to math.

Heidi  8:38

And then we are going on to step four, which is to schedule your large blocks of time. Most likely these are your language arts and math times.

Emily  8:47

If you have to scheduled 90 minutes of language arts does that time all have to be consecutive? Because splitting up that time may be way more effective than doing it all in one go. Doing writing in the morning and reading in the afternoon maybe just what your class needs.

Heidi  9:02

I have found that districts and school administration like to see nice neat blocks of time in your schedule. But they are just really looking at one piece of the puzzle and they’re ignoring the larger picture. Because as handy as nice neat blocks or time are they are not always practical.

Emily  9:20

When it comes to scheduling large blocks of time, you need to keep in mind your two most important resources, time and energy. So they’re even time in your schedule between your fixed events to accommodate a large block of uninterrupted time. A consecutive 90 minute literacy block might not even be an option for you.

Emily  9:38

The second resource to manage his energy. Your energy and your students energy. As any teacher knows not all hours of the school day are equal for your students or for yourself. So what if instead of wishing we had more time we use the time we do have more effectively.

Heidi  9:56

And that is what I have very loud opinions. about math being taught in the morning. Shocking. When I taught second grade, I frequently got pushed back on teaching math in the morning, because our district was very literacy focused, and they wanted the literacy first thing in the morning.

Emily  10:15

Oh yes. But luckily, you have never been one to shy away from rocking the boat as needed.

Heidi  10:20

When you have research on your side, it only makes sense. So every time I explain that repeated studies have shown that math in the morning is more effective, they would just kind of back off and leave me alone, because it’s hard to argue against that much data. And they didn’t really have any data on their side, they were just doing something they’d heard they should.

Emily  10:40

It was definitely a big push in our district. Daniel H. Pink has a book called When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing. And we’ll put a link to that in the show notes. It’s not a book specifically about education, but it has a lot of insight about how timing impacts education.

Emily  10:59

He says students who had math in the morning had higher grades and better scores than students who had math in the afternoon. When we think about scheduling, we think of it as purely an administrative task. We don’t think about it as a pedagogical task. But just the random assignment of kids in an afternoon math class versus a morning math class is going to affect how much math that kid learns. And that could have a few degrees of tilt in the trajectory of that kid’s life going forward. So no big deal.

Heidi  11:30

And we’re working so hard to get our math scores up. So it just makes sense to use every tool at our disposal. And another reason I prefer teaching math in the morning is because I was a better teacher in the morning. And I don’t have any research to back this particular finding. But I’d have to assume that part of the reason kids learn more from math in the morning, is because the teacher isn’t worn down yet.

Emily  11:53

Yeah, it’s not just student energy we want to consider when we’re making our schedules. It’s the teachers energy too.

Heidi  12:01

I loved teaching math right after morning meeting. But I hated teaching writing at any time of the day, and I moved it all over the place. If you love teaching writing, please come tell me your secrets, because that sucked the soul right out of me.

Emily  12:16

And it’s one of those things we’ve talked about so many times on the podcast, but like, I think we both thought that would be our favorite thing to teach. And that was super excited. The worst one.

Heidi  12:27

Might because we were doing Lucy Caulkins. Anyway, eventually, I ended up moving math to right before lunch. And I put writing in that first lot of the day because I realized, if there was any hope of my writing blog going well, I had to tackle it. When I still had enough energy to care about doing it well.

Emily  12:49

Yes, it just doesn’t make sense to schedule high energy lessons at times when everyone involved has low energy. So as you’re considering where to put your flexible subjects pay attention to if you have enough time to cover that subject. And if there’s enough energy at that time to cover it well.

Heidi  13:05

You also want to pay attention to whether or not you have too many similar activities in a row. That brings us to our fifth step for creating an intentional daily classroom schedule. And that is to mix things up.

Heidi  13:19

During writing time, my students were mostly in their seats, and during math time, my students were often in their seats. But I could teach those two subjects back to back because we had morning recess right in the middle to mix things up.

Emily  13:31

For sure. Kids need a change of pace and a change of place every 30 minutes or so. If we don’t offer them that change, they’ll take it upon themselves. By getting off task and causing problems.

Heidi  13:43

It is so much easier for everyone involved, to set yourself up for success from the start by planning a schedule that doesn’t have kids seated in one spot for too long.

Emily  13:53

Okay, so as we’re making our schedules, the first thing to consider is our fixed events. Then we add in the hinge events on either side of the fixed events. After that, we can list our flexible events and schedule our large blocks of time, taking into account the resources of time and energy we have available. We’re just cramming it all in here. So what’s next?

Heidi  14:15

All right, we’re up to step six. And we can finally add our smaller flexible events to our schedule.

Heidi  14:20

At this point, you may have to get a little creative with your times. Maybe you would love 20 minutes for morning meeting every day. But you can only squeeze in 10 minutes between morning work and math, because of course you’re doing math in the morning. Or maybe you want 45 minutes of science five days a week, but the best you can do is 25 minutes, four days a week.

Emily  14:40

Sometimes good enough is all we have time for. I bet every teacher has at least one subject in their schedule where they’re settling for good enough instead of ideal because you only have as much time as you have.

Heidi  14:52

Yeah, we can’t make any more of that unfortunately. Also, don’t forget any hinge events needed for your flexible events. And that’s our seventh step. And this is an easy one thankfully, because these flexible hinge events probably won’t be nearly as detailed as the ones needed for fixed events.

Emily  15:09

Right. It takes way more prep to get kids out the door at the end of the day than it does to get them to move from their desk to the carpet for a read aloud. So if a straightforward transition is all it takes to move from one event to the next, you likely don’t even need to add it to your daily schedule.

Heidi  15:24

However, if you’re flexible event needs a full procedure in order to transition, maybe something complicated, like kids around the classroom, cleaning up centers and getting logged into Chromebooks, you might want to add that five minutes into your schedule.

Emily  15:40

All right, we have carved and sliced and whittled down six hours into tiny meaningful blocks of time. Is there anything else we need to consider Heidi?

Heidi  15:48

Yes. How about a little something for you, darling, because you deserve it.

Emily  15:54

Well, I do like the sound of that. Tell us more.

Heidi  15:57

Well, our eighth step is to schedule a little time to plan. We like to call this a pocket of prep.

Emily  16:04

We’re gonna trademark that. I like it so much.

Heidi  16:07

It’s a cute name. So what a pocket of prep is, is a little chunk of time, where students are engaged in a meaningful independent activity so the teacher can get done a little work of their own.

Emily  16:20

So if you’re familiar with morning work time, that’s a pocket of prep right there. The kids are busy with spiral review, which they need, but big bonus for you, now you can take attendance and send the lunch count before the Secretary has to hound you. Because your students are busy with a meaningful independent task.

Heidi  16:43

Your pockets prep might be daily or weekly, or both. When I taught second grade, I’ve reserved the first of our station times to catch up on work. I maybe pulled a phonics group to go over their words sort, because somehow I didn’t get to them on Monday. Or maybe I did progress monitoring or did last minute lesson prep.

Heidi  17:03

Or you know, I’m sure this never happened, but maybe I was hurrying to grade the common assessment that I needed to bring to collaboration later, I dealt with whatever looming task I had that day. But then on Fridays, instead of doing a regular phonics lesson, I showed a 25 minute PBS show that was about phonics. Kids are still getting phonics instruction. I got 25 minutes to plan next week’s lessons.

Emily  17:28

Right. They still got a phonics lesson, you just didn’t have to teach it. We’ve been so conditioned as teachers to feel that doing anything besides giving instruction doesn’t belong in the school day. But that just isn’t true. As long as your students are engaged in meaningful learning activities, there’s nothing wrong with taking time to do another part of your job.

Heidi  17:48

Right, we do plenty of work for free, the whole system is set up on that. So don’t feel guilty about making time to actually do your job while you’re doing your job.

Speaker 1  17:58

Yep. Whether you’re starting your class schedule from scratch, or you’re looking to maximize the schedule you’ve used for years. Keep these eight steps in mind.

Emily  18:07

Start by scheduling your fixed events. Add the hinge events for each of your fixed events. Next, make a list of all the flexible events you need to include. Then schedule your large blocks of time keeping in mind the limits of your time and energy. Remember to mix things up so kids get a change of pace and place. Add your smaller flexible events into your schedule, including any hinge events for your flexible events. And don’t forget to include a little time to plan so you can get your own work done. Easy peasy right?

Heidi  18:39

Nothing to it. If you want more help crafting your daily schedule, be sure to grab the resource that we have linked in the show notes. And you can sign up for the waitlist for our BTS Success course if you want to work on this live with us in just a couple weeks.

Emily  18:55

Yes, sign up, we want to help you.

Emily  18:59

Now let’s talk about this week’s teacher approved tip. Each week we leave you with a small actionable tip that you can apply in your classroom today. This week’s teacher approved tip is make a schedule for your short weeks. What can you tell us about this Heidi?

Heidi  19:15

Crafting an intentional daily schedule is such an important part of maximizing your school day. But as you may have noticed, it takes a lot of work. So what do you do on those weeks when your schedule is abnormal?

Heidi  19:28

We like to call them Swiss cheese weeks because your regular schedule is full of holes. It might be a four day week or a three day week. We even had a two day week right before Thanksgiving. Or you might have a week with a bunch of early dismissals. And that can make it really hard to plan.

Heidi  19:45

Instead of taking these weeks on a case by case basis, decide once how you want to handle it. My personal rule was that a four day week was just treated like a normal week because there were just too many of them to make exceptions.

Heidi  19:58

But I had an adapted routine on two and three day weeks. You can use our favorite interactive scheduling magic tool that we mentioned earlier to help you plan a set schedule for your swiss cheese weeks. So you aren’t having to figure out what to do each time one pops up.

Emily  20:14

The nice thing about making an adapted schedule is it simplifies planning so much. You can say for math, I don’t want to teach a new lesson because a bunch of kids will be absent on a short week. Instead, we’ll play review games for math on those days. And we’ll always play these certain games as a review. Or instead of regular writing time, we’ll do some sort of seasonal writing craft.

Heidi  20:36

And you can do the same thing. If you frequently have early out days. Maybe you condense your schedule, so you’re always covering all of your content just for shorter amounts of time. Or maybe you have set things that you leave out every time you have a shortened day. Making a set plan now really cuts back on the crazy of being outside your normal schedule.

Emily  20:56

If this sounds like useful advice, make sure to catch our next episode on Thursday, where we have a freebie or a really good freebie to help you plan some of the Swiss cheese weeks that fall around the holidays. And yes, we’re going to talk about that in July. It’s gonna be awesome.

Heidi  21:13

To wrap up the show we are sharing what we’re giving extra credit to this week. Emily, what gets your extra credit?

Emily  21:18

I’m giving extra credit to the car charger I recently got from my mini van. Plugs into the lighter and it has two cords built into a plus there’s room to plug in like other types of cords. And there are different variations. So you can pick what you need based on what devices you have. So what cords you need.

Emily  21:36

But here’s why it’s so cool. My favorite part is that the built in plugs are retractable, that’s nice. You only need to pull it out as far as you want it. So like there’s not long cords always in the way. But then when you’re done you just retract the cord and tada they’re gone out of the way it’s the best car charger I’ve ever had.

Heidi  21:56

Well, that sounds really handy because I’ve been in the car with you and your children. So yep, I know the charging situation. Yes.

Emily  22:02

Yes. What are you giving extra credit to Heidi?

Heidi  22:06

My extra credit goes to the Instagram account art, but make it sports. So I know a little about art and I know next to nothing about sports, but somehow the two of them together just make me laugh.

Heidi  22:20

So what happens is this guy and I don’t even know his name. He takes photos from sports events. And he pairs them with classic works of art. So a simple one is just a photo of a soccer player with his arms crossed over his chest. And that is paired with an ancient Egyptian sarcophagus with his arms crossed.

Heidi  22:40

Or imagine a basketball player Caitlin Clark and I had to look up her name, posing with the basketball under one arm and she’s looking proudly at the camera. And that is paired with a painting from 1630 of Judith, except instead of a basketball, she’s got the head of Holofernes under her arm, and she’s also looking really proud of herself.

Heidi  23:02

Okay, podcasting is not the medium to explain this. But it’s so clever and so funny. You really have to check it out in person. So it’s called art but make it sports.

Emily  23:13

I’ll try and remember to post them on our stories when this episode comes out.

Heidi  23:19

That’s it for today’s episode. Use our eight steps for crafting an intentional daily classroom schedule. And don’t forget our teacher approved tip for making a set plan for your swiss cheese weeks.

More About Teacher Approved:

Do you ever feel like there’s just not enough time in the day to be the kind of teacher you really want to be? The Teacher Approved podcast is here to help you learn how to elevate what matters and simplify the rest. Join co-hosts Emily and Heidi of Second Story Window each week as they share research-based and teacher-approved strategies you can count on to make your teaching more efficient and effective than ever before.

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