When was the last time you heard someone complaining about having too much time on their hands? If asked, would the teachers in your school or district say they have adequate time to take care of their responsibilities for supporting students? If your teachers were given additional time in their day, what would they do with it?
We all know you can’t get more hours in a day, so it is critical to use time intentionally by aligning the systems and structures in schools to ensure everyone’s time is maximized. When we create a culture that values collaboration and develop systems and structures that protect those precious minutes, we send the message that we appreciate our teachers and honor their time outside of the workday to help them achieve a better work/life balance.
This isn’t micromanaging how everyone spends their time, but rather setting up specific structures to support effective use of the things that matter most. Here are four ways to give teachers the gift of time.
1. Master Schedule
As leaders, we must always remain keenly aware of our school’s mission and vision to ensure that everything is filtered through the lens of, How does this fit into the bigger picture of the success and continuous improvement of my school? One way to ensure that you are always being intentional with the big picture in mind is by aligning your master schedule in a way that promotes common planning time for teacher teams. In a profession that can often feel isolating, common planning time fosters collaboration by providing a structured opportunity for teachers to work together and share responsibilities. When multiple people focus on the same task, they typically complete it in a fraction of the time it would take a single individual. Thus, collaborative structures can gift time back to your teachers.
While common planning time provides teacher teams the ability to collaborate, it is often impossible to coordinate common planning for all collaborating teachers such as interventionists, special education teachers, and English language development teachers. Yet, collaboration among all these educators is crucial for supporting students with the greatest needs. A creative way to provide this time is to evaluate the master schedule to see where there are places in which you can use support staff such as counselors, special area teachers with an open block, instructional coaches, or other certified staff to step into a classroom for a 30-minute block of time once a month to allow the collaborating teachers to discuss progress and regroup as needed. The support staff can teach a social-emotional lesson or other lesson tied to school-wide goals (think Red Ribbon Week content, bullying prevention, character education, etc.).
It is critical to align the systems and structures in schools to ensure everyone’s time is maximized.
2. Unit Planning Days
As we all know, common planning, which affords time for professional learning community work, is a valuable structure that teachers appreciate. This structure promotes collaboration and collective efficacy, building upon the strengths of each team member. Even when leaders develop a master schedule that protects common planning time for teams, teachers can find themselves still needing more. One of the biggest time challenges that teachers face is planning instruction for each unit. With the amount of content each teacher is required to cover, it is important for them to be prepared before it is time to actually teach. One way to help teachers plan is by providing unit planning days for teams to collaborate and prepare for upcoming lessons. These planning days can be provided before the school year begins or throughout the year based on teachers’ pacing for each unit.
Providing teachers with a unit planning day every 6 weeks is a gift of time that will not only provide your teachers with the opportunity to be intentional and go deeper with their planning to ensure scaffolds for differentiation exist, but it will also provide teachers a day to refresh and recalibrate with their peers. If you’re providing them throughout the year, you can plan within your budget to pay for substitutes to cover classrooms for the days allotted or you could have a rotation of support staff that help to cover classrooms for part or all of the day. The master schedule described above can also play a huge role in planning and preparation when offering unit planning days throughout the school year. If funding and subs are not available, see if there is a creative way you can schedule those days into extra special area blocks.
As with any paid day, decide on a structure with your instructional leadership team of what each team should plan to accomplish during their planning day. Create an agenda with the team ahead of time to help each member come prepared and stay on task so that they can maximize this gift of time.
3. Living Calendar and System Evaluation
Another critical tool that allows leaders the opportunity to gift time to their teachers is a living calendar. By maintaining a live document that captures all the activities and events within a school, leaders can proactively anticipate which days, weeks, and months of the year will be a heavier lift (i.e. state testing, parent/teacher conference days, end-of-course exams, etc.) and ensure they don’t pile on additional meetings and responsibilities. Having a living calendar that all teachers have access to also provides clarity in communication of workload expectations. This allows teachers the opportunity to be intentional and mindful with their own calendar, which can promote better work/life balance.
How often do you meet solely to check a box? One of the greatest gifts you can give to free up time is to cancel meetings that could easily be an email. Need to make sure that teachers received your communication? Request a quick reflection on what they got from the email or have them sign off that they received the message. At the end of the day, teachers are often tired and have little capacity to receive more input. By sending an email, they can read it at a time (within 24 hours) when they have the capacity to retain the information.
Another important focus for the gift of time as it relates to school-wide systems is evaluating your leave early/late arrival policy for teachers. Are teachers required to take a whole day off to complete basic personal tasks? Teaching hours often run the same times as all the important tasks citizens are required to complete (such as a driver's license renewal). In addition, teaching is a female-dominated field. If you have teachers who become pregnant, the amount of medical appointments could be overwhelming if they are required to take an entire day before even having their child. Would you rather have a substitute cover a classroom for a whole day or have someone on staff help out for an hour? Which is easier for student behavior and routines?
The gift of time is not about creating more time, but rather honoring the time teachers already have.
4. Individualized Professional Growth
We always hear, “You can’t pour from an empty cup,” and because of that, our fourth suggestion for providing the gift of time is creating a system that provides teachers the opportunity to be poured into both professionally and personally. In What Can I Take Off Your Plate, we describe this system as IPD Days, or Individualized Professional Development. Individualized professional development days are a great way to help support teacher growth and rejuvenate their passion for what they do.
In an era where compassion fatigue is increasingly affecting educators, finding ways to maximize and honor teachers' time is more critical than ever. With creative scheduling, one to two teachers (numbers will fluctuate based on the size of your staff) will have an entire day every six to eight weeks to focus on themselves and their goals. This day begins with a coaching session with the principal, assistant principal, or an instructional coach to reflect on their accomplishments and impact since their last coaching session and recalibrate their goals for the next coaching cycle. Based on the goals established, the teacher then creates a plan of how they will pour into their own growth and development by visiting other classrooms and engaging in individual, self-paced PD. There is also a dedicated block during the day that allows teachers to focus on personal growth using a menu of options to combat compassion fatigue. This structure creates a general outline of what the individual teacher wants to focus on both personally and professionally during their day.
Remembering the Bigger Picture
In the end, we all have the same 1,440 minutes in a day. The gift of time is not about creating more time, but rather honoring the time teachers already have in their day. By creating systems and structures that intentionally prioritize the needs of teachers, you send the message that you value them both personally and professionally. In a time when compassion fatigue is a driving factor of teacher burnout, the gift of time not only helps take things off teachers’ plates, but also increases the chance they'll stay in the teaching profession longer.
What Can I Take Off Your Plate?
Teacher burnout demands systemic solutions. Learn how leaders can actively reduce frustration and provide real, sustaining support for all staff.
