As part of our week of celebrating the fabulous and practical ways our positive teachers are using their TPTC Planners, @yearthreeandme, a teacher from inner London talks us through how she's using hers.
Hello everyone,
In this crazy time that we’re all in at the moment and now that most teachers are working from home, I wanted to try and find a way to organise my work life whilst being at home. I wanted to use my Positive Teacher Planner because I like the space that it offers and I feel like we all need that inspiring quote at the top, now more than ever!
As we are now teaching online, I don’t need to plan individual lessons in the same way that I would during school time so I needed to switch up the way I was planning.
I, like a lot of teachers, have a very long to-do list but I find it quite overwhelming when it is too long and each thing is given a time period so I decided to use my planner to break it down into 3 key sections which could be completed at any time of the day.
-MUST do
-SHOULD do and
-COULD do
I found that this is the best way to break up my day as it gives me freedom and structure at the same time! I used brightly coloured washi tape from Paperchase to colour code my sections.
Yellow is for my MUST do’s. These are the things I have to do that day (meetings, deadlines, lessons for Google Classroom etc) I also colour code within this section. Green highlighter is for the lessons that are to go on Google Classroom and orange highlighter is for virtual meetings. This helps me see at a glance what my commitments are at the beginning of the day. I then use a bullet journaling–esque system for the other things I have to do by adding a square next to it that I can tick off when I have completed it.
My next section is purple for SHOULD do’s. These are the other things in the day that I really should get done but it is not urgent if it needs to get moved to the next day. If I don’t get it completed, I draw a little arrow in the box and those are then become the top SHOULD do’s for the next day!
My final section is the COULD do’s. In the unlikely event I get all my MUST do’s and SHOULD do’s done for the day, these are the extra things I could do to get ahead of the game (lesson prepping for the following week, finding resources etc).
I hope you found how I set my planner up helpful and good luck to all those teachers now working from home! You rock!
