The process of making a Yearly Plan is quite time-consuming - about 3 ½ hours work. Therefore, before we start, we should be crystal clear what we are trying to achieve, and why we are doing this work.
What we are doing here is trying to transfer work from the hectic thrash of mid-term to a quieter period of the year. when our time has less value. This is not really about efficiency - if we added up the time taken, we are probably doing things the long way. We are, though, evening out the load over the year, and making our lives easier, by stripping out tiny bits of work from our everyday grind, and lumping them together to tackle beforehand.
We are doing this, in fact, in two separate ways:
1. We are creating a Yearly Plan, which will contain - in one place - all our key dates, commitments, and deadlines. This will make our term-time life easier by keeping all our information in one place and enabling us to manage our diaries quickly and simply. It will also reduce the likelihood of us forgetting to do something important, or - much more likely - being obliged to rush it through at the last minute. It will also highlight what we already know: some periods of the year are likely to be problematic in terms of workload.
2. We are using that Yearly Plan to create a Weekly Plan, based on our Full Timetable. Now, remember that we are trying to move work to a “quieter time of year”. For a teacher, this description very rarely applies to September, so if you have only been given your teaching timetable at the start of the school year, I recommend you omit these steps, and concentrate only on the Yearly Plan. If you know your timetable in advance, however, it is well worth getting fully organised and preparing in advance a proper plan, or schedule, or diary - whatever you choose to call it.
The first step in creating a Yearly Plan should really be to simply get hold of your school's schedule for the academic year in spreadsheet form. However, this will not be available not be available in most schools so we will start by assuming that absolutely nothing is available.
Don't download anything until you've read the instructions, but note that the downloads are here.
Step 1 A Blank Calendar
Create a blank diary worksheet in a spreadsheet program, or - much better idea - download one. See the spreadsheet called Yearly Plan Step 1 as an example. Don't download that yet, though - see Step 2.
Step 2 School Holidays
Mark school holidays, or - much better idea - download a spreadsheet with the holidays already marked, and modify it. See Yearly Plan Step 2 as an example - holidays are marked in yellow. Don't modify that yet, though - see Step 3.
Step 3 Week Numbers
If your school operates a two-week timetable (this means that a teacher's timetable on even-numbered weeks is different to that on odd-numbered weeks) add information to show this, or - you guessed it - download one. See Yearly Plan Step 3a.
If your school uses 'week numbers' to schedule activities (eg “all coursework must be completed by Week 23”), add this information to the spreadsheet. See Yearly Plan Step 3b.
So... if the example spreadsheets match what you need, modify them and use them. If not, create your own. You now have a schedule on which to base your Yearly Plan. If you are doing this work in September, or any other busy-busy time, you should omit the timetable-related steps which follow, and continue at Step 8.
Step 4
Create a new worksheet to lay out your timetable. An example is given in Yearly Plan Step 4, based on Mary's example timetable - alternative versions are available to help teachers with a six-lesson day.
This may seem like unnecessary work - after all, your school already provides you with a timetable. However, it does have an advantage - you can lay it out exactly as you want it to look. You should add columns to reflect any time outside class which you might use for non-teaching tasks - the most common being simply labelled 'before school' and 'after school'. This will allow you to see your Full Timetable.
Next, copy your column-headings into your Yearly Plan and adjust the column width so everything is legible. You should also 'freeze' the heading rows, and the left hand columns so they are always visible when you scroll your worksheet (tips on how to do this are available on the web).
When you have laid out a timetable, stop. Save your spreadsheet, because at this point you have you have a spreadsheet which can be used by absolutely everybody in your school. Share it and make yourself a hero.
Step 5
If you haven't already done so, add onto your timetable any standard non-contact activities which you want to form part of your weekly schedule. 'Standard' means that they will happen without change every week, every term. See Yearly Plan Step 5 Timetable sheet for Mary's example. You will see that she has added 'lesson planning' nearly every day. This is daily planning, considering lessons for today and/or tomorrow. It is not considering longer-term planning like schemes of work, or next term's modules. Mary has left some of her PPA lessons blank for assessment and longer-term planning (though she will do work after school as well, of course)
You may be asking yourself whether this adds any value - writing down the same activities every week; you may even suspect that it creates work: every time you decide to do something different, you will have to change your plan. If you are thinking along these lines, you are absolutely right. We are deliberately making it difficult to change our plan. If Mrs Smith insists on an 8 o'clock meeting on Tuesday to discuss why her little Beyoncé-Fay has been given a detention when she was just texting her sister, well... that's fine by me if it's fine by you. But: you will have to overtype your “lesson planning”, and - hopefully - think about when you are going to do it instead, and hand-write it into a different slot in your weekly plan. The intention is that you send a message-in-time to your future self: these are not 'free' periods, this work is important, this work is planned in advance.
Step 6
Now, a trial run. Copy and paste a week's timetable into the first week of your Yearly Plan. See Yearly Plan Step 6 - the worksheet called Yearly Plan, for Mary's example. You are likely to find that the 'Lessons' text is too long for the boxes. There are two steps to take to rectify this. Firstly, create an abbreviated timetable; secondly modify the column heights and row widths of your Plan sheet. The key trick here is NOT to worry about your teaching lessons - these will not change, and you will have them pretty-much-off-by-heart within a few weeks. If, however, you have any PPA lessons in a particular time-slot (for example 'Period 3') then that column must be wide enough to accommodate a reasonable amount of text. A revised version is shown in Yearly Plan Step 6, and an explanation of the techniques required is provided online.
Step 7
And now, a bit of copy-and-paste - see Yearly Plan Step 7. At the risk of stating the obvious, before you do so much pasting and editing, you really need to make sure you've got things right.
Step 8
Set Print Area - see online explanation of how to do this.