TM4T Using Your System 2.1 - At the Start of Each Week

At the start of the week, you should review your Yearly Plan, modify it based on what happened - or didn't happen last week, then create a Weekly Plan for the following week.

You should review your Yearly Plan; not just for this week, but to understand the following two-three weeks and to place this week's activity into the context of the school year.

This longer-term perspective is sometimes called a head's up and it is invaluable to avoid being focused solely on the detail of the day-to-day grind.

This activity - deciding what you are going to do next week - is fundamental in TM4T and is fundamental in keeping control of your life, and making sure that you respond-not-react to whatever is thrown at you.

Let's go through this in detail.

Your Yearly Plan will include three types of scheduled activity in addition to your teaching timetable:

1. Lesson Planning activities which you added at the start of the school year following your chosen lesson-planning method. If you are using the magpieplanning method these will mostly comprise Lesson Scripting tasks, each dealing with 3-6 lessons. Of course, your own work pattern will be unique, varying dependent on the time of year, your timetable, your speed of work and your subject discipline.

2. Assessment activities which you added when you did your Lesson Scripting sessions. Note that your Scheme of Work may already show your chosen assessment approach, and when you will be doing your assessment, but it is rarely advisable to add tasks to your Yearly Plan when writing a Scheme of Work. Remember that this could be over a term before you teach the lessons involved. Assessment is much more reliably scheduled when it is done as a part of Lesson Scripting - at most a few weeks before the assessment takes place.

3. Key dates: personal deadlines, meetings, duties and school events which you have recorded from a variety of sources. It is clearly important that every scheduled event in your working life is recorded on your Yearly Plan. Then, based on your up-to-the-minute knowledge of what is happening in your classes, in your school and in your life, you should add to or modify the events scheduled for the following week.

Here is an example of what a section of the Yearly Plan might look like before being modified.

You should review the events on the right-hand side of the plan, decide what needs to happen when, and modify the left-hand side. This timetable will be used to create your weekly plan.

Note that all these modifications are being made NOT on the Weekly Plan, but on the Yearly Plan. You should do this at the start of the week, in a calm reflective environment. Some teachers like to prepare their weekly plans on Sunday evening rather than do so in the bustle of a busy Monday morning.

You will be aware of two conflicting pressures in modifying your Yearly Plan. On one hand, you will be aware of looming events in the school, and the pressures of delivering high quality learning to your students. On the other hand, you must remember the realities of a stressful career. A week is a long time in politics, but can sometimes feel like a lifetime in teaching. As always, try not to multi-task. Either do family stuff or do teaching stuff, but not both together. Make modifications to ensure that you can do what is needed, but do not make a plan that you cannot carry out. Remember that your family, and those you love, and you, deserve a generous chunk of your time.

There is one more key piece of advice here: when you are prioritising your work and deciding exactly what goes in your Weekly Plan, avoid binary decisions. In this context, a 'binary decision' is a yes-no choice regarding what to do. There may be a time, for example, when you feel you have to choose between going to the gym or marking Year 10's test papers properly. In fact, in most cases, you don't have these simple either-or choices. There are a million shades of grey between 'not marking a test paper' and 'marking a test paper properly' (whatever 'properly' means); and there are a range of alternatives to 60 minutes in the gym. Remember 'opportunity cost' at all times, and look for the best combinations of outcome.

The presentation earlier on the page shows a quite sophisticated Weekly Plan, based on a spreadsheet. This allows you to simply copy from your Yearly Plan to a Weekly Plan and print it out. Examples are available here.

You should use something like this, every day...

Of course, just having a plan doesn't guarantee things will go smoothly, for key points in using your plan, click here.