Work smarter, not harder: It’s a common adage for teachers who want to bolster their time management skills by keeping overtime at a minimum and classroom efficiency at a maximum. It's always a good idea to regularly check in with yourself and assess which time management strategies have been the most effective for you so far — and when to implement a few new ones.
Here, elementary teacher Genia Connell shares 15 tips on how to make the most of your time each day in the school year ahead so that you, too, can work smarter. Some of these ideas (say, those involving parent volunteers) may depend on your school district's policies, so be sure to refer to those before starting.
1. Archive Your Lesson Plans: Lesson planning takes an enormous amount of time and energy — the first time you do it. By developing a system for saving and archiving your lessons (hint: use binders!), you will be able to easily retrieve a lesson from a prior year, make a few modifications, and voilà: a new lesson for the new school year in a fraction of the time.