Organize This! Long Range Planning

“It’s easy to come up with new ideas; the hard part is letting go of what worked for you two years ago, but will soon be out of date.”  --Roger von Oech

Starting in the 2015-16 school year, we are moving to Project Based Learning. Many of my past assessments have been performance or project based, so I this adjustment is probably going to be easier for me than it will be for many of my colleagues. But, PBL is not the same as teaching a unit with a performance task as a final assessment, so I still have quite a bit of work to do to effectively make the transition. I would love to have all of my units completely planned before school starts, but that isn't realistic, or really even a good idea. I will need to meet my students before ironing out the details. However, I do need to have as much done as I can, so I have pulled out my trusty spreadsheet program and started with a long-range plan template to help me organize my year.

My template starts two weeks before school starts and continues for a week after graduation. I have color-coded each month in reverse rainbow order, just to mix it up a bit. The grayed out days are school holidays, though the big blocks like winter and spring vacations are just omitted from the calendar. I have rows for each of the subjects I will be teaching (or so I've been told, at this point) and the row underneath each subject is for me to list the standards for each unit. This is a two-page spread (landscape), so I can put it in my teacher binder when I finish my long-range plan.

I've broken up the weeks of the school year in two ways. Each course is broken into week-long sections, starting on Monday and ending on Friday. Also, above the months I have made note of each actual "week" of school, starting on the first day and taking into account each of the school holidays. 

My next step is to figure out my individual PBL units. I don't want to spend a lot of time doing in-depth planning right now, but I really do want to figure out the basics of each unit, so I have created a planning template that I will be using to do my preliminary planning.

It is double-sided, and I will use the front side to plan the basic project, and then use to back to do more detailed scheduling when it is time.

If you like this and want to use it, just look in the "Free Stuff" tabs and get the link to the free TpT download.

Organize This! Attendance Edition

"And gain is gain, however small." - Robert Browning

Summer break is in full force. I finished working on curriculum at the district office last week, so now it is time to make sure that I start getting myself ready for next year! The first day of school is just under two months away, and I'm teaching 10th grade next year, which I haven't done in several years, so I've got some planning to do.

My first order of business is to do some general organizing, and I'm going to start with my teacher binder. I have searched far and wide, but have not really found a teacher organizer/grade book/planner that I have fallen in love with, so I have created my own templates and put them into a binder. I made it in the middle of last year, but I plan on making some updates and changes for the upcoming school year.

I'm starting with the my daily attendance logs. Our school is on an alternating A/B block schedule, so it is a challenge to find anything that is easy to use and works with an alternating schedule. I LOVE making and working with spreadsheets (I know that is a nerdy confession, but it's true), so I used Excel to make my daily attendance logs.

I started by creating separate tabs for "A" day and "B" day. I teach high school, so I made space for up to 30 students in each class. I made ten 5-day weeks and put in the dates for the first nine weeks of school. I added shading to the columns, first for the school holidays and teacher work days, and then for the alternating schedule:

These separate evenly so that there are 5 weeks on each page, and I just 3-hole punch them and put them in my binder.

At the bottom of each page, I added my "key" for taking attendance. When I was taking my education classes, one of the teachers I observed showed me how he combined his grade book and attendance. To mark a student absent, he outlined the box for that day, and if the student came in late, he put a diagonal line in the corner of the box, making a triangle. I really liked his method, but I have added to it since then.

I don't combine attendance and the grade book because I like to be able to give myself more information than I could if I had to save space for grades. Like Mr. Stephens, I outline the box if the student isn't in class when I take attendance. If the student doesn't show up, I put an A in the box at the end of class. If the student walks in late, even 2 seconds late, I make a diagonal line, which creates a triangle, in the upper left-hand corner to show that the student was late. If the tardy is unexcused, I leave it blank, but if it is excused, I fill in the little triangle. If the student is more than five minutes late, I write the time that he or she got to class. When a student leaves early, I make a triangle in the upper-right hand corner of that day and mark the time.

This gives me a lot of information that the online attendance record doesn't provide. First, if a student shows up tardy, but has a pass, I don't mark it as tardy in the official attendance record, but it still helps me to know that the student was late, especially if I'm grading warm-up activities and wondering why a student didn't turn it in. Second, my school counts students absent if they are more than fifteen minutes late to class--this way I know if a student was actually absent or was just more than fifteen minutes late. Finally, this method helps me track not only how often a student is late, but how often a student is REALLY late. Someone coming in a minute late once a week is different from someone coming in 10 minutes late once a week. This helps me see patterns and, let's keep it real, I sound much more impressive when I'm talking to parents and can tell them exactly how often and how late their child was.

Since I make one set of pages for each quarter, I can just print them out one grading period at a time, and then put them in my filing drawer at the end of each 9-week period. This keeps my teacher binder from getting overloaded with papers, yet allows me to keep my records on hand.