Teachers have crazy schedules, and if you ask any of them one thing they want more of, the answer will undoubtably be TIME. We’re always looking for more time. More time to grade papers. More time to spend with our students. And, if you’re like me, more time to plan for tomorrow.

When I was a first-year teacher, this was perhaps one of my biggest challenges. I couldn’t get past the perpetual question of: “What am I doing tomorrow?”. Now, I planned ahead and my training prepared me to deliver engaging lessons and integrated problem based and STEM units, but my focus was always on this question. This made for early mornings and late nights. I knew something had to change.

Worrying about the “what” I was doing daily wasn’t only increasing the mental strain on me (and my family); it was taking my focus away from what really matters: my students learning.

After a lot of late nights and stressful mornings, I realized that planning days and trying to “fill them” with good instruction or learning experiences wasn’t working. A foundational shift in my planning and implementation of instruction had to be more focused on the big picture. This is when I started focusing on units, and allowing my students to drive more of my instruction.

I started with the standards and developed leveled or tiered learning targets. I then created essential questions and aligned learning opportunities for my students to experience in order to learn the content. Then I decided something that would change my teaching forever…I was going to let the students set the pace. It wouldn’t be me determining what we were doing tomorrow in class, but rather their mastery of the content and progress through the learning targets.

This doesn’t mean I wasn’t facilitating and guiding their learning, but this shift changed the scope and appearance of my class. Instead of “filling time,” my students were continuing their educational journey (which I had mapped out) from one day to the next. I started working with them to show mastery after every learning opportunity and increasing their accountability. I created opportunities, through stations and technology, that allowed my students to access all parts of the curriculum as they were ready for them. Ways to monitor and track their progress were also created and utilized to keep me on pace with copies, lesson creation, and the creation of things like video lectures.  Their learning was in their hands now, not mine. And to my pleasant surprise…they were thriving.

I created and developed ways to manage the system and better organize the learning opportunities that made it easier for both me and the students. Additional help from an inspired student teacher I was lucky to have, helped me create a system that put the power of learning and the accountability of mastery in my students hands.

Walking into my classroom looks much different than my first classroom ever did. Students are doing multiple things every day, being assessed constantly, and they are working where they are at instead of where I “tell” them to be.

Planning ahead, letting students control the progression of curriculum delivery, and creating universally accessible and consumable curriculum. Mastery learning and letting my students set the pace has forever helped me answer the question of: “What am I doing tomorrow?”.

Instead of scrambling nightly to find another great, engaging lesson, my response is simple…my students are learning tomorrow, and I will be there to support and help them in their journey.  So stop worrying about what your doing and focus on what your students are learning, what they know, what they don’t, and what to do about it.

If you’d  like to share your own ideas (which I would L.O.V.E. to hear!) or learn know more about my classroom or how you can start to make some of these changes, shoot me an email, lets talk! If you want to learn how to use the system that I’ve created in your own classroom let me help you by clicking here.