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The Secondary Teacher | Classroom Routines, Secondary Teacher Strategies, Workload ManagementElective Teacher Resources, Secondary Teacher Strategies, and Teacher Planning Author: Khristen Massic Elective Teacher Resources, Secondary Teacher Strategies, Teacher Planning
**Are you looking for secondary teacher strategies, elective teacher resources, and teacher planning systems that actually work when you're juggling multiple preps?** Are you drowning in lesson planning and still taking work home every night? Wondering if managing your workload is even possible when every class needs something different? Let's be honest your planning period disappears fast. If that sounds like you, you're in the right place. This podcast is for overwhelmed secondary teachersespecially elective teachers, CTE teachers, and any multiple prep teacherwho are tired of feeling behind and need practical secondary teacher strategies built for the reality of teaching multiple courses. You'll learn how to simplify teacher planning, build classroom routines that reduce your workload, and find elective teacher resources that help you keep students engaged without creating everything from scratch. Because you don't need a better planner. You need systems that fit the reality of your secondary classroom. Hi, I'm Khristen Massic. I'm a former high school teacher in career technical education who spent 10 years teaching courses like engineering, drafting, robotics, digital media, and moreand at one point, I taught **nine preps in a single school year**. I've also worked as a middle school assistant principal and now support teachers at the district level, so I've seen the teacher workload from multiple angles. And here's what I learned the hard way: It's not that you're bad at teacher planning. It's that most planning systems were never built for teachers juggling this many different classes. I used to overplan, rebuild everything from scratch, and try to make every lesson perfectuntil it became completely unsustainable. What changed? I stopped chasing perfect plans and started building simple, repeatable systems. Now I help secondary teachers simplify teacher planning, reuse what already works, and actually finish something during their prep period. Inside this pod Language: en Genres: Courses, Education, How To Contact email: Get it Feed URL: Get it iTunes ID: Get it |
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Ep 373: Teacher Time Management Mistakes That Keep Repeating
Episode 373
Tuesday, 13 October, 2026
Teacher time management mistakes that keep repeating can quietly steal your planning period, even when you already know how to do the work. On this episode of The Secondary Teacher Podcast, host Khristen Massic explains why the answer isn’t always working faster. Sometimes, the real problem is having to start over.Links mentioned in this episode:Grab the Secondary Teacher Systems Toolkit here: https://khristenmassic.thrivecart.com/systemstoolkit/?ref=pod Planning for the next school year? If your day is organized by class period, your planning calendar should be too. Grab my Editable Class Period Calendar here: https://khristenmassic.com/secondarycalendarpodGet the Planning Period Reset Toolkit—a free set of quick-start tools to help you protect your time, focus faster, and finally finish something… even during chaotic school days. https://khristenmassic.com/resetShop my Teachers Pay Teachers store: https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Store/Khristen-Massic-Cte-Teacher-CoachFor middle and high school teachers, especially multiple prep teachers, the repeated work can hide in plain sight. You set up a gradebook, configure something in your student information system, organize course materials, or adjust an LMS setting. The task gets done, so you move on. Then the next term arrives, and you’re back at the beginning, hunting through menus and trying to remember which setting you changed last time.That pattern is one of the most common teacher time management mistakes that keep repeating because the task feels finished once it leaves your list. You handled it. You survived it. You may even remember that it worked. But remembering that a task worked isn’t the same as remembering how to complete every step. When the process only happens once a term, once a semester, or once a year, your memory may not be a reliable system.Khristen shares a clear example from her own teaching work. In her district, students may be placed in separate course sections based on whether they’re taking a class for regular high school credit or dual enrollment credit. The students can still sit in the same classroom and learn the same material, but the LMS lists them in different sections. Rather than building and maintaining duplicate course materials, she cross-lists the courses so everything can be managed in one place.The process is genuinely helpful. The problem is that she only needs to cross-list courses once a semester. When the next semester comes around, she knows she has done it before, but she may not remember exactly where the settings are, which menu to open, what order to follow, or which box to check. That creates a frustrating kind of administrative déjà vu. The work isn’t necessarily hard. It’s just infrequent enough that she has to relearn it.The same issue shows up when you set up your gradebook again, configure a district system, or prepare materials for a new semester. These tasks don’t need to be complicated to consume valuable planning time. They only need to have enough steps that you can’t confidently reconstruct them months later. For a teacher managing three or four classes that all need attention, the cost is more than a few clicks. It can be the lesson introduction you didn’t finish, the practice activity you didn’t plan, or the uncertainty you carry home because the planning period disappeared.The better approach is to notice which tasks need a repeatable process before you do them again. Ask yourself two practical questions: Will I need to do this again? Am I likely to remember how to do it when that time comes? If the answer to both questions points toward repetition and relearning, that task is a strong candidate for simple documentation.This is where standard operating procedures, or SOPs, become useful for teachers. The phrase may sound formal, but the idea is not. An SOP can be a basic set of instructions that helps you complete a task without figuring everything out from scratch. It doesn’t need a special template, a polished design, or instructions for every possible situation. It needs to help future you get through the process with less confusion.The key is to document the task while you’re already doing it. Don’t create a giant project out of documenting every classroom routine, every LMS setting, or every administrative process you’ve ever touched. Choose one task you know you’ll repeat. The next time you set up your gradebook or cross-list your courses, open a Google Doc and capture the process as you go.Take a screenshot when you need to open a particular menu. Capture the screen when you change an important setting. Add plain instructions such as, “Step 1, do this. Step 2, click here. Step 3, make this change.” If you need to reference a website or another set of instructions, include the link. That’s enough. You’re not writing a manual for an entire school district. You’re creating a starting point for the next time the task comes around.That first pass may take a little longer because you’re completing the task and documenting it at the same time. But you’re doing the work once so you don’t have to spend the same amount of time relearning it later. This is one of the simplest ways to reduce the mental load of occasional administrative work for multiple prep teachers. You still have to teach the content, respond to students, make decisions about instruction, and prepare for several classes. You shouldn’t also have to rediscover the same menu path every semester.The document only helps if you can find it later. Use the words you’re likely to search for in the title. If the instructions are about cross-listing LMS courses, put those words in the title. If the process covers gradebook setup, name it that way. You don’t need a complicated filing system. You need a document that appears when you search for the task you’re trying to complete.That searchability matters because teacher systems tend to break down in ordinary, predictable ways. The document may exist, but you can’t remember what you called it. The screenshots may be saved somewhere, but not alongside the instructions. You may have written a clever title that made sense in the moment and means nothing six months later. Clear, searchable language beats a beautiful filing system when you’re trying to protect your planning period.Protecting your planning period isn’t only about blocking off time on your calendar. It’s also about reducing the number of decisions and searches that consume that time. If you spend 20 minutes trying to remember how to complete a task that could take 5 minutes with clear instructions, you’ve lost 15 minutes. In a secondary classroom, 15 minutes can hold a lot: a lesson introduction, a decision about tomorrow’s activity, or the final pieces of a plan that lets you leave school without carrying uncertainty home.That’s why one of the biggest teacher time management mistakes that keep repeating is treating every recurring task like a brand-new problem. A schedule can show you when to do the work, but it won’t necessarily tell you how to stop relearning the process. Scheduling and systemizing solve different problems. One gives important work a place. The other gives repeated work a path.The episode also makes an important timing distinction. If you’re listening in October and you already completed your beginning-of-year setup, don’t go back and recreate every step from August. That would turn documentation into another project, taking time away from the work that actually needs your attention now. If you’ve already set up your courses or configured your gradebook, let that work stay finished.Instead, document the process the next time it naturally comes around. Maybe you’ll set up the gradebook again next term. Maybe you’ll cross-list your courses next semester. Maybe your school or district has a recurring process you only touch once a year. Put the name of that task somewhere you’ll see it when the time comes. Add a reminder to your calendar for the beginning of next semester, or put it on the checklist you already use when preparing for a new term.When the task comes back, document it in real time. That is the moment when the menus, settings, and sequence are in front of you. You don’t have to rely on a vague memory of what you did months ago. You can capture the actual process as it happens, including the small detail you would otherwise forget.This approach is especially useful for middle and high school teachers who move between multiple preps. The work may look different from class to class, but the administrative repetition is often familiar. You may have to configure similar gradebook categories, organize materials in the same LMS, or complete the same school-specific setup across different course sections. The content changes. The repeated administrative steps remain.That’s where teacher tips about time management often become too generic. Telling a multiple prep teacher to “use your time wisely” doesn’t address the real drain. The issue may be one recurring task that quietly steals part of every planning period when it comes around. The useful question is more specific: Which task do you keep doing without creating a way to do it faster next time?The answer may be your gradebook setup. It may be an LMS process. It may be something particular to your school or district. You...
