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Ideas for a More Creative Teacher Planner

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Abax Kingfisher Pty Ltd

Have you been thinking about the way you want to plan and organise your lessons next year? But you might just resort to the same old spreadsheet and timetable that an ordinary teacher planner already has mapped out for you? We feel that creative teaching has to come from a creative teacher – that’s why we’re always on the lookout for good ideas for a teacher planner Australia based educators can use. Here are some suggestions we love, which we hope can give you a dose of inspiration too.

First of all, make sure your routines and fixtures are mapped out first, so that you’re always aware of the parameters of your planning. If you know you’ve always got a computer lab lesson or physical activity at a certain time every week, then keep that stable and shade it in a distinctive colour. The goal is to mark out the empty space you have which you’re able to fill in with whatever you like: this will also give some scope and rein in the temptation to run absolutely wild.

Another useful method is to visually map out your big and small goals, and make sure they’re connected in some way. That way, you can feel like you’re working towards something big, like improving literacy outcomes, through lots of small tasks – like vocab lists, or storytelling. We particularly recommend using a visual symbol to try and categorise your big and small goals – for example, you might draw a little star every time you’ve got a literacy goal, and then a big star to represent the more important assessments you’re building towards.

The good thing about big goals is that they can be ambitious and amorphous, without the minutiae of measurements. A big goal might be something like meeting the ideals of your favourite educational theorist, or to develop your students’ love for a particular topic. Then, by connecting all your small day-to-day and activity-to-activity goals to the finish line, you’ll start to feel that every day you’re working towards something, instead of just going through the motions.

You might also want to use this visual approach to create some backup plans and contingencies in case your class is either accelerated, remedial, or mixed ability. As you’re planning activities, you’ll naturally notice moments for extension, as well as certain activities which lend themselves to being ran for a longer length of time if needed. Make a note of these plans in your margins to remind yourself you have options later in the term. And if you’re the kind of person who gets stressed out looking at a page full of worst-case-scenarios, you might want to fold up these plans in a post-it-note, hidden and to be opened back up in case you do need it.

With these little suggestions, we hope to put a bit of fun back into working with your teacher planner. We’ve loved hearing about ideas for a teacher planner Australia based teachers have shared with us, and we hope to pass on some of the best to you and your faculty.

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