Welcome to the show everybody! I'm Renata Salas, and I am here with Colin Whitfield. Colin, I want to talk about Sunday night dread. Not the general dread of Monday, but that very specific feeling around 8:00 PM when you have five different teacher edition manuals open on your kitchen table, and your brain feels like it's running on a dial-up connection. Ah, yes. The weekly planning marathon. It's a classic. But is the actual writing of the lessons the part that drains the battery, or is it something else? That is exactly what Jamie Sears argues in Edutopia. She wrote this piece called "2 Secrets to Making Lesson Planning Easy," and her core claim is that the real killer isn't the writing. It's the gear-shifting. It's going from third-grade reading standards, then jumping to long division, then pivoting to a writing prompt, and then trying to remember what on earth you're doing for noun-verb agreement. Oh, the cognitive friction of that is immense. In psychology, we call that "task-switching cost." Susan Weinschenk actually wrote about this in Psychology Today, in an article called "The True Cost of Multi-Tasking." She points out that every single time you switch tasks, it takes your brain about a tenth of a second to adjust. Now, a tenth of a second doesn't sound like much, but when you're bouncing back and forth across five subjects over a few hours, those fractions of a second compound. It can slash your overall productivity by roughly 40 percent. Forty percent! That explains so much. No wonder teachers feel like they've run a mental marathon by 10:00 PM without actually finishing the plans. It's the startup friction of opening a new mental tab every twenty minutes. Precisely. It fits perfectly with what Daniel Willingham writes about cognitive architecture. Our working memory is incredibly narrow. It can only hold a few items at once. If you are trying to keep fifth-grade fractions, persuasive writing rubrics, and the solar system model in your working memory simultaneously, you're just bottlenecking your own brain. Right, so instead of holding five different subjects in your head at once, the goal is to keep exactly one subject, one pacing guide, one set of standards, and one assessment path in your working memory. It's like clearing off the desk completely before you start the next thing. Exactly. And that brings us to the actual mechanics of "subject batching." How does a teacher actually organize this without drowning? Sears suggests a 90-minute block. You put it on your calendar, you close every tab that isn't that one subject, and you plan the next five weeks for that single subject. Five weeks of math. Or five weeks of ELA. Nothing else. Okay, five weeks sounds incredibly daunting when you first hear it. Like, "Renata, I can barely get through next Tuesday, and you want me to look at late November?" But Sears uses this great example of third-grade multiplication. She says the first three days of the unit are always the slowest to plan because you're literally loading the conceptual progression into your brain. You're learning the arc. But once that's loaded? Days four, five, ten, fifteen... they fly by because every decision is just building on the one you made three minutes ago. Yes! You've already built the scaffold in your own mind. You don't have to rebuild it every Sunday. And the workflow is key here. You don't try to make it perfect on the first pass. Step one is just the skeleton. You list the learning target and the check for understanding as quick bullet points for all twenty-five days. That's it. No slides, no worksheets, no searching for cute activities. Once that skeleton is locked in, then you do your second pass to pull the materials and build the slides. I love that distinction. It separates the "what are we learning" phase from the "how are we delivering it" phase. It's much easier to batch slide-creation when you already know exactly what goes on every slide, rather than trying to invent the pedagogy while aligning the text boxes. Ugh, the text box rabbit hole! Don't get me started. If I'm formatting a worksheet on Tuesday while trying to figure out what my Friday exit ticket is, I'm toast. Well, let's talk about how to grease the wheels of this process even further, because we live in the future now. If you're using ChatGPT, Claude, or MagicSchool, you can drop in a prompt to generate that initial five-week skeleton in about ten seconds. Oh, what's the prompt? Give me the exact recipe. Right, so you write: "Generate a five-week table for third-grade multiplication standards. I need one row per school day. Each row must include: a student-friendly learning target, a five-minute warm-up, the main task, an exit ticket question, and one differentiation move for students working below grade level." That is beautiful. Because it gives you the structure instantly, but—and this is a huge "but" for my fellow teachers—it is just a draft. Batching is a workflow; it's not a rigid lesson model. It doesn't care if you use the workshop model, direct instruction, or inquiry-based learning. It sits underneath whatever format your district requires. That's an important point. You aren't changing *how* you teach; you're changing *when* you think about it. But Renata, let me play devil's advocate here. If I plan five weeks of math in one go on a Tuesday in October, what happens when my kids completely bomb day three? Doesn't this make my teaching less responsive? Honestly, I think it's the opposite. When I'm planning week-to-week, if my kids bomb day three, I panic on Thursday night because I have to rewrite everything for Friday while still trying to figure out the next week's standards. But if I have a five-week map, I already know where we need to end up. I can just shift my pre-planned days down, or insert a "reteach day" because the overall path is so clear to me. It actually makes you more flexible, because you aren't lost in the woods. That's a fair point. It's easier to reroute when you actually have a map of the whole state, rather than just turn-by-turn directions for the next block. Exactly. So, here is our nudge for you tomorrow morning: find 90 minutes. Pick one subject. Put away everything else, grab your standards and your pacing guide, and try to map out five weeks of just that one subject. The first hour might feel painfully slow as your brain loads the concepts—but pay attention to how fast those last few weeks come together once you're in the flow. Try it, and tell us how your Sunday night feels afterward. Bye everyone! Cheers, see you next time.
Audio Coursesby Jellypod