The Secondary Teacher | Elective Teacher Resources, Secondary Teacher Strategies, and Teacher PlanningEp 372: Teacher Planning Starts With Protecting Your Planning Period
Planning period for multiple preps can turn into a daily negotiation with yourself. On The Secondary Teacher Podcast, host Khristen Massic explains why protecting your planning period matters, then takes the next step: deciding how to use that time across every class you teach.
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/secondarycalendarpod
Get 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/reset
Shop my Teachers Pay Teachers store: https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Store/Khristen-Massic-Cte-Teacher-Coach
The common mistake is easy to recognize. You finally get a quiet block without students, open your laptop, and realize that “planning” could mean almost anything. You could prepare tomorrow’s lesson, start the next unit, finish project materials, make copies, revise something you already taught, or answer the task that happens to be sitting directly in front of you. When every option is waiting for a decision, the first part of your planning period disappears before you’ve done meaningful work.
The episode captures that problem with a painfully familiar mailbox detour. There was time available, but no clear answer to the question, “What should I work on right now?” So checking the mailbox became tempting. It was a real task, easy to complete, and satisfying enough to create the feeling of progress. But it wasn’t the work that needed attention every day. The better solution was simple: check it after school, check it once a week, or send a fast finisher to the office with a hall pass. The point isn’t that a mailbox never matters. The point is that an available task shouldn’t automatically control your planning period.
For middle and high school teachers, especially those managing several courses, planning period for multiple preps requires a wider view before focused work begins. Look across the day you’re preparing for. Which classes are ready? Which one still needs a lesson? Is one course about to start a new unit? Does a project need materials set up? Is tomorrow handled well enough that you can work ahead instead? This quick scan prevents one class from absorbing all your attention while another class quietly becomes tomorrow night’s emergency.
That’s the difference between a deliberate choice and planning in silos. Finishing an entire unit for one course can feel like a major win, and it is real work. But if robotics still needs a lesson tomorrow, the work hasn’t solved the whole teaching day. A multiple prep teacher workload punishes tunnel vision because each completed course doesn’t automatically help the next course. The answer isn’t to plan every class simultaneously. That creates its own kind of chaos. The answer is to check all your preps first, then choose where your attention belongs.
Sometimes one prep genuinely needs the full block. Building out a new unit may require sustained thinking, especially when you’re working through what students need to learn, practice, and produce. The key is knowing that this is the choice you’re making after reviewing the rest of your schedule. “Today I’m focusing on this unit because I checked the other classes” is a plan. “I spent the whole block here because this is where I started” is how planning in silos takes over.
The conversation also offers a practical way to make the next prep less demanding. Don’t assume every course requires a completely new lesson structure. Look for decisions you can carry forward. An activity format, student practice structure, discussion routine, or feedback process may transfer even when the subject matter changes. The episode uses a bell ringer example to make the distinction clear. The same video didn’t make sense across engineering design and robotics, particularly when students were in both courses. But the structure could stay: students look at something, write what they notice and wonder, and talk with a partner. The content changes. The classroom routines can remain familiar.
That approach takes pressure out of planning period for multiple preps. You’re not asking, “How do I invent a brand-new lesson for this class?” You’re asking, “What do I already have that fits, and what still needs to be chosen?” Course-specific content still matters, but you don’t need to rebuild every instructional decision from the ground up. The Unit Planning Lab approach referenced in the episode, using Introduce, Practice, Produce, reinforces that planning can happen through connected decisions rather than a pile of unrelated tasks.
The practical routine is straightforward. Before you sit down, look at the whole day. Identify what needs attention next. Give that work a place in the time available. If you’re going to spend the entire block on one prep, confirm that the other preps won’t surprise you later. Then, when the planning period ends, leave a clear next step. Not a giant list of unfinished work. Just enough direction to make the next start easier. If you finished the Introduce portion of a unit, write down that the next decision is how students will practice. If you chose a bell ringer structure, note that you still need course-specific content. If you finished one prep, mark what may carry over to another.
This is especially useful for teachers moving between English, social studies, science, math, robotics, engineering, electives, or other secondary classroom courses during the same day. The content may shift constantly, but the planning process doesn’t have to feel brand new every time. A clear next step keeps you from spending ten minutes deciding where to begin. It also makes it less likely that an easy errand, inbox check, or familiar administrative task will replace the instructional work you meant to do.
For teachers who already feel behind in one class while getting ahead in another, planning period for multiple preps offers a better way to measure progress. The goal isn’t to touch every class every day. The goal is to make sure your focus is intentional and connected to what students will need next. One class may receive the full block. Another may benefit from a structure you’ve already developed. A third may only need materials gathered or a next step recorded. That is still a plan, because you made the decision after looking across the schedule.
Host Khristen Massic connects this work to the larger process of protecting your planning period. First, decide what belongs in that time. Then set an order. Then schedule the work that matters before the period begins. The Planning Period Reset Toolkit is named in the episode as a resource for sorting through the work competing for planning time and identifying what actually needs attention. The broader lesson is clear: your planning period needs more than empty minutes. It needs a starting point.
The episode is for any secondary teacher whose planning time gets hijacked by whatever task is closest. It’s for the teacher who finishes a two-week plan for first period, then realizes the other classes still need tomorrow’s lessons. It’s for the teacher who has plenty to do but wanders toward the mailbox because choosing among ten reasonable tasks feels harder than completing one obvious errand. And it’s for the multi-prep teacher who wants a more sustainable teacher work life balance without pretending that every class can be planned at once.
Use the whole day as your starting point. Protect your planning period from low-priority drift. Choose the prep that needs attention, carry forward structures that still work, and leave yourself a clear next step before the bell sends you back into the classroom. That’s how planning becomes more manageable across the whole teaching day, instead of leaving you ahead in one class and behind in the rest.
Stop letting the nearest task run the show.
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