Batch Planning to Beat Teacher Burnout

Renata Salas

[warmly] Welcome to the show -- Colin, I wanna start with a thing from Jamie Sears in Edutopia, April 11, 2023, that made me feel both seen and a little attacked: if your planning block has you bouncing from English Language Arts to math to science in one sitting, stop doing that, and batch one subject across several days instead.

Colin Whitfield

[curious] That April 11 piece is so good because it sounds almost insultingly simple... until you realize most teachers do the exact opposite. We carve up one planning hour into, what, 15 minutes of reading, 12 of maths, 10 of science, and then wonder why we feel tired before we've produced anything useful.

Renata Salas

Exactly. And the tired part is the part people miss. It's not just, "oh, I prefer to focus." No -- by subject three, I'm already irritable. I used to do the full Sunday loop: Monday's ELA, then math, then science, then social studies, one day at a time like I was speed-dating my own curriculum. [laughs]

Colin Whitfield

[deadpan] Romantic, really. Nothing says a restful Sunday like four content areas fighting for custody of your frontal lobe.

Renata Salas

There it is. And then I'd end the night feeling weirdly busy and weirdly unfinished. Like, yes, technically Monday existed on paper. But I hadn't actually thought deeply about any one class.

Colin Whitfield

And there's a reason for that. Dr. Susan Weinschenk wrote in Psychology Today back in 2012 that when you switch tasks, your brain has to reload the relevant mental files. I love that phrase -- "reload." Because the cost isn't only the new task itself. It's the setup cost before the task even begins.

Renata Salas

Wait -- "mental files" is the exact image. Because ELA brain and math brain are not the same drawer for me. In ELA I'm thinking text complexity, discussion prompts, annotations. In math -- well, when I had to support math planning -- I'm thinking worked examples, practice sets, misconceptions. Science is labs, materials, safety, timing. That's three different desktops open in my head.

Colin Whitfield

Yes, and this is where the cognitive-load bit matters. We talk constantly about switching costs for students -- don't overload working memory, don't make them juggle too many things at once. Fine. But teachers are doing it to themselves during planning. Open reading, then maths, then science, and you pay the reload tax over and over and over.

Renata Salas

[skeptical] Which is funny, because if a consultant came into my classroom and told kids, "Okay, now every nine minutes we're gonna switch to a completely different kind of thinking," I'd be like, absolutely not. That's chaos. But then Sunday night me was doing exactly that to myself.

Colin Whitfield

[responds quickly] Right -- and the "reload tax" isn't metaphorical fluff. It's attention, decision-making, recall. You have to remember where that unit left off, what materials it needs, what the assessment is supposed to build toward. Then you abandon all of that and load a different schema. Same brain, same limited working memory.

Renata Salas

Schema. See, this is why you're useful. [chuckles] But truly, when I finally tried batching, the thing that shocked me wasn't just efficiency. It was emotional. I would spend one Sunday only in ELA. Just ELA. Four weeks of it. And I'd finish with this cleaner feeling, like I had actually completed something instead of leaving little planning crumbs all over the house.

Colin Whitfield

"Planning crumbs" is excellent. And listeners will know exactly what you mean. Little half-made worksheets, three tabs open to district pacing guides, one unlabeled Google Doc called Final_Final_UseThisOne.

Renata Salas

[laughs harder] Stop, because "UseThisOne" is a real genre of teacher file. But yes -- the big shift for me was going from planning Monday for all subjects to planning one subject for, say, four weeks at a time. Same total amount of curriculum. Different sequence. And suddenly Sunday wasn't six hours of spinning. It was shorter. Cleaner. More like, okay, I did the work and now I can go be a person.

Colin Whitfield

And that's the tension I want to underline: batching doesn't magically erase the amount of teaching you have to do. It changes where the friction sits. Instead of paying a dozen tiny startup costs, you pay one, then stay in the same lane long enough for the work to become easier.

Colin Whitfield

[matter-of-fact] So if someone's thinking, "Fine, lovely theory, what do I actually do tomorrow morning?" -- start with one subject. Just one. Then list the remaining units for the year in that subject. Estimate how many weeks each unit should take. After that, count the real instructional weeks left, not the fantasy weeks. Subtract holidays, testing windows, field trips, assemblies, all the glorious interruptions that make school... school.

Renata Salas

The "real instructional weeks" part is the one people skip. [pointed] Not calendar weeks. REAL weeks. Because if March has state testing and a field trip and a random pep assembly, you do not have five clean days. You have, like, two and a half functioning days and a prayer.

Colin Whitfield

Exactly. And once you've counted the real weeks, you adjust the unit lengths to match reality. Not your ideal version of the year, the actual version. That step matters because batching only helps if the plan is plausible.

Renata Salas

Let me make this concrete. Say you're teaching 7th-grade ELA. One Sunday, you sit down to draft four weeks of a novel unit. That's roughly twenty instructional days. And because you're staying in one subject headspace, you can sketch twenty one-sentence objectives, the reading task for each day, and an exit ticket for each day without stopping to think, "Wait, where did I put the science lab?" There is ZERO subject switching.

Colin Whitfield

[questioning tone] Twenty days is the memorable number there. Not one heroic master plan for the entire semester -- twenty days. Four weeks. That's big enough to create momentum, but not so big that it becomes a fantasy document nobody uses.

Renata Salas

Yes. And then the following Sunday, maybe you batch social studies. By the end of the month, every subject is four weeks ahead. That's the part that feels fake until it happens. You're not scrambling on Wednesday night because Wednesday already exists. Past You handled it.

Colin Whitfield

[softly] Past You -- occasionally the most trustworthy member of staff.

Renata Salas

Occasionally! [laughs] But here's where people get nervous. They hear "four weeks" and think, "So... more planning?" Not exactly. The first session may FEEL longer because you're doing a full startup: looking at the unit arc, the standards, the assessment path. But then the repeated startup cost disappears. Your objectives stay in the same sequence. Your materials stay in the same subject family. Your assessments build logically because you haven't left the room, mentally speaking.

Colin Whitfield

That's the key distinction: not planning more, planning differently. If the first batched session takes, say, a bit longer than your usual Sunday routine, that doesn't mean the method failed. It means you've front-loaded the thinking instead of scattering it into five separate acts of reorientation.

Renata Salas

And only after you've done that by hand -- after you've picked the subject, mapped the units, counted the real weeks, adjusted for reality -- THEN you can use an AI tool as a time-saver. ChatGPT, Claude, MagicSchool, Brisk, whatever you've got. Paste in a prompt and ask for a Monday-through-Friday table with a do-now, main task, and exit ticket. Fine. Helpful. But that is step four, not step one.

Colin Whitfield

[skeptical] I'm glad you said step four. Because if the AI generates a gorgeous five-day table before you've done the curricular thinking, all you've really done is outsource confusion. Very efficient confusion, perhaps, but still confusion.

Renata Salas

That is EXACTLY it. And teachers can smell marketing language a mile away. The method is the batching. The tool is just a copier with better manners. Once I know my 7th-grade novel unit is twenty days, I can absolutely let a tool help me draft do-nows or tighten exit tickets. But it cannot tell me what my kids actually need next if I haven't mapped the road.

Colin Whitfield

And there's one last practical bit I think matters more than people realize: save the file. Don't rebuild the universe next year. Save the batched unit, teach from it, make notes, then edit what already exists. Curriculum should age like a marked-up cookbook, not disappear like a Snapchat.

Renata Salas

[warmly] Yes -- save the file, save your comments, save the ugly version. Future You does not need a fresh blank document. Future You needs a decent draft with evidence from real children attached to it. Try batching one subject tomorrow morning, just one, and see if your brain feels less... chopped up. Then tell us how it went.

Colin Whitfield

[calm] If nothing else, you'll find out whether your planning problem was time -- or switching. That's a rather different diagnosis. See you next time.