Surviving the Teacher Workload When You Have Multiple Preps

We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: expectations for teachers are totally unreasonable.

The teacher workload includes everything from administrative duties to grading to professional development to, oh yeah, teaching, and when we list it all out, it’s no wonder that teachers are especially vulnerable to burnout.

One significant part of the teacher workload that many people don’t understand is just how long it takes to plan lessons and create curriculum. The general public believes teachers are handed curriculum on their first day in the classroom, ready-to-go with no prep required. Our school administrators and district officials seem to agree: besides, they’ve given us a 50-minute prep period to tie up any lingering loose ends (and think it’s so generous they have no qualms about asking us to give it up regularly to cover for absent teachers).

But as any teacher will tell you, district-provided curriculum is never just ready-to-go, and creating our own curriculum takes much more than 50 minutes. In fact, it could easily be its own full-time job rather than just one piece of the typical teacher workload.

Adding to this already heavy teacher workload is the fact that it’s rare to be assigned just one course. It was standard practice at our school that each teacher had at least two courses (referred to as “preps” in the teacher world). Many of us taught three. Teachers at small schools frequently find themselves teaching four or more.

So how do we manage our teacher workload when we’re assigned multiple preps? How do we keep all the plates spinning, all the balls in the air, insert your preferred metaphor here? How do we create curriculum and lesson plans for multiple courses while still answering emails, grading student work, and teaching multiple classes a day?

This is a question we hear frequently from new teachers, and it’s one we’ve had plenty of opportunities to investigate over our combined 30+ years of teaching. If you’re in need of strategies to manage the teacher workload that comes with multiple preps, we have ideas for you!

Creating Curriculum When You Have Multiple Preps: 6 Strategies for Managing Teacher Workload

When it comes to creating curriculum, your new go-to strategy is to use everything you can for both (or all) preps. Sometimes we can quite literally reuse the exact same materials; other times, we can make a few modifications that still add significantly less time to your teacher workload than creating multiple lesson plans that are entirely unique.

Reuse small skill-building activities that students are unlikely to remember.

Before we switched to using Quill.org for personalized grammar instruction, we created a series of grammar packets. When Kate was assigned to teach both 9th and 10th grade English, she used the exact same grammar packets, and the next year, we learned that students are unlikely to remember a 5–10 minute grammar exercise a year later. Not one student mentioned that they had done the activity already.

Reuse mini-lessons for review, especially when you teach courses that are unlikely to overlap.

If you’re teaching a one-day mini-lesson to review something simple like creating a plot diagram or writing an effective theme statement, you can probably get away with reusing it, especially when the purpose is to review something students should already know.

When you teach courses that are unlikely to overlap, this works even better. For much of our careers, we taught standard-level 10th grade English and AP Literature to seniors. Very few of our former students showed up in AP Lit, so we were able to save quite a bit of time by using the same skill review activities.

Use the same daily routines.

If you do daily bellringers, structure them the same way in each class. Whether we were teaching an honors course, a standard-level course, or AP Lit, all of our students did Quill grammar, Kahoot review lessons, and First Chapter Friday Nearpods.

Sure, we made some adjustments: we used different vocabulary for the Kahoots and changed up some of our book recommendations, but using the same basic structure for all classes made lesson planning and weekly prep easier.

In a similar way, we followed the same policies in all of our classes. For example, we used the same basic system for assigning participation points, even though it was more of a classroom management tool for our standard-level sophomores and a discussion grade for our AP seniors.

It’s much easier to reinforce these policies (and keep yourself sane) when they’re consistent throughout the day.

Use the same activity for multiple preps and just replace the texts.

When your activity is a little bit more memorable and you want to avoid students remembering all the answers year to year, use the exact same materials but replace the texts.

When Kate taught 9th and 10th grade simultaneously, they had the same content standards, so for every activity we did in 10th grade, she did the same activity in 9th grade with a different text. Introduction to the 5C paragraph? Same materials, different movie. Introduction to theme statements? Swap out the Pixar shorts. Advertisement analysis activity when learning persuasive writing techniques? Same worksheet, different ads.

English is a skills-based class, and our students need regular practice with the same skills. Save yourself some prep time by reusing the same activities with different texts. If you have repeat students from one year to the next, they can do both activities and still have a valuable learning experience.

Use a basic skeleton to create every assignment.

Even if you’re not reusing an entire activity, use the same basic skeletons to create assignments for each prep.

When we created guided reading assignments, we always formatted them the same way. Tests on novels had the exact same sections. Rubrics looked remarkably similar, even with their slight variations.

It’s always easier to edit something than to create something from scratch. So don’t start with a blank document. Use the basic format of something you’ve already created and edit it for another prep.

Use the same core curriculum for standard-level and honors-level courses in the same grade.

You may have heard the passionate argument that honors classes shouldn’t just be standard-plus, they should have their own unique curriculum. In an ideal world, sure!

But when the courses have the same standards or you’re at a school where all students in a grade read the same texts, use your standard-level curriculum with your honors classes and just add enhancements.

For the most part, honors-level students still need the same basic review and introductory lessons, but they can move through them more quickly and with less scaffolding. For guided reading assignments, we kept most of the questions the same but then required honors students to write an analytical paragraph for a more challenging short-answer question and added a discussion component. When Kate taught standard and honors-level sophomores, she added a couple novels and projects to the honors curriculum.

A Suggestion for Pacing When You Have Multiple Preps

When you’re creating your calendar for multiple preps, do your best to be aware of weeks that will have a heavy workload. If you’re going to do a project where students in one class will need a lot of intensive teacher interaction, try to make your other prep a little more hands-off. If you have a major essay going on in one class, don’t schedule a major essay in another class.

Of course, sometimes the chaos is unavoidable, but when you can spread out highly-intensive, stressful activities so they don’t all land at once, you make your life much easier.

Organizational Tips for Managing Multiple Preps

Sometimes it’s the little things that make a big difference, and organizational tools are one of those little things that help you manage multiple preps without losing your mind.

Use a different “theme” for each course so you can easily tell materials apart.

At the most basic level, use a different color on the whiteboard to write each class’s agenda and homework. We did this for years, and it helped us and our students know where to look.

But as we got more tech-savvy, Kate started designing the core materials for different preps with their own unique styles, whether it was a syllabus, a Canvas course, or daily agenda slides. It was helpful to be able to tell at a glance which prep something belonged to (or, on a particularly busy day, which class period we were in).

Buy organizational supplies that help you and your students keep things straight.

A few years in, Steph started keeping two baskets on the front table: one for AP Lit and one for sophomores. The idea was that students would turn in work, especially late work, to the appropriate basket. While they certainly made mistakes, it helped keep grading a little bit more organized, especially on busy days.

Whether it’s different color markers or folders, different binders, or bins and baskets, a trip down your favorite aisle at Target or Staples can be a helpful way to ease the daily chaos.

Sharing the Teacher Workload: Collaboration Tips When You’re Teaching Multiple Preps

You have to interact differently with your colleagues when you’re trying to juggle multiple preps than you would if you taught the same class all day.

Collaborate and share resources.

You can’t afford to be a lone wolf when you’re teaching multiple preps (especially when you’re teaching three or more). This is a quick road to burnout (trust us, we’re speaking from experience here).

If you’re lucky enough to have solid PLCs at your school, work together, share ideas, and divide up the workload. Even if you don’t have great opportunities for collaboration at your site, join a teacher community on Facebook (or through AP Central if you teach an AP course). Take advantage of TPT resources.

The teacher workload is too big already, and you don’t have to go it alone. Get help!

Know your school and maximize your course requests.

Different schools handle course requests differently, so you’ll need to be familiar with how things work at your site, but once you are, use the knowledge to your advantage.

We were able to provide a fair amount of input into the courses we wanted to teach, so we often requested to stay at the same grade level so we could reuse our curriculum. We also, for many years, offered to teach any course as long as we could stay together as collaborators. If you have the opportunity for this kind of input, make course requests that will help to keep you sane!

If you’re at a school where you don’t have a lot of input into course requests and you find yourself changing courses frequently, don’t put down roots. If you know you’re always going to be changing back and forth between preps, it’s probably not a good use of your time to invest heavily in creating materials that you may not ever be able to reuse.

Be willing to break from your PLC if it helps you survive.

In an ideal world, participating in a PLC helps ease our teacher workload rather than making it worse. But if your PLC adds additional stress and work to your plate, don’t be afraid to take some space. If you need to do something different with your class just to stay sane, let your PLC know. At the very least, they’ll appreciate the heads up, but it’s also possible they’re also feeling overwhelmed or have suggestions about how to make things more manageable. Prioritizing your own sanity and boundaries is better for you and your students (and maybe even your fellow teachers) than staying quiet or going along with the group just to avoid conflict.

Mindset Shifts for Teaching Multiple Preps

Maybe we should have included this section first instead of last, but we thought it summed up our best advice for surviving the teacher workload when you have multiple preps. You have to have a different mindset than you would if you were only teaching one prep.

To be honest, we think this is all pretty good advice for just surviving the teacher workload in general, no matter how many preps you have!

Don’t create everything from scratch.

We’ve both identified this one as an unnecessary expectation we held for ourselves that contributed to our burnout. To endure in this profession, you can’t prioritize everything, and when you think about the things that only you can do, creating everything from scratch just isn’t one of them.

This is especially true when you’re teaching multiple preps. Choose a unit or two from each course that you’ll create from scratch (if that’s something you enjoy doing), and then look for “good enough” materials you can use for everything else. We’re using “good enough” a little tongue-in-cheek right now. Steph’s therapist is teaching her to say “good,” not “good enough.” We’re confident that there are plenty of “good” things out there that we could have used over the years and that other people are equally capable of creating “good” things.

If you teach the class for multiple years, you can choose a unit to flesh out the next year. And plan wisely—don’t create units from scratch for both preps at the same time! Alternate!

Focus on the most important things.

Identify the units and skills that are most important for your students in each prep and focus on those. If you only teach one novel during the year, then it’s worth putting in the time to make it good. If your school has a major interdisciplinary research paper, then make that your priority. If your students have a less than amazing lesson on the occasional short story or poem, they’ll survive.

Simplify.

When you’re juggling multiple preps, you have to be kind to yourself. You just can’t invest in your course the same way you would if you only taught one prep. So learn to be okay letting things go and keeping it simple. Sure, maybe you won’t be the teacher who always has a super-fun themed tea party or Google Slides presentation full of carefully-selected memes. But that’s okay.

Be intentional about your time priorities.

It’s easy to let one class take up all your grading time. We swung like a pendulum on this one—we’d focus on AP because they had a lot more graded assignments and were more likely to read feedback, but then we’d want to procrastinate essays and crank through our easy credit/no credit assignments for our sophomores.

Sometimes, you do need to prioritize one class over another, whether it’s because they’re preparing for an AP exam or you need to give feedback on those Actively Learn responses so they can do revisions the next day. Otherwise, try to keep a balance between grading (or at least grade things in the order they’re turned in) so you don’t accidentally ignore a class for longer than you should.

Aim for a B minus.

Okay, folks. This one’s hard to hear, but it’s Steph’s new mantra in life (thanks again to therapy). 

For those of us who struggle with perfectionism, it is humanly impossible for us to fulfill all of our responsibilities (work and personal) perfectly. We can’t be excellent at everything all the time.

But we can do a pretty good job most of the time. And when we reserve the energy we’re tempted to expend getting from a B minus to an A+ to get another area of our life up to B-minus status, we’re probably going to feel better about ourselves across the board. And let’s be honest, fellow perfectionists: our “B-minus” is most of the world’s “A-plus-plus.”

This is helpful life advice for all of us, but when we’re juggling multiple preps, it’s lifesaving. Don’t try to be an A+ teacher. Try to be a B- teacher, and we’re betting things will turn out not just “good enough” but pretty darn good.

The teacher workload is always going to feel insurmountable, but especially when you’re teaching multiple preps, you have to make decisions about where you’ll spend your time so you can keep all your classes moving forward without throwing your personal life into total chaos. Every minute you can save is valuable, and we hope these practical tips buy you back more than a few minutes.

Need some regular encouragement in your inbox? Scroll to the bottom of this page and join our email list for a dose of friendly advice, humor, and reminders that you do, in fact, have this every Monday morning. And if you’re into the idea of using different themes for each prep, check out our bundle of three themed daily agenda slides to get started!