How Shared Planning Can Reduce Teacher Workload

Sharing planning tasks can effectively reduce teacher workload. But how do you effectively coordinate planning activities across several departments? In this article, I will want to emphasize the importance of coordinating planning across the organisation.

We all know how time-consuming it can be to plan the school year and there are many different levels to plan on. It can be long-term (covering a term or year), medium-term (covering a unit or half herm), weekly or daily (in which you set out in detail your plans for a lesson).

? Read also: Plan the Academic Year in a Cyclical Planner

However, planning is a necessity for effective teaching and lessons will generally be more effective when you are certain of the content, learning objectives and activities. But in order to plan on the micro level, it is essential to have an overview of the school year and the activities in each department. The right overview supports the operational planning process and makes it easier to produce individual teaching plans for every lesson you teach.

At Plandisc we have made it our personal mission to reduce complexity in the educational planning process. Try out our free planning tool here.

So how do you make sure that your planning efforts are not gonna be a waste of time?

Towards a more Effective Planning Process

Research suggests that coordination issues are one the main impediments to effective and inclusive planning. In Scandinavia, it is common to use digital planning tools in the education sector. Planning online reduces complexity and makes it easy to share plans between departments.

Likewise, a case study from the Department of Education has shown that sharing planning tasks has several positive outcomes. The key findings are:

  • 85% of teachers reported that shared planning saved time
  • 95% of teachers reported that shared planning improved the quality of planning
  • 96% of teachers reported that shared planning encouraged departmental teamwork

You can read the full case study here.

The Shareable Planning Tool

Planning learning activities is very subjective from teacher to teacher and it is not something that can be done automatically. Each person plans differently and focuses on different aspects. That is why it is important to have an overall plan for the term year.

Plandisc is an online planning tool that provides a circular overview of the school year with whatever activities relevant to the school. Also, it is possible to integrate rings from different creators making coordination between different departments.

To the left, you can see a very basic example of how the overall plan could be structured. Plandisc can easily be customized to your specific requirements and the way you use it is entirely up to you.

It is possible to include the activities of several departments in the same Plandisc. Hereby, you get a complete overview on a single page and suddenly coordination issues are a problem of yesterday.

The key features include:

  • Printable year plan
  • Outlook integration
  • Embed on webpage
  • Evaluation of activities
  • Quick templates

Plandisc is currently being used in a lot of circumstances and industries. It is being used in schools, universities, HR departments, sports associations, project management, board of directors etc. The possibilities are endless.

However, the main vision is and always will be, to create a seamless and effective overview of planned activities. This vision has contributed to helping Scandinavians create the best education system in the world.

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