The Value of Time

Today I had four meetings. I usually don’t have four meetings in a month. It started with my post observation meeting with my principal, which went well. I then had a long overdue problem solving meeting for one of my students. After school we had a very interesting behavior committee meeting that was interrupted by a parent who was going ballistic in the office. But the best meeting I had today was with my teaching partner and coach. We are trying to redesign our last reading and writing unit, and so our principal, with a great assist from our coach, allowed us to take a half day to plan. My partner and I plan a lot, like we talk about our plans daily. However it still always feels rushed. Trying to plan a full unit on our own would have been a nightmare, and there is no way we would’ve come up with a great plan like we did today.

We took the entire afternoon off, and after some back and forth, we came up with a great plan for both reading and writing. I put together a calendar for reading, and my partner started the calendar on writing. Our coach helped us with some great ideas, found some great materials, and looked up some books that we can purchase for the unit. The three of us got these units pretty much planned from when we get back from break all the way through the end of the year.

It is such a nice feeling to have all of that done. It will make our planning over the next two months so much easier. We may need to make some tweaks along the way, but that is expected. All of this is due to the fact that we just had some time to plan. It is so valuable, yet it seems so hard to come by sometimes.