Team Planning Made Easy Using the Google Suite!

Collaborating with your team is one of the most important aspects of planning as a teacher. Thinking critically about your own teaching and how your students are responding to it is how you grow as a professional. Unfortunately, as most teachers know, finding time to do that critical thinking and have meaningful team meetings is incredibly hard to do. Between balancing upcoming events, admin mandated assignments, and just the basic day to day planning it is almost impossible to have those essential conversations to improve your teaching!

BUT… once my team implemented the use of Google Suite in our planning we were able to reduce our planning time and have more meaningful conversations in our prep time. We were able to minimize the busy work and maximize our time together. Here’s how:

My team and I decided that we were going to ditch our paper planners and create a digital planner that we were all able to access and edit. Although there are specific planner apps that you can buy, we found that using a Google Doc was actually the most effective. What we liked most about it was that it was simple; set up was easy, we could add notes and communicate with one another, and we could link resources.

Step 1: On a new Google Doc type out all of the weeks of the school year. This seems like it would take a long time, but it actually goes by really quick!

Step 2: Highlight all of those and change them from “Normal” text to “Title”. This will create a “Table of Contents” for you on the left side of your doc so that you can access each week easily.

Step 3: You can set this up however you want, but here is what worked for us.

For each week we included a table for major things that needed to get done, our daily schedule, and a “To Do” list for each day. It looked like this:

We would copy and paste this page for each of the weeks. This gave us the ability to plan into the future and to add in events or lessons for later weeks with ease.

Plan for the Future:

The first thing my team and I would do was fill in anything major on the tables at the beginning of each week; state testing, picture days, assessments, assemblies, holidays, etc. would get put in immediately. This was so helpful as we never accidentally missed something important!! We’ve all been there! We usually did this piece together to start to just touch base about major items and to make sure that we were all on the same page.

Delegate Subjects:

My team delegated prep amongst our team, so we were each responsible for a subject. This worked best for our team and helped us create the most meaningful and thoughtful lessons without burning out. If you are creating all of your content please let me be your assistant and let me know what you need support with by submitting a form here!! I would be happy to create materials for you to help support your classroom!

Linking Materials:

Each person was responsible for adding in the appropriate material for their subject for each week and day. This could include a link to a lesson plan, worksheet, video, Google Classroom assignment, or slide deck so that we all had access to the plan for the day. By utilizing the linking function we were able to keep our planner neat and clean but packed with information and planning. It also gave each teacher the opportunity to print, make copies, and prep materials in a way that worked for them. We had all the information and could utilize it how we saw fit for our classroom.

Google Drive Folder:

The way that we kept everything organized was in a shared Google Drive Folder. We could upload PDFs so that we could link them to our planner for easy printing and/or Google Classroom use. The drive was organized by subject so even if you wanted to just go in and get materials from the drive instead of the planner, you could.

This greatly reduced the amount of time we spent utilizing our planning time for planning because we were able to immediately access each other’s work and the materials we were going to need for that day of learning.

Another thing I loved about this strategy was that after we did this for a whole year we were able to re-use SO MUCH of our work the following year because it was organized in such a way that we could quickly and easily repost, reprint, or reuse all of the material!

I hope that you utilize this strategy or modify it to fit the needs of your team! If you wish to buy my pre-made Google Slides planner from Teachers Pay Teachers, click here. Regardless, I encourage all teachers to explore the Google Suite to help maximize their work time!