How to Balance Your Time Between Admin and Teaching As a Teacher

As most teachers will know, there’s more to teaching than guiding young people and helping them achieve success inside and outside the classroom. There’s also a great deal of administration involved, like responding to emails, marking homework, communicating with parents, and preparing classwork. 

Sometimes, it may feel as though you’re spending more time on admin than actually teaching. Fortunately, even though it’s challenging to balance your time between admin and teaching, it can be possible when you take these approaches: 

Start Early

Whether you have experience in public administration or any other line of work with a great deal of admin, you will know that the more interruptions you have, the longer it takes. That’s often why many teachers find themselves working long into the evenings. 

Rather than working those extra couple of hours after the school bell has rung for the final time, consider starting an hour early. You might be surprised by how much you can achieve when you’re able to beat the morning traffic. There are also fewer disruptions and distractions when you’re at school long before other teachers and students arrive. 

Set Boundaries

When you’re passionate about teaching and education, you want to be accessible and responsive to other educators, your students, and their families. However, this can come at great personal cost. You can find yourself responding to emails outside your regular working hours, just so you don’t have to keep anyone waiting. You can even waste precious time on the simple task of checking your emails multiple times a day. 

In most cases, immediate responses aren’t necessary. In fact, standard email etiquette is 24 to 48 hours. Give yourself grace and create separation between your home and work life. You may find that your personal life starts to flourish. 

Use Software 

Software and applications have made the lives of everyday workers so much easier and more productive, and teaching is no exception to the rule. Several programs have been created to assist teachers with everything from class planning and time management, through to setting meetings and prioritizing tasks. Think about the parts of your job you’re struggling with and start researching the programs that could make them easier. You might be surprised by what you find.  

Dedicate Blocks of Time 

When you have multiple administrative tasks to complete in one day, it’s all too easy to spend every free moment you have trying to squeeze them all in between teaching. However, switching between tasks isn’t making the most productive use of your time. If you want to maximize how much you can achieve in the smallest amount of time, dedicate a block of your free time to administrative tasks of the same kind.

For example, you might complete all your homework marking in the gap between two classes and respond to all your emails at the very end of the working day. When you have one focused session just for administration, there’s potential for you to achieve more than if you tried to complete various tasks throughout the day.  

Delegate and Share the Load

If there are tasks that teaching assistants and your coworkers can help with, don’t be afraid to share the load. This can be a particularly valuable piece of advice for teachers who are feeling burned out. Most of the time, teachers and teaching assistants are happy to help their peers, especially when they know the favor will be returned. 

Prioritize Tasks 

Arriving at school knowing you have several things on your to-do list can feel overwhelming. You don’t always know what to focus on first and can end up prioritizing the wrong things while more urgent tasks are left until last. 

That’s why planning your days and listing your tasks from most to least important can be so helpful. You know what requires most of your attention, and you can feel less stressed if you don’t complete the least pressing tasks. 

Give Each Day a Theme 

You don’t have to aim for balanced days in teaching. You can aim for balanced weeks. Consider assigning your tasks to specific days. For example, Monday can be about lesson planning, while Tuesday can be the day you grade all your students’ work. You might focus on administrative paperwork on a Wednesday and spend Thursday and Friday on student feedback and preparing for the following week.  

Balancing your time between teaching and those crucial administrative tasks can be challenging. However, by making use of technology, changing how you complete your tasks, and asking for help, you can achieve that all-important balance you seek.