One thing I loved about this past school year was the opportunity to host a student teacher and to work with the beginning teachers in my district. I had the opportunity to present multiple professional developments for them and it was refreshing to remember where I began and where I am now in my teaching career. It also reminded me of how much I didn’t know my first few years of teaching. So the idea of the beginning teacher boot camp was born.
I hope to provide you (beginning teachers or veterans in need of a refresher) with small action steps to make this job easier. I absolutely love this job, but I didn’t really start to feel like I was flowing with it until my 5th year teaching. So beginning teachers do not get discouraged when you feel like you should be doing more for your students. It will come with time, but hopefully I can help you not make the same mistakes as I did.
Alright now that I have rambled a little, let’s get down to business.
Today I am going to give you some tips for setting up your classroom schedule in a self-contained special education classroom. I personally teach moderate to severe intellectual disabilities, but this works for lots of categories and classroom types!
Action Step 1: Create or use a template of your week and days.
I like to use an Excel spreadsheet or PowerPoint as a template for my weekly schedule to make sure I am able to put all the things onto a schedule and then I clean it up later so that it is more printer friendly. Across the top of your paper write out/type out the days of the week and then down the side write out/type out time increments starting at the beginning of your day in 15 minute increments all the way to the end of the day. Once your template is ready to go you are ready for the next step.
Action Step 2: Collect related service schedules for your students who receive them (PT/OT/Adapted PE/ Speech/ etc.), your assigned lunch time, assigned specials times (basically any schedule you do not have direct control over) and put it into your template.
Contact your service providers and get their schedule as early as possible. In my district we share our related service providers with other schools, which means that they might only be on our campus once a week for a few hours. I usually ask them on the very first work day what they’re schedule is going to be so that I don’t schedule direct instruction in academics when I am going to have a lot of my students pulled out the room. It’s okay if this doesn’t work perfectly all the time, but a lot of my students receive adapted PE. This pulls multiple students and staff out of my room at a single time which can be difficult. So if you have a situation like that I would suggest you work on independent work or leisure skills with your remaining students.
But back to this action step…remember some service providers will be easier to get a response from than others and they are also doing the beginning of the year scramble to figure out how to best prepare. Some years it has been mandated by our district where and when service providers would be at our school and sometimes service providers will ask me when works best for them to pull my students. I prefer being asked and try to have a best case scenario already in mind. If you do this, you will be able to respond quickly and get priority on the times that work best for your classroom.
The last bit of this is to put in all your predetermined schedules onto your template. When your class is assigned lunch, any duties you have, specials times, access to the gym, etc. It’s an easy part of the step, but all of that needs to be in there to ensure you fit in the service time into your day. You can move forward with your schedule if you haven’t heard back from other service providers, but you are setting yourself up to redo your entire schedule if you guess wrong on a lunch time.
Action Step 3: List out the staff and students you have in the room onto your schedule.
I have made schedules without doing this and let me just say it didn’t go well. The goal should be for our students not to be in our room the entire day. Sometimes it may be more difficult to make that happen, but inclusion in the school is the goal. In high school that may look like students participating in electives with or without support. Meaning you might not have all of your students and staff in the room for up to 90 minutes at a time. I like to schedule my students’ inclusion classes at the end of the day (when I can) so that I can ensure they have gotten their instruction before exiting my room.
I like to ask my classroom staff what they feel really strong at doing in the beginning of the year. If they tell me data collection I want them in the room for IEP work time or if they say they love running an English small group I try my best to make that happen. It’s easier to work in a place where everyone is playing to their strengths and aren’t doing a task that makes them miserable. (It’s not always possible to avoid things that others don’t like, but trying to play to strengths and preferences goes a long way for building rapport within your team).
Action Step 4: Start putting in instructional times (academics, IEP work time, life skills, social skills, vocational, community-based instruction)
This is the fun part of the schedule. Prioritize your academics and put them in first. I personally like to have an hour of reading and math Monday-Thursday. I break them up with lunch in the middle. Then I like to do social studies and science once a week Monday –Thursday for a 30-minute block within the same time daily. Which leaves that time free for social skills and life skills the other two days of the week that you are not doing science or social studies. I like to break up the academics in this time period a little so I will do social studies on Monday and science on Wednesday, then social skills or life skills on Tuesday or Thursday. This gives me time to prep the lessons to ensure that students will benefit from the them and are able to participate in science experiments and different kinds of projects.
Ummm, but what do you do on Fridays?…..I’ll get there in a minute I promise.
A non-negotiable for me is IEP work time. I like to have all my students and adults in the room at this time and like a 45-minute block daily for this work period. I have a blog with a lot more detail on this setup so check it out here. <add in link to IEP work blog> . So schedule that in to make sure you are collecting strong data. You don’t have to run it
like I do, but you need to set aside sometime in your day to address IEP goals and be able to take data on them.
There will be some down time in your schedule most likely. I like to fill these times with classroom chores, movement or sensory breaks, brain breaks, or club time with our Unified Club. You can also use them as times to play games together like Kahoots or just some good old fashioned UNO. The students are still working on valuable skills during those down times such as self-regulation, social skills, appropriate behavior, etc. I could go on, but I will spare you my rant on how important it is to teach leisure skills to our students.
Now, about Fridays. I fully believe in a fun Friday. Especially if you have a very high needs room leaving you with virtually no prep time. So Fridays in my room look a little different. We start our day with a movement break most of the time and then go into morning meeting. When that is finished we work in our school-based enterprise (we run a coffee shop for our staff) or vocational skills in the classroom if a student’s behavior impedes their ability to work in the coffee shop. Students deliver the coffee to our staff with the support of one classroom staff member and the students not on the delivery team work in the room to clean up the coffee shop and do other vocational skills. I also like to have an alternate Friday schedule to accommodate community-based instruction.
This leads us into our lunch time and after lunch students do IEP work then (if earned) can vote on a movie, games, kickball, tennis whatever their options are for the time period. If students did not earn fun Friday they work on independent work or supplemental materials. I like to have them work on Unique Learning during this time.
Action Step 5: Make a copy of the schedule then clean it up into a printer friendly way.
You need to keep the master schedule with all the students/ adults listed, but you can make it much more printer friendly and have the activity listed by block. This way everyone knows what should be happening in the classroom and there is no confusion with extra words everywhere.
Action Step 6: Print out the schedule and post it, hand it out, and go over it with staff.
It’s important that everyone have an individual copy of the schedule so that there will be no question of what should be happening in the classroom. Also it’s good to have people check the schedule to make sure they don’t see any major conflicts that you may have missed.
Teacher Tip: Do not get stuck trying to make this perfect or happen on the first draft. Things will change and a classroom schedule falls under pirate rules (more of a guideline) than law. The schedule exists in a perfect world while we live in an imperfect world. Buses will be late, students will have meltdowns. You can have the most perfect schedule in the world and it will still not happen every single day you are in the classroom. This is okay, but you do need some direction to make some sense out of the chaos so use this as your guide through the day.
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