It’s not a secret that a teacher’s life inside the classroom can be complex and stressful. So we asked some of the Spanish Teacher Success Academy online conference speakers to tell us a trick they use to save time.
Here’s a summary of what they revealed to us as part of the Mastermind Q&A sessions.
15 Time-Saving Tricks for Spanish Teachers
1. Ashely Mikkelsen (Srta. Spanish) – “Google! Time-saving tips from Google… One: Google forms for assesments and I married it with Flubaroo [add-on to grade answers on Google sheets] to grade things. My second one is having templates for your favorite activities set in Google.”
2. Sam Finneseth – “I grade while in class. I very rarely collect papers.
3. Allison Wienhold (Mis Clases Locas) – “It’s all about planning effectively… I plan big-picture for the entire year…week by week, I just pull [from my curriculum map] what I need for that week.”
4. Bethanie Drew – “I try to set up resources that can be used for multiple levels in multiple classes… I consistently use some classroom management techniques that help class roll along smoothly.”
5. Emilie del Risco (Island Teacher) – “I am the queen of list-making and post-it notes… I take a couple of minutes [everyday] to make my list and to categorize and prioritize. That’s a time-saver in the long run.”
6. Laurie Clarcq – “One trick I use to save time is to grade less and evaluate more... I tend to evaluate more frequently in my head.”
7. Meredith White – “I move really quickly… I think it is important to keep students moving from one activity to another [to give them a sense of urgency].”
8. Jen López – “I don’t grade everything… often, they just get a completion grade and I move on. ”
9. Erin Gilreath Carlson – “I love a procedure so that my students already know what to do… I like to overlap things.”
10. Albert Fernández – “I grade things that are not turned in. I grade things as kids are working on them… I walk around and give them a once-over.”
11. Kristin Montgomery – “I have a teaching assistant… all of my cutting, laminating, cleaning can be done by a teaching assistant.”
12. Jeremy Jordan (Señor Jordan) – “I like to use classroom jobs… my students are doing work I don’t do [well]…usually students are willing and they want to have their jobs. They can write down quizzes for me, they can write down stories, they can organize the quizzes for me in alphabetical order, they can pass things out for me.”
13. Michaela McCoughey – “I repurpose units, either the anchor text, the resources, or the theme.”
14. Jodi Stokdyk – “I grade almost nothing… I look for comprehension and engagement, and that can be evaluated on the spot in class.”
15. Tina Hargaden – “I don’t correct errors because I know that the patterns of errors will go away… it has such a negligible effect size on their accuracy, but it has a huge effect size on my social life because it will take my whole weekend to correct a hundred and fifty papers.”
Learn more about the Spanish Teacher Success Academy online professional development sessions that brings together 25 world-class experts who will share with you the best strategies for teaching Spanish.
