Organizing Your Beginning of the Year Tasks

Hi, teacher’s! Welcome to the My Adventures in ESL podcast. I am your host, Millie, and I am excited to be here with you all today.  In today’s episode, we are going to be talking about how you can organize your beginning of the school year using online task boards. I love doing this. I just did a really in-depth professional development for the members of my program, the ESL Teacher Master Plan, on this. And after that they were getting organized.

So I can not wait to give you an overview today of this training so you can start implementing this in your classroom. Now, before we jump into today’s topics, I would like for you to reflect on your “wins” for the week. Thinking back on the week, what is something you want to celebrate? Every week I want you to celebrate your “wins”. It can be a big win, a small win. I want you to celebrate those and I want to celebrate those with you.

If you have a win, join our community, My Adventures in ESL, on Facebook and share your “wins”. You can always email me at millie@myadventuresinesl.com to also share those “wins” with me as well. This week’s “wins” come from Claudine.  Claudine is a member of my program, the ESL Teacher Master Plan.  In the program, Claudine has been dedicating her time to preparing for the upcoming school year. She has been attending professional development, our weekly office hours and actively participating to get her students ready.

So shout out to Claudine. You are doing a great job and keep up the wonderful work for your students. Now, have you ever stepped into the new school year feeling overwhelmed with all the paperwork? I am raising my hand right now because that is so me.

If you’re new to teaching ESL or even returning teachers, be prepared for the paperwork and the compliance that comes along with teaching language learners can be overwhelming. In this podcast, I am not going to sugarcoat it. I’m going to be completely transparent about it.  We’re going to have a system in place, so that way it will reduce the overwhelm and reduce you being frustrated. But a lot of times this is overlooked.  You can feel really unorganized and frustrated at the beginning of the school year if you’re not prepared for all of the paperwork that you do have to do.

I can remember being and feeling very prepared with my lessons and walking into the school year with a mountain of paperwork to complete. This is no exaggeration here. I had to prepare for testing and screening students. I had to prepare for language support plans, “can do” charts, schedules and so much more at the beginning of the school year. I didn’t know where to start, how to start, what to do and how to organize my paperwork for the beginning of the school year. I was terrified of being audited or even reprimanded for anything regarding compliance. I wanted to make sure that I was following all of the procedures that I needed to be following very closely to be in compliance.  I didn’t have a system in place and I knew that I needed the structure and a system to get organized for the school year. 

And it was a commercial. Yes, a commercial actually provided me with inspiration for this.

In the commercial they mentioned a project management tool.  If you’re not familiar with what project management tools are, they are  basically a tool that assigns tasks to the members of a team.  I immediately thought of how I can use this project management tool to organize my task or my team to create lists at the beginning of the school year. Now, I know from experience because before I got into education, I worked in corporate, so I knew that these tools can be very expensive.

So I researched and researched and  I came across a great tool called Trello.

Now, this is not a commercial I do not want you to be like, OK, she’s trying to sell me on Trello. This is not a commercial, so don’t switch off the podcast. Stay with me. I’m really sharing with you a real life strategy that helps set up our team for the school year. So I wanted something free because I knew that these tools can be expensive.  So I came across Trello, which is a free tool, which is a free project management tool.  With Trello, I was able to organize my beginning of the year on a digital task board.  I was able to set up my task and we were able to collaborate as a team.

You don’t have to use Trello, there are other tools out there.  Like I said, I did this professional development with the members of my program, the ESL Teacher Master Plan. And some of the teachers started saying things like, oh, what about Padlet or what about Wakelet? So these are some of the tools that you can use besides Trello.

I like Trello because I can assign tasks to specific people on my team and you can use it with any kind of tool that allows you to organize and create lists.  In addition, I like it because I can see how other people on the team were progressing through their task. So this would be really helpful if  another team member needed help with their beginning-of-the-year paperwork.  Getting organized this way, we were able to stay on top of the year’s paperwork, stay in compliance and ahead of tasks.

I mean, we were on it. We weren’t overwhelmed, we weren’t frustrated. It was still a lot to do, but we were organized. It is a big difference in having a lot to do and being organized and knowing what to do versus having a lot to do and it being a hot mess. So I want you to be on the side of being organized and prepare for the school year. So that way you’re not feeling overwhelmed, you’re not feeling frustrated and it gets pushed to the side.

Like I said before, this tool really helped us while we were completing tasks. Because if I wasn’t behind on the task and I saw a team member needing help; I was able to jump in and vice versa. It was actually a situation where I was behind on a task for our beginning of school paperwork and a team member said to me, he was like, “hey, I see that you’re behind, do you need any help?”

And I was like, “yeah, I need help”. I didn’t have too much pride in saying I needed help.  He jumped in and he helped me and it got done on time.  This is why these tools are so important in helping you get set up at the beginning of the school year. 

 What I want to encourage you to do is decide on a tool that you can use to organize all of your beginning of the year tasks. Then you can do a massive brain dump of all the tasks that you need to be completed at the beginning of the school year. Organize these tasks by “to do”, “in progress” or “completed”. That way, if you can, your team can see where you are in the progress. So if it’s under “to do”, that means you haven’t touched it. If it’s “in progress’, that means that you’re working on it. If it is “completed”, of course, that means it’s done.

Think about organizing it in a way that your team or even yourself can see how you’re progressing with your beginning-of-the-year task.  What you can do is, well, you can even attach due dates to the task. So even if you’re doing Padlet or Wakelet, you can definitely just put in parentheses a due date. Like I said with Trello, I like that you can actually do the due date and it will actually be sent out as a reminder to you saying, hey, this needs to be done.

Doing this is going to give you a clear plan on what you need to have done, who needs to do it, and when it needs to be done by. So that way – you’re going into the school year feeling organized, you’re feeling confident and you’re feeling like, OK, I got this, I can tackle this. 

Here’s what I would like for you to do. I want you to research a free project management tool software out there. Some examples are Monday.com, Trello, Asana and all of those are free. You can use Padlet or you can use Wakelet. Just find a tool that you can get organized and it works for you. And then what I would like you to do after that is brainstorm all of your beginning-of-the-year tasks. Write down all of those tasks and organize them on your board for the beginning of the school year. Now,I love organizing!!

I love hearing how other people are getting prepared, I would like to know, how are you organizing your task at the beginning of this school year? You can share your answers in our community, My Adventures in ESL, on Facebook. So go join our community, My Adventures in ESL, on Facebook and share how are you preparing for the beginning of the school year?

Once again, thank you so much for joining us. And I hope you have a fantastic week and a wonderful school year!!

See you next week!!