Guest Blog: Carla Erskin
Carla Erskin is a middle school teacher, productivity coach, and the founder of Sustainable Teaching Solutions, which focuses the use of planning periods as a practice that can be taught, supported, and strengthened. Her concept of Planning Period Literacy provides valuable insights for instructional coaches and school leaders to explore with staff. What systems can help manage time, energy, and attention? With her support teachers complete more of their work within the school day.
Planning Period Literacy: A Missing Link Between Teacher Capacity and Student Learning
There are a lot of car guys in my family. Growing up, my dad would often invite me to stand beside him while he worked under the hood of a car. I stayed around long enough to learn the basics, but I never became the car chick he probably imagined. Still, one lesson stuck with me. You take care of a car, and you do not run it hard indefinitely. You pay attention to what it needs. You perform regular maintenance. You respond when the warning lights come on. If you keep pushing the car while ignoring every sign of strain, eventually, something gives out.
I have been thinking about that lesson as teacher workloads continue to grow. Teachers are managing expanding instructional expectations, increased documentation, student needs, family communication, meetings, coverage, and responsibilities that rarely fit within the contracted workday. Many are already showing the warning signs. In a national survey I conducted with more than 400 educators, 89 percent said they had experienced symptoms of burnout. The connection to the car may seem like a stretch at first, but stay with me.
When you run a car too hard for too long, its performance begins to suffer before it stops running altogether. Teachers experience something similar. Some eventually leave because the workload has become more than they can reasonably carry. Others stay while operating at or beyond capacity.
That matters for student learning.
Teaching depends on thousands of decisions. Teachers study student work, anticipate misconceptions, adjust instruction, prepare materials, and decide what students need next. That work requires time and enough mental space to think clearly. When teachers spend the day moving from one urgent demand to another, that space begins to disappear. The teacher may still deliver the lesson. The classroom may still look productive. But the deeper work of responding, refining, and planning becomes harder to sustain.
I often say that one of the best things we can give students is a regulated and rested teacher. Teachers do not need to lower their standards or care less about their work. Schools need to recognize that teacher capacity shapes what happens in the classroom.
The planning period sits at the center of that connection.
Too often, schools treat planning time as leftover space in the day. It becomes available for meetings, class coverage, paperwork, interruptions, and anything else that needs somewhere to land. At the same time, many teachers have never received professional learning on how to structure that limited time around the work that most directly supports instruction.
This is where Planning Period Literacy™ becomes essential. Planning Period Literacy™ is the knowledge and skill teachers need to protect, structure, and use planning time as a professional practice. It includes setting clear priorities, building repeatable workflows, and deciding what to do when the available time cannot hold every task.
In my survey, teachers ranked help creating structure for their planning periods as their second-highest support need. Only administrative support ranked higher. That finding matters because the two needs are connected. Teachers need skills for using their time well. They also need leaders to create conditions in which those skills can work.
A protected planning period can give a teacher time to examine yesterday’s exit tickets before teaching today’s lesson. A clear priority can help a teacher complete the work with the greatest instructional impact before smaller demands take over. None of this eliminates an unreasonable workload. Planning Period Literacy™ should never become another way to ask teachers to do more with less. Schools still carry responsibility for protecting planning time, reducing unnecessary demands, and setting realistic expectations.
Schools can begin by examining how planning periods are actually used. Leaders can reduce the meetings, interruptions, and coverage assignments that consume the time. They can teach practical planning workflows and clarify which responsibilities deserve priority when every task cannot be completed. Teacher-preparation programs have a role as well. New teachers learn how to design lessons, assess learning, and manage classrooms. They should also learn how to approach a planning period with purpose before they inherit a workload that is already moving at full speed.
A planning period will never solve every challenge facing educators. But when schools protect that time and teach educators how to use it, they strengthen the conditions in which thoughtful instruction can happen.
My dad taught me that you cannot ignore what happens under the hood and expect the car to keep performing at its best. Education cannot keep ignoring teacher capacity and expect student learning to remain untouched.
Planning Period Literacy™ gives schools a place to begin.
Thanks Carla.
