“Over the years, I've seen Maia's work transform the lives of hundreds of teachers and leaders. Maia is a teacher at heart and gets that a teacher has to give thought to hundreds of considerations over the course of the day. She helps us feel prepared, centered, and Together so that we can show up as our best selves for students.”
Chong‐Hao Fu, CEO, Leading Educators
“Our job as leaders is to support our teachers to become superb educators so they can be at their best for our students and families. Too often we lose teachers with great potential because they become overwhelmed by the amount of information coming at them, that is, emails, texts, phone calls, student work, daily and weekly team meetings, and PD sessions. The Together Teacher provides the tools needed to equip teachers with specific strategies to process all that information and free up their minds to focus on honing their craft. We appreciate the tools provided and the humor and compassion that exudes from Maia, as it leads to all of us believing that being organized and being Together is 'cool' and something we all want to do.”
Kate Mehok, cofounder and CEO, Crescent City Schools
“Twenty years ago, I entered the teaching profession with good intentions and lots of enthusiasm. However, the impact I made was minimal because I lacked strong systems for managing all of my responsibilities. After implementing the strategies from The Together Teacher, I was able to stay on top of my daily priorities, utilize my calendar in a powerful way, and tame the email beast—and become a high‐performing teacher. I'm a principal now, and I use The Together Teacher with my staff to help them plan ahead, get organized, and save time. The Together Teacher is one of the most transformative texts I've ever read as an educator.”
Eric Newcomer, principal, YES Prep Northbrook Middle School
“Through The Together Teacher, Maia leads you on a journey of self‐reflection to create personalized organizational systems that work for your priorities and personality. In becoming a Together teacher, I began to use my two most finite resources – time and energy – more strategically, becoming a happier and more balanced person in my life both in and out of the classroom.”
Greta Gartman, elementary teacher, South Portland Schools, Maine
“Maia understands the reality of teacher life. Her work supports teachers across all grade levels and settings to ensure they have a clear, prioritized plan for their massive workload and laundry bag. Maia builds on her previous work and offers us new insights as we shift to a more tech‐driven school environment. This book is required reading for school leaders looking to create healthy and sustainable working conditions for their staff.”
Shawn Mangar, principal, Baychester Middle School
“I am SO thankful for being introduced to The Together Teacher during my first year of teaching. Maia's simple, efficient, and effective techniques saved me from many potential meltdowns! Now, six years later, I still think about these Together tips all the time. These techniques help me spend less time feeling overwhelmed and more time actually educating!”
Julia Ziac, STEM educator
Second Edition
Copyright © 2021 by Maia Heyck‐Merlin. All rights reserved.
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SECOND EDITION
To the Together Team (you know who you are)
Before you turn to the opening chapter of The Together Teacher, I invite each reader to think about the students who show up at your classroom door each morning. Imagine how those students would describe you. Would your students describe you as the teacher who consistently comes up a handout short or the teacher who has a handout placed on each student's desk before class begins? Regardless of where you fall on the continuum of un‐Together or Together Teacher, Maia Heyck‐Merlin brings her own classroom experiences as an amazing teacher to her readers and creates multiple trailheads for your Together journey.
The Together Teacher, however, is not just for teachers. As a former principal and school district superintendent, I have had the chance to visit many teacher classrooms over a 35‐year career and see many incredible Together teachers still on the Together journey to hone their teaching practice. I have also visited classrooms of teachers just beginning their Togetherness journey. I have seen firsthand the extraordinary impact of Maia's work with teachers, assistant principals, principals and district office leaders. When I first met Maia, I felt I was well down the trail of Togetherness but was able to add many additional tools, systems, protocols and working habits to my leadership roadmap. I quickly learned that a culture of Togetherness in classrooms, schools and district offices can be transformational for a school district.
Imagine the experience of students across our nation if every principal handed each teacher hired a copy of The Together Teacher. Our students arrive in our classrooms each day with their own degree of un‐Togetherness and Togetherness. These students deserve and need a teacher who tightly plans, utilizes tools and systems with discipline and consistency, declutters the learning space and avoids the reputation as the discombobulated teacher. The degree of commitment a teacher has to Togetherness will frequently impact the level of learning a student is able to experience. As educators we owe it to our students to make each precious teaching and learning moment count.
The teaching profession is challenging, complex and fast paced. The peaks and valleys allow little time for rest and rejuvenation. My wish for every teacher is the opportunity to take a slight detour on your teaching journey to read The Together Teacher. Give yourself permission to pause and take stock of your tools, structures, systems, routines, and protocols. I am confident when you rejoin the trail you will be better prepared, energized and Together! Then share a copy of The Together Teacher with a teaching colleague, student teacher or mentor so that more and more students arrive at classrooms each day with a Together teacher. Let the journey begin…
Ann Blakeney Clark
Executive Leadership Coach
former Superintendent of Charlotte‐Mecklenburg Public Schools
Let’s first picture the not‐together teacher. This may be you on some days; I know it was certainly me. You race into the school parking lot, mug of coffee in hand (but lunch forgotten in the refrigerator at home) and backpack stuffed full of papers you intended to grade last night, but did not. As you sign in at the front office, stammer “hello” to the office staff, and walk quickly to your classroom (wait—why are there children in the building already?!), you realize you don’t have copies of the unit test you are giving that morning and the copier is jammed. It’s only 7:15 a.m. and you already feel overwhelmed.
Relate much? Then this book will help you plan ahead and work smarter so you are more prepared and less discombobulated. If this DOESN’T sound like you, this book will help you prioritize deeply and protect your time even more fiercely. No matter your entry point, this book will meet you where you are in your Togetherness journey.
The Together TeacherTM is the teacher who makes it look easy. You know, that person in your building who never scrambles to make copies at the last minute, has lessons planned a week or more in advance, turns progress reports in early, makes time for positive parent phone calls, conducts extra tutoring after school, and packs healthy homemade lunches. Don’t stress—this teacher wasn’t born that way. Countless routines, systems, and tools go into pulling off that level of Togetherness, and they are not achieved overnight. Throughout this book you will meet teachers with varying years of classroom experience, in multiple subjects and grade levels, who work in unique school environments. Some of them began their teaching career highly organized; others learned these skills on the job to deal with the demands of teaching. For some readers this book will affirm things you’re already doing and provide ideas for refining your systems and coaching newer teachers. For others it will serve as a “how‐to” guide on getting organized (enough) to be a great classroom teacher.
The Together Teachers I know execute their work with an incredible degree of intentionality. They rely on simple yet sophisticated systems that hold up under the complexity and fast pace of teaching. These systems require tremendous discipline, a little bit of time, and faith that planning and organization will actually free you up to focus on bigger, more fun, and more interesting things. To be clear, this is not a book that is going to tell you how to color‐code folders and make picture‐perfect charts. (Nor will it help you organize your closets at home!) It will not tell you precisely which planner or which app to use. I will help you cultivate routines that help you become organized enoughto get results for your students and make your life more fun and less stressful.
As teachers, we face a unique set of challenges compared to the average professional. We have little to no discretionary time, stand on our feet most of the day, incur large amounts of take‐home work, deal with mandated technology systems as well as old‐fashioned paperwork, and manage constantly shifting schedules that allow for virtually no moments of concentration or focus. Let’s not even talk about our rapid shift to online instruction during the pandemic (which, at the time of revisions to this manuscript, was hitting us all in full force). To‐Dos come at us from a million different directions—email inboxes, phone messages, text messages, paper memos, and staff meetings.
Although the bulk of our role as teachers is to design and deliver outstanding instruction on a daily basis, there is a lot of other work that needs to be done in the background to ensure that those lessons are the best they can be. Given all of these demands, it is easy to understand how we may scramble to plan lessons, miss progress report deadlines, and hand back student essays two months after students turn them in!
Add to this complex set of responsibilities the additional duties involved in providing strong instruction—deeply analyzing student data, ensuring that lesson plans include high‐quality rigorous questions, and making time for one‐on‐one tutoring with struggling students, all of which takes extreme focus and planning—and pile on the emotional toll of breaking up a scuffle in the hallway, calming the upset parent of a perpetually tardy student, and comforting a kid who is trying to comprehend a death in the family—and you have a recipe for stressed and undoubtedly less effective teachers.
Many resources are available to help you set ambitious goals and get your students invested in school. There are a ton of tools that will help you with unit planning, lesson planning, and making the right assessments to determine content mastery. However, there are very few accounts of how outstanding teachers actually spend their limited free time, plan ahead, and organize their work and classrooms to arrive at strong outcomes. As someone who has been a teacher, recruited teachers, hired teachers, trained and evaluated teachers, and worked like heck to retain great teachers, I believe that being organized is an invaluable skill to possess in the most demanding and important profession there is. Teachers MUST rely on solid organization and planning skills to meet the needs of their students.
Together can take on a whole host of meanings. To some teachers it means having neat filing systems that allow them to find the exact manipulatives for a place value lesson. To others it means always meeting deadlines for lesson plans or using time efficiently to get more done in fewer minutes. To yet another group it means having the perfect plan for a field trip. Regardless of how each one defines it, Together Teachers all demonstrate seven essential skills.
As teachers, we need to develop habits in all of these areas in order to be “Together.” Here’s why: If you are a person who loves organizing and making lists but you never refer to them, you will accomplish little. If you spend all of your time fiddling with perfect color‐coded file folders that have every lesson categorized by day, but you don’t use them efficiently, you will not move forward. Together Teachers take a balanced approach and hone each of the skills in this list in order to become their maximally Together selves.
When I started teaching fourth grade over two decades ago, I consistently worked 80 or 90 hours per week. In a last‐ditch attempt at self‐preservation, I read a ton about how professionals with tremendous volumes of work and lots of people to answer to managed their jobs. Although I found some strong resources to help me “get things done,” “put in the big rocks first,” and “not check email in the morning” (David Allen, Steven Covey, and Julie Morgenstern, to name a few of my favorite resources), nothing totally fit into my daily teaching life—the one during which I was consistently on my feet, had my precious planning time eaten up by student issues, was rarely in front of a computer, struggled to understand the announcements made over the garbled intercom, and dealt with more pieces of paper than I knew what to do with. There are some amazing resources out there in the vast field of productivity and time management, and more tools are made available each and every day online. The challenge, however, is that none truly address teaching, a unique profession that varies so greatly depending on how our schools function, what technology we are issued, and what expectations are set for our roles.
And very honestly, none of the existing materials addressed jobs as complex as mine was. I was responsible for 60 students (three sections of writing), communicating with the families of all of those students, and a fourth‐grade teaching team. I received feedback from a literacy coach and homework from my own graduate classes; handled papers to collect, papers to grade, papers to return, papers to be filed, and professional development resources to be used now and later; and I needed an inordinate amount of stuff in my classroom. I spent a lot of money at office supply stores trying to find the perfect planner for teachers but was annoyed when I couldn’t customize the templates that accompanied them. I put together a huge binder with tabs for every aspect of teaching, but it got too heavy to lug around school all day. I bought a PalmPilot with a nifty stylus pen (remember those?!) and started keeping an electronic calendar, but I couldn’t find a way to enter stuff fast enough during the teaching day. I tried black‐and‐white composition books, graph paper, and Action Pads. Nothing could keep up with the pace and volume of my job teaching fourth grade.
In the meantime, I was slowly learning to teach, taking graduate classes, and picking up more responsibilities, such as tutoring my students on Saturdays. I quickly realized that fumbling for the right overhead transparency (ahem, #1999) or flipping through stacks of papers to locate copies for that day’s lesson resulted in lost instructional time for my students and was an open invitation for them to misbehave. If I wasn’t sure when my progress reports were due or when an important assembly was scheduled, I would enter the day unprepared and then become incredibly stressed when someone would remind me. I lost credibility when I gave a warning for talking out in class or told a student, “Great work on your spelling test! I am going to make a positive phone call to your parents tonight,” and promptly forgot. When I spent too much time chatting with Mrs. Russell during a prep period, it meant I had yet another hour of work to take home. The only way I could survive was to be incredibly organized and super‐efficient, and to plan as far ahead as possible in order to deal with the unexpected stuff, good and bad, that inevitably comes up in school environments.
After I stopped teaching, I was fortunate to spend a decade working in two other high‐performing, disciplined environments—Teach For America and Achievement First. At TFA, many of us used a “Weekly Action Plan” to stay organized for the week, but we often found it was too short term a view of our work and duplicative of our electronic systems. At Achievement First, many teachers tried to use the Outlook tools but found it hard to organize their work in an exclusively electronic way while teaching. There had to be some way to take practices experts recommended, what I had observed my talented colleagues try, and what I had experimented with myself, and make it work for teachers!
I was fortunate that Achievement First, and then Relay Graduate School of Education, provided me with an informal research lab to develop approaches that would meet the demands and needs of teachers. Slowly, and with much trial and error, I eventually landed on the set of tools you’ll find in the first half of this book. Over time, I learned there was no single system that all teachers could rely on to become magically more organized. What’s more, individual teachers (and all people) have different work habits, particular affinities for paper versus digital systems, varied teaching loads, and different personal obligations and dreams. So, although there is no silver bullet, there is a practical set of tools, habits, and skills that can make teachers increasingly effective—and help them eradicate the perpetual feeling of being underwater and behind. And so was born the concept of The Together Teacher.
This book will not only teach you those critical organization skills but also provide you with tools, samples, and templates to support them. Throughout this book I feature many teachers at different stages in their careers, from a brand‐new elementary teacher to an English teacher with twenty‐plus years of experience. Some of the teachers I met once or twice in workshops or came to know through single thought‐provoking conversations. Others I have had long‐standing relationships with and know every detail of their lives. No matter how long you’ve taught, these Together Teachers will help you become a stronger and more organized planner.
As we enter our second decade of delivering Together Teacher Trainings, we’ve updated our thinking and reorganized the second edition of the book in several different ways.
This book is designed to help you deliver better results for your students and to make your important work more sustainable. I also share tips on how to adapt the tools to meet your particular work style and preferences. Most teachers build their own Together Teacher Systems as they read, starting with how to manage time, To‐Dos, thoughts, and notes—and moving into how to juggle email, organize space, and deal with papers.
We have organized this text into the following five sections:
Do I subscribe to a particular system, tool, or school of thought? Although I have opinions about EVERYTHING, I care most that your system is effective for you, and I’m indifferent about the exact tools you use to get there. I’m not here to force you to part with your paper planner or make you switch to an entirely electronic system. I promise to help you create and customize your OWN personal organization system.
You can read this book individually in one fell swoop (there are jokes! Fun! Encouragement), read a chapter per month, or just target the areas you need as you need them. Regardless of how you choose to read the book, you will want to engage with the content as you go. Below, we have outlined a few ways to interact along the way!
Follow these steps to create your own complete personal organization system:
And before we jump into all of the things, I want to pause and ask you why are you here? What will Togetherness GET you? No one needs to be organized just to be organized. Togetherness has to serve a larger purpose. Which leads me to ask you, What is your Togetherness intention?
Take a moment, a yoga‐class moment if you will, and consider your Togetherness intention. In the examples provided, you will see the words “Balance,” “Cheer,” and “Ready.” These teachers believed Togetherness would help them achieve these things. So, go deep with me here.
PS Your intentions can change over various seasons of your life!
Like trying to live a healthier lifestyle (and isn’t that on everyone’s New Year’s resolution list?!), getting organized is a process. No one arrives after just reading one book. You will find that some habits are easier to adopt than others and that some days we slip and rely on our old Post‐it Note habits and on others we go on strict efficiency frenzies. Being organized is a learned skill, and, as with any other skill, takes time to become a habit. Throughout this book you will hear from teachers who have balanced their lives while remaining effective instructors; they’ve have paced their work to be sustainable for the long term.
I look forward to joining you on our journey. Let’s begin with some vision‐questing: Designing Your Ideal Week.