The Together Teacher™: Plan Ahead, Get Organized, and Save Time!
by Maia Heyck-Merlin
(Jossey-Bass, 2012 – Learn more)

Reviewed by Beth Fabijanic

Author Maia Heyck-Merlin earned my respect and admiration with her humbling introduction to The Together Teacher: Plan Ahead, Get Organized, and Save Time!. In the introduction and throughout the book, Heyck-Merlin describes the “not-together teacher” in whom her readers will surely recognize themselves. However, rather than focusing on the problems with our organizational and time-management systems (or lack thereof), she offers her own comprehensive rules for a system that tackles the never-ending to-do lists and deadlines that haunt many teachers, including me.

Let’s get something straight. I consider myself a pretty organized person. I meet (most) deadlines, reply promptly to work emails (sorry, friends), can find a paperclip, scissors, or yesterday’s graded vocabulary quizzes at my desk within seconds. (Give me 30 to 45 seconds for the quizzes.) However, like most teachers who would benefit from reading this book, I knew that while I have been treading water, I would rather be swimming from one end of the lake to the other. The author’s familiar and encouraging style (along with the features chronicling a real-life teacher at the end of each chapter) make becoming The Together Teacher™ seem attainable. I have never read a book so instantly applicable to my day-to-day life and career aspirations.

A together book

As a book on the topic of organization should be, this text is incredibly well-organized with five distinct parts focusing on 1) making work and home priorities; 2) rules and tools of organization; 3) creating weekly plans; 4) organizing email, desks and classrooms and finally; 5) implementation of the systems. The book is part self-help, part manual, so it is best read cover to cover first and then used as a reference. The accompanying CD contains templates and a free Reader’s Guide to record answers to reflection questions posed throughout each chapter.

Each chapter is presented with headings and subheadings that coordinate with the Reader’s Guide so that material is easy-to-digest. The 300+ page text is never dogmatic. Sentences such as “Trust me, some tasks were meant to die” remind the reader to take a deep breath and relax, much like my yoga teachers do when they see a room full of students biting their lips and scrunching their faces in agony.

Heyck-Merlin empowers her readers to own their schedule “rather than reacting to the crisis of the day” and recognize that “being organized is a means to an end — strong student outcomes and more free time.”

You don’t need super powers

From the first chapter, we understand that this is not a book about being a super teacher, but rather about finding the way to accomplish both the tasks we must do (e.g. grading, making phone calls, grocery shopping) and those we want to do (e.g. exercising, spending time with family). The author emphasizes rules such as the necessity of having a portable system and breaking tasks into bite-size pieces. Then, she explains the tools needed to accomplish the goal of “togetherness.”

Throughout the next chapters about calendars, to-do lists, “thought catchers” and meeting and professional development notes, the necessary components of each –including tool and paper and electronic examples — are offered. Heyck-Merlin encourages us to use the format that will work best for us (e.g. smartphone apps, computer programs, paper agendas, wall calendars) and offers numerous recommendations and examples of tools other teachers use. Here again the book empowers; this is not about learning how to implement the author’s organizational system but how to make one that will work for you.

The Weekly Worksheet

Most of us make to-do lists, and while the author offers many ideas for maintaining and prioritizing these lists, these were not the most revolutionary ideas in the book for me personally. The Weekly Worksheet created by reviewing your calendar, to-do list, “thought catchers” and meeting notes is what I believe will most transform my use of time in the coming school year. Two chapters and an appendix are devoted to defining and creating the Weekly Worksheet. It’s these sections I know I’ll be returning to most as I try to implement the book’s strategies.

The fourth section of the book covers physical organization of classroom stations, student materials, and incoming and outgoing papers. The ideas in these chapters are accompanied by photographs when applicable as well as suggestions for where to buy supplies.

Rather than leaving you feeling inspired but overwhelmed, The Together Teacher concludes with a chapter about implementing your system and a sample month-by-month implementation plan. As I write this I’m still enjoying my summer vacation, but have also started getting it “together.” I have begun using a to-do list app on my smartphone, printed the Weekly Worksheet templates from the CD, and planned a trip to my school to reorganize my email inbox and post the author’s email tips next to my computer workstation.

I feel confident that this might be the year that I return graded essays before students forget they wrote them and finish writing progress reports in the daylight hours.

Read another MiddleWeb review of this book

Read a MiddleWeb article by Maia Heyck-Merlin

Beth Fabijanic is a former elementary teacher now working in the middle grades. She teaches English/language arts, drama and yoga to students with language-based learning differences, near Washington, DC. She’s on her way to becoming a “Together Teacher.”

The Together Teacher™: Plan Ahead, Get Organized, and Save Time!
by Maia Heyck-Merlin
(Jossey-Bass, 2012 – Learn more)

It’s 4:30 PM on a Friday afternoon. Your kids have left the building and your fellow teachers are pressuring you to join them at a much-needed happy hour. You look at the bottomless pile of papers to grade and the incomplete lesson plans and think: I’m exhausted, but there’s no way I’m going to make progress on this stuff in an hour. So you shove everything into your tote bag and pray you will get to it all on Sunday… Sunday comes around and by the time you eat breakfast, go to the gym or spend time with your family (or both), do laundry, and grocery shop, it is past 3:00pm. The tote bag taunts you from the corner of the living room. Eventually you open it and try to comb through its contents. You have no idea where to begin.  ~ Maia Heyck-Merlin, The Together Teacher (p. 121)

By Ariel Sacks

As I read these lines of Maia Heyck Merlin’s new book, The Together Teacher, I saw myself many-a-time…reflected exactly.  Teachers have a huge workload and no secretary to keep us organized and on track, as so many other professionals do.  Our preparation and professional development rarely address this formidable challenge in our work.  The amazing thing about this book and Maia’s work in general is that she has lived through and understands the life of a teacher—and she actually has some real solutions to the problems we all face with organization, sustainability and creating a healthy work-life balance.

The Together Teacher is not a collection of tips on how to be more organized like those you might find in a magazine or single blog post, that you can take or leave, remember or forget.  For people who really struggle with organization, a tip here or there can have little to no impact on the above scenario. This book is set up as a comprehensive guide with all the materials necessary to implement an organizational system. Maia’s tone is personal, and since she’s worked directly with so many teachers, you feel like she’s really talking to you. Best of all, it’s set up for any of us, regardless of subject, grade level, or varied responsibilities, to customize an organizational framework around our particular needs and wants.

 Changed My Thinking and Behavior

On top of being incredibly concrete and practical, the book also goes into a great deal of reasoning and psychology behind some of our best and worst habits. Taking the time to read through the entire book created a real experience for me that actually changed my thinking about organization, my time, the way I approach my work and my life. In other words, for a busy teacher who struggles with organization, reading and responding to this book has the potential to be nothing short of life changing.

Maia’s techniques revolve around the somewhat counter-intuitive concept that by planning everything in advance to the T, we actually become more free and flexible. This certainly differs from my natural inclinations, which are more of the “go-with-the-flow…it’ll-get-done” variety. I am the type to do important things at the last minute by staying up late, and let smaller things, like packing lunch for myself, slip by undone.

The Together Teacher’s customizable templates (included on an accompanying CD) gave me an efficient way to write down everything I need and want to do in a 7-day week and how much time I need or want to spend on each item. While this level of planning feels rather Type A to me (not a way I identify myself), Maia argues that teaching is not a normal job. To accomplish everything a teacher needs to accomplish and still have a life, some strange and compulsive behaviors are necessary and provide great payoff.

By writing/planning everything strategically, I stop avoiding the truth about my time. I have more knowledge of it and can make informed decisions about it. If something comes up on a Wednesday night, when I said I would be blogging, I can divert from my plan. If I choose to do so, I know that somewhere else in the week or month, I will need to make up the time. Instead of making the decision blindly, I can now weigh my options with the bigger picture in mind.  Or if a pressing situation with a student takes my prep time away, when I planned to make my copies, then I’m aware of the amount of work that just got pushed into my afternoon or tomorrow morning. Sounds simple, but thinking this way consistently provides a level of strategy and clarity for busy teachers who have to be their own personal secretaries.

Maia even has a way of capturing the ideas that you have while on the go — the to-do’s that result from PDs or meetings, or those important tasks that don’t have hard deadlines and therefore get pushed back and back and back. The trick is to have everything you have to do (whenever) in one place. She provides an array of tools to accomplish that (electronic, paper or both) and lets us choose, depending on our preferences.

Crucial For Teacher Leaders

One thing I really appreciate about this book is how relevant it is to teacher leaders, who are fulfilling an increasing variety of roles, both within our schools and in other education-related work. In my schedule, for example, I need to include all of the following professional tasks:

• Unit and lesson planning
• creating and photocopying materials
• assessment and grading
• communicating with parents
• maintaining classroom environment
• meeting with co-teachers
• planning and facilitating grade team meetings
• blogging
• education-related reading
• writing my book

Maia’s approach is 100% applicable to teacher leaders and can work around each of our unique sets of responsibilities. Especially helpful, she profiles several teacher leaders throughout the book. We get to peek into their work and home lives, seeing concretely what their schedules look like—how they manage to eat breakfast, maintain romantic relationships and social lives, coach teachers, lead PD sessions, teach students, and grade papers. All in the same lifetime.

The book is highly readable and even fairly entertaining. If the description at the top of this review applies in any way to you, now is the perfect time to read this book, and get set up to launch a different kind of year.

While The Together Teacher will not lessen anyone’s actual work load, it can help us clear away the mental clutter that begs the questions, “How can I possibly get this all done?” and “What am I forgetting to do?” and “How did I get myself into this mess?” These questions can often make it difficult to even get started on simple or complex tasks. The Together Teacher teaches us to make important choices ahead of time, and no longer hold them all in our heads. Maia’s good advice frees us up to focus our mental energy where it counts most.

Read another MiddleWeb review of this book

Read a MiddleWeb article by Maia Heyck-Merlin

Ariel Sacks is an eighth grade English teacher and grade team leader at a middle school in Brooklyn, NY. A member of the Teacher Leaders Network, she writes the blog, On the Shoulders of Giants, and is working on a book on teaching Whole Novels. This past school year, she participated in a Together Teacher training experience.

Organization Made Easy! / Tools for Today’s Teachers
by Frank Buck
(Eye on Education, 2010 – Learn more)

Reviewed by Fran Lo

There is a lot to like in Organization Made Easy! Many well-described concrete recommendations will help teachers handle paperwork effectively (though not student work – more on this later).

Many practical ideas will help teachers stay personally organized, using either paper resources like a calendar/daytimer or a smartphone/PDA. The author also provides useful ideas about managing email effectively (for example: drag the email into your Outlook calendar if a meeting is needed). He even provides specific tips for using Outlook for email, calendar, and task-list. I suspect one could adapt many of these ideas for Google tools.

Buck also offers good ideas about chunking your work – instead of shifting constantly from email to project to person with a question to email. I loved the section about organizing the way you keep files on your computer, which was both well-thought out and well-described. There was even a section about how to help students use their agendas/assignment books to stay organized. But key areas are absent or incomplete.

What’s missing in this book

The differences between elementary and secondary classrooms are not always recognized here, and the classroom examples are all elementary. For example, the suggested way to avoid wasting time passing out graded papers –  a pigeon-hole for each student – is workable only when you have 25 students. The author doesn’t suggest anything for secondary teachers with larger class sizes.

I had hoped for lots of good ideas for dealing with paper-grading, since as an English teacher I read several thousand writing pieces a year. Page 136 has six good ideas to reduce the need for grading. One (which I use myself and it has saved my sanity) is that you don’t have to grade everything.

But only three pages out of 160 address grading. Having expected at least a chapter, I was disappointed.

I was looking for ways to organize papers to work with an electronic grade book, but grade books are barely mentioned. I was looking for ideas for staying organized between my school computer and my home computer – a real chore for all of us -  but this isn’t addressed either.

I can’t help feeling that the author is writing from the office rather than the classroom. For example, he keeps urging his readers to delegate – to adults. I kept wondering which adults he thought I could delegate to. He also spends six pages on creating a tickler file to keep track of paperwork, and another four pages on in/ pending/out boxes.  These are dandy ideas, but too complex for the non-student-papers paperwork I have to deal with.  If I was a principal, though, I’d want systems like these.

Much of this book is practical and helpful, for both teachers and administrators. I’m glad I read it and I still recommend it. But if you’re looking for ways to manage all those papers you have to grade, this may not be the right book for you.

Fran Lo teaches English, Social Studies, and Computer Skills to middle schoolers in Connecticut, where she enjoys blending technology into her classes. One of her other hats is technology guru for teachers and staff.  Prior to teaching, she helped people cope with technology in small businesses, health care, and the financial industry.