Teacher planner: what to put in it and how to set it up for the year

Teacher planner or ordinary diary?

An ordinary diary gives each day a block of lines. A teacher planner gives each day a row per lesson, so period 3 on Monday has its own box for what you’re teaching, what you need for it and what to follow up. It also holds the pages a diary doesn’t have: class lists, marks, the roll and parent contacts.

Plenty of teachers keep both, the planner on the desk for lessons and a personal diary or phone for everything else. A teacher planner with room for your own dates, like family birthdays, means one book can be enough.

The pages worth having

• Year at a glance and term dates: the four terms, holidays, pupil-free or teacher-only days, reports, athletics and swimming days, copied from the school calendar on day one.
• Timetable: your week on one page, or two timetables if your school runs a fortnightly week A and week B.
• A lesson-plan week: Monday to Friday with a row per lesson, plus the weekend and a box for your to-do list.
• Class pages for each class you teach: class list, seating plan, mark book, roll and parent contacts.
• Students’ birthdays, listed by month and printed on the day.
• Notes for a relief teacher: routines, where things are, who to ask.
• Duties: playground, lunch and bus duty.
• Meeting notes, and plenty of plain notes pages at the back.

Leave out what you won’t use. Empty pages make a planner heavier, not better.

A5 or A4?

A5 fits in a bag next to a laptop and is enough if you teach a few lessons a day or keep detailed plans elsewhere. A4 gives every lesson a box big enough for real planning notes and makes the mark book and roll easier to fill in, which helps if you teach six or more lessons a day or plan in the book itself.

Coil binding lies flat on the desk and folds back on itself, handy when you write in it standing at the front of the room. Softcover is slimmer and lighter in a bag.

How to set it up before Term 1

1. Copy the term dates, public holidays, pupil-free days and big events from the school calendar onto the term dates page and into the weeks they fall in.
2. Fill in your timetable, in pencil if it might still change.
3. Write each class list into the class list, mark book and roll. This is the slow part; in a personalised planner the names are printed in for you.
4. Add your students’ birthdays to their weeks, so you can mark them in class.
5. Block out reports, parent-teacher interviews and assessment due dates in the weeks they fall.
6. From then on, plan the next week’s lessons each Friday, with what to copy or prepare in the box beside the week.

Paper or digital?

Digital planners and the school’s own systems are good for sharing and for marks that feed into reports. Paper wins in the classroom: it’s open on the desk all day, needs no login, and one glance at the week shows what’s next. Many teachers plan units digitally and keep the week on paper.

How our teacher planner does it

Our teacher planner is built this way. You choose the month it starts (January, or February with Term 1), how many lessons you teach a day (4 to 10), the size (A5, A4 or US Letter) and which pages you want. Paste up to four class lists, one student per line with their birthday, and the names are printed into the class list, mark book, roll, seating plan and parent pages, with every birthday in your week and the age the student turns. You page through the whole planner before you order.