A Teacher Work-Life Balance: Managing Expectations and Maximizing Time

Teacher work-life balance can be a delicate thing. Many people assume we are babysitters. Many others (and many of the same people) assume we don’t really work full-time jobs because we often have summers “off.” What they don’t know, however, is what it’s really like in the classroom. How difficult it can be to not just manage behavior in a room of 15-30 students but to instill in them knowledge and the ability to think critically, reason, and, ideally, love to learn.

What all of this means, however, is that while teachers tend only to have approximately 190 contract days, we do not just work a simple 9-5. We must plan, grade, assess, email parents, and more! On top of all that, having meetings during our prep times means much of the planning, grading, assessing, and emailing can happen at home. So, how do we manage this while still maintaining a personal life outside of work? This post will explain our best strategies for maintaining that teacher work-life balance.

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Teacher Work-Life Balance – What does ours look like?

I, Cameron, have been teaching for nearly 15 years now while Ana is in our 8th year. I started out, for many years, as a teacher who constantly brought work home. I would bring home papers to grade, lessons to plan, and the occasional email to write. This was most every night and certainly most every weekend. Sometimes, I did the grading or planning; sometimes, I didn’t. However, I was always extremely stressed about what I had to do or did not do at home outside of the classroom. This is all on top of end-of-quarter/semester to-do items such as preparing final grades, writing report card comments, etc.

Today, though, my teacher work-life balance looks very different. Experience (and the pain of stress and anxiety) have taught me well. These days, I rarely bring home any classwork to grade. I plan almost exclusively at school, and, for the most part, all parent/student communication happens during work hours. This doesn’t mean that I never do any schoolwork at home. It’s the nature of the job that sometimes we must. Report card comments especially are an area where I must take time out of my evenings or weekends to complete.

I’ve also worked for several different schools, and how each school allocates time during the workday is different. This means some schools offer more time for teachers to plan or grade while others choose to fill that time with meetings. It can really vary between schools, even if you’re in the same district. No matter what kind of school I work for, I find a way to separate my life as an educator and my personal life. It’s not always easy, and I’m not always successful, but let’s look at our strategies and approaches to finding the ‘best’ teacher work-life balance we can.

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Teacher Work-Life Balance – Our Approaches

Bringing Grading Home or Grading at Work

All teachers have to mark student assignments. It’s the nature of what we do. We need to know if our students are learning or not, and some of this happens through assignments. We need to grade tests or essays to understand individual student learning and know if it’s happening. This often means grading numerous assignments. Do we always take it home? Nope. 9 times out of 10, when I take classwork to grade, it just sits in my bag. What’s the point? We cannot get it all done during our school day, so what do we do?

We set boundaries. We do give our students a time frame for assignments to be graded. It’s never the next day. The larger the assignment, the longer we take. Generally, we are successful in completing our grading. Not always, as we are not perfect, and we let our students know this. We also make sure to reciprocate this ideal – sometimes, things get done at a different rate than we had planned.

We don’t always have the time we’d like to grade during a prep period. Maybe we need to make copies or plan the next day’s lesson, or we have a meeting. But when we have time, we try to maximize that at work. How?

Don’t Grade Everything

With experience comes wisdom…usually. In this case, I’ve learned that not every single piece of work that students complete needs to be graded. The idea behind education is for students to want to learn intrinsically. As such, I don’t grade every piece of work. It still helps me glean insight into student understanding without necessarily taking up valuable grading time.

Providing Targeted Feedback

Admittedly, I’m still working on proficiency with this one. I mean that when I grade assignments and provide feedback, I focus on one specific part. It’s easy to read student essays and comment on the content, ideas, supporting evidence, spelling, grammar, etc.; your feedback can take forever. We choose a specific item on which to focus our feedback. That way, we don’t get bogged down writing too terribly much.

Time Management is Key in Teacher Work-Life Balance

Pomodoro Timer

I’ve mentioned this before in another post about surviving the end of a school year, but it’s worth mentioning again. I struggle to stay on task for long periods of time, so I use a Pomodoro timer to help me focus. These are two-fold timers. One is set for work time (say 20 minutes), then as that goes off, another begins for ‘break’ time (say 5 minutes). I use this so I don’t end up getting distracted for long periods of time. As a side note, I often recommend this to my students and parents as well.

Scheduling Time or Time Blocking

If you are like me, someone who struggles mightily with time management, or even managing my time management, then it can be difficult to do what you want to do. I like to practice something called Time Blocking. I use Todoist, a great habit tracker/to-do list app that helps me not just time-block but also build daily habits and routines. They also have a great article on Time Blocking.) The gist, however, is this: rather than say I’ll check email and then get to my grading or planning before the meeting or making those copies, you firmly decide how much time you want to spend on each item.

It’s all too easy to say you’ll spend time working on sending emails or grading, but ultimately, what people do (and myself many times as well, is bounce around from task to task without any clear goal of what exactly I want to accomplish. The Todoist article has a great graphic that shows the reality of many of us and how we ‘accomplish’ or ‘tackle’ items.

As I said, I’m plenty guilty of being the person on the left, but I do my best to use time blocking to be the person on the right. I use time blocking mostly at school when I know I’ll have the prep periods free. It helps me focus on completing work as much as possible, so I don’t need to take anything home.

I’d like to say I do as well with time blocking for things I’d like to accomplish and do at home, but if I’m honest, I don’t do it as well. Life tends to get in the way, and the darker impulses of Netflix or video games take hold, and I usually don’t get as much done as I hoped.

We both use planners (as well as Todoist) to help with our time blocking. I prefer the Clever Fox Planners. They range hourly, daily, and weekly, come in many colors, and have habit trackers as well. I buy planners that are not dated since academic calendars tend to start in August. You can buy all Clever Fox Planners via Amazon.

Emails, Learning Management Systems (LMS), & Firm Guidelines

Being a teacher means having a barrage of emails arrive in your inbox at any given time. Sometimes they are useful, sometimes they are frustrating, and other times, they go straight to the trash. Other times, student questions or comments still need to be addressed. We’ve all probably received an email from a student or a parent late at night. I remember once a few years ago, I had a parent who regularly sent their emails to me between midnight and 1 am. I hope it’s needless to say, but I did not respond.

We typically set hard and fast rules about responding to parents. Most schools offer teachers a 24-hour grace period to respond to parent emails, and even if they don’t, we usually let parents know that’s our policy. For regular contact with parents or students, I tell them if it’s an hour after my contract hour (e.g., 5 if my work ends at 4), I will respond. Beyond that, I will reply sometime the next day. We set clear boundaries regarding communication with parents and students to recapture our time at home.

This all includes any LMS system we use, be it PowerSchool, Google Classroom, or something similar. Occasionally, I’ll respond to a student if it’s time-sensitive or if I know the project hasn’t been off until the last minute, but overwhelmingly, I stick by the policy and wait until the next day. Again, this helps me to recapture my time spent at home away from work, but also because, more often than not, students never see the response anyhow!

Technological Separation – A Key to Teacher Work-Life Balance

Laptops & Browsers

One of the benefits of working at an international school is they tend to provide either a dedicated school laptop or money for you to purchase one. What this usually means for us is a distinct separation between a personal computer and a work one. However, if that model doesn’t work for you, your school, or your budget, there is a simple free alternative.

If you don’t have a separate computer to distinguish between your classroom and your home life, a great way is to download a separate browser to use exclusively for work and/or home. Let’s take a look at what I mean.

Many of us have a preferred browser, be it Safari, Chrome, Firefox, or possibly even Edge. Whatever your choice may be, we recommend choosing another browser you’d normally not use – for our example, we’ll use Firefox since it’s available on all devices. Keep Firefox on your computer and use it alone to log into any school-related items. When you are done, simply quit the browser and forget it exists. Open your personal browser and you can feel as though you have left your classroom behind with this other browser now closed and no signs of your work email anywhere. This method is not always foolproof, as you might find yourself signing on to the other browser with your work email more often than you’d like, but it’s a good place to start.

Work Email – A Source of Anxiety

We also recommend you not add your work email to your email clients such as Mail, Outlook, Gmail, Spark, etc. Keeping off of any email applications and only accessing it via the browser helps to ensure it’s more of a process to check that email and you’re less likely to be getting email notifications if something jumps into your inbox.

When I access my work email on a laptop, it is only ever via a browser and never an email client. This means I need to physically open my specific browser (in my case, Edge) and use it to open my school email. What this means for me is that I only check school email after work if I know there are likely to be questions or some kind of emergency. It’s a simple trick, but it does wonders for my anxiety levels in knowing whether I’ve received an email I didn’t want to see right before I go to bed.

Phones and Teacher Work-Life Balance

We all have phones. Our phones are all connected. We are always connected. I’m not recommending getting rid of your phone or not using it for work. For the most part, we have to. However, we do suggest a few tips or tricks to separate your personal phone life from your work one.

Like the previous suggestions of email clients, I use a separate email app for my school email than I do my personal one. And I keep notifications turned off. This means during the day at work, I can still check my email on my phone, and I can at night as well, but without notifications, I don’t know they’re coming in. At work, this might seem like a problem, but when I’m teaching, if it’s urgent, someone will call or come in, and if I’m on my planning period, I usually have my work computer or work browser open to see all emails. At home, it means I can check if I want, but I don’t know that new emails have been received. Using a separate browser or computer helps separate the work and home spaces and prevent any unnecessary anxiety right before going to bed so I can get the best sleep possible.

Finally, we recommend not using any of the LMSs on your phone. I don’t use Google Classroom or any school-affiliated item on my phone (including Google Drive). Does this cause issues at times? Occasionally, because it means I’ll have to sign into my account on my phone, but the annoyance of doing that is a trade-off I’m willing to make to reduce my overall stress levels. It also means that I’m not tempted to respond to student questions that show up on Google Classroom or PowerSchool at 8:30 or 9:00 at night as they are wont to do.

Accountability Buddies

We all have that teacher bestie – at least I assume we do – or at least that person whose room you’re likely to walk into during a free period and just sit and chat. Maybe you struggle with teacher work-life balance. Maybe they struggle with teacher work-life balance. Maybe you both do! Whatever the case may be, we recommend you find this person (or someone else) and message each other to remind them (and yourself) that work is done and you need to relax. We have a friend we’ll occasionally message who routinely stays after work 2-3 hours after school is out and contract time has passed.

An accountability buddy is also great for helping you and/or them keep track of deadlines, which means utilizing your time at work more efficiently, thus reducing anything you need to do at home. Combine this with time blocking and planning, and you’d be amazed at what you can get done during your work hours if, like me, you’ve struggled with these things in the past!

Final Thoughts on Teacher Work-Life Balance

We recommend trying our tips. They aren’t perfect, and they won’t always work. They certainly don’t always work for us. And even when they do work, sometimes…you still need to do some work at home! That’s just the nature of the job!

If you like these tips or want any more information on the products or strategies we use, please contact us or leave a comment! We’d also love to hear from you about what you do as an educator to maintain a healthy teacher work-life balance!