Secondary Teacher Podcast

About Secondary Teacher Podcast

**Are you looking for secondary teacher strategies, elective teacher resources, and teacher planning systems that actually work when you're juggling multiple preps?** Are you drowning in lesson planning and still taking work home every night? Wondering if managing your workload is even possible when every class needs something different? Let's be honest… your planning period disappears fast. If that sounds like you, you're in the right place. This podcast is for overwhelmed secondary teachers—especially elective teachers, CTE teachers, and any multiple prep teacher—who are tired of feeling behind and need practical secondary teacher strategies built for the reality of teaching multiple courses. You'll learn how to simplify teacher planning, build classroom routines that reduce your workload, and find elective teacher resources that help you keep students engaged without creating everything from scratch. Because you don't need a better planner. You need systems that fit the reality of your secondary classroom. Hi, I'm Khristen Massic. I'm a former high school teacher in career technical education who spent 10 years teaching courses like engineering, drafting, robotics, digital media, and more—and at one point, I taught **nine preps in a single school year**. I've also worked as a middle school assistant principal and now support teachers at the district level, so I've seen the teacher workload from multiple angles. And here's what I learned the hard way: It's not that you're bad at teacher planning. It's that most planning systems were never built for teachers juggling this many different classes. I used to overplan, rebuild everything from scratch, and try to make every lesson perfect—until it became completely unsustainable. What changed? I stopped chasing perfect plans and started building simple, repeatable systems. Now I help secondary teachers simplify teacher planning, reuse what already works, and actually finish something during their prep period. Inside this podcast, you'll find: * Secondary teacher strategies for managing multiple preps without constant overwhelm * Teacher planning systems that help you decide what to work on first and actually finish it * Elective teacher resources that save time without sacrificing meaningful learning * Classroom routines that reduce decision fatigue and keep your day running without constant effort * Low-prep classroom games and engaging lessons that support student engagement without hours of prep * Secondary teacher tips for protecting your planning period and getting more work done during the school day * Systems for repurposing lessons across career technical education, electives, and other courses * Practical strategies for CTE teachers, elective teachers, and any multiple prep teacher constantly switching between courses * Teacher productivity strategies that help you reduce your Teacher workload and protect your time * Practical ways to use AI to support teacher planning without turning it into one more thing you have to learn You don't need to do it all. You need systems that work. If you're ready to spend less time reinventing lessons, feel more in control of your planning, protect your evenings, and still show up for your students… **Hit play.** ### Next Steps Grab your free resources to start simplifying your teacher planning right away: 🎯 **2026–2027 Secondary Teacher Editable Unit/Lesson Planning Calendar** https://khristenmassic.com/secondarycalendarpod 🎯 **Planning Period Reset Toolkit** https://khristenmassic.com/reset Find more ready-to-use elective teacher resources in my Teachers Pay Teachers store: https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/store/khristen-massic-cte-teacher-coach Learn more at: [www.khristenmassic.com](http://www.khristenmassic.com)

Publisher

Khristen Massic | Elective Teacher Resources, Secondary Teacher Strategies, Teacher Planning

Category

education · education · education

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

15 Oct 2020

Latest episode

6 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

378 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   6 Oct 2026

   Ep 372: Teacher Planning Starts With Protecting Your Planning Period

   Planning period for multiple preps can turn into a daily negotiation with yourself. On The Secondary Teacher Podcast, host Khristen Massic explains why protecting your planning period matters, then takes the next step: deciding how to use that time across every class you teach. Links mentioned in this episode: Grab the Secondary Teacher Systems Toolkit here: https://khristenmassic.thrivecart.com/systemstoolkit/?ref=pod (https://khristenmassic.thrivecart.com/systemstoolkit/?ref=pod ) Planning for the next school year? If your day is organized by class period, your planning calendar should be too. Grab my Editable Class Period Calendar here: https://khristenmassic.com/secondarycalendarpod (https://khristenmassic.com/secondarycalendarpod) Get the Planning Period Reset Toolkit—a free set of quick-start tools to help you protect your time, focus faster, and finally finish something… even during chaotic school days. https://khristenmassic.com/reset (https://khristenmassic.com/reset) Shop my Teachers Pay Teachers store: https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Store/Khristen-Massic-Cte-Teacher-Coach (https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Store/Khristen-Massic-Cte-Teacher-Coach) The common mistake is easy to recognize. You finally get a quiet block without students, open your laptop, and realize that “planning” could mean almost anything. You could prepare tomorrow’s lesson, start the next unit, finish project materials, make copies, revise something you already taught, or answer the task that happens to be sitting directly in front of you. When every option is waiting for a decision, the first part of your planning period disappears before you’ve done meaningful work. The episode captures that problem with a painfully familiar mailbox detour. There was time available, but no clear answer to the question, “What should I work on right now?” So checking the mailbox became tempting. It was a real task, easy to complete, and satisfying enough to create the feeling of progress. But it wasn’t the work that needed attention every day. The better solution was simple: check it after school, check it once a week, or send a fast finisher to the office with a hall pass. The point isn’t that a mailbox never matters. The point is that an available task shouldn’t automatically control your planning period. For middle and high school teachers, especially those managing several courses, planning period for multiple preps requires a wider view before focused work begins. Look across the day you’re preparing for. Which classes are ready? Which one still needs a lesson? Is one course about to start a new unit? Does a project need materials set up? Is tomorrow handled well enough that you can work ahead instead? This quick scan prevents one class from absorbing all your attention while another class quietly becomes tomorrow night’s emergency. That’s the difference between a deliberate choice and planning in silos. Finishing an entire unit for one course can feel like a major win, and it is real work. But if robotics still needs a lesson tomorrow, the work hasn’t solved the whole teaching day. A multiple prep teacher workload punishes tunnel vision because each completed course doesn’t automatically help the next course. The answer isn’t to plan every class simultaneously. That creates its own kind of chaos. The answer is to check all your preps first, then choose where your attention belongs. Sometimes one prep genuinely needs the full block. Building out a new unit may require sustained thinking, especially when you’re working through what students need to learn, practice, and produce. The key is knowing that this is the choice you’re making after reviewing the rest of your schedule. “Today I’m focusing on this unit because I checked the other classes” is a plan. “I spent the whole block here because this is where I started” is how planning in silos takes over. The conversation also offers a practical way to make the next prep less demanding. Don’t assume every course requires a completely new lesson structure. Look for decisions you can carry forward. An activity format, student practice structure, discussion routine, or feedback process may transfer even when the subject matter changes. The episode uses a bell ringer example to make the distinction clear. The same video didn’t make sense across engineering design and robotics, particularly when students were in both courses. But the structure could stay: students look at something, write what they notice and wonder, and talk with a partner. The content changes. The classroom routines can remain familiar. That approach takes pressure out of planning period for multiple preps. You’re not asking, “How do I invent a brand-new lesson for this class?” You’re asking, “What do I already have that fits, and what still needs to be chosen?” Course-specific content still matters, but you don’t need to rebuild every instructional decision from the ground up. The Unit Planning Lab approach referenced in the episode, using Introduce, Practice, Produce, reinforces that planning can happen through connected decisions rather than a pile of unrelated tasks. The practical routine is straightforward. Before you sit down, look at the whole day. Identify what needs attention next. Give that work a place in the time available. If you’re going to spend the entire block on one prep, confirm that the other preps won’t surprise you later. Then, when the planning period ends, leave a clear next step. Not a giant list of unfinished work. Just enough direction to make the next start easier. If you finished the Introduce portion of a unit, write down that the next decision is how students will practice. If you chose a bell ringer structure, note that you still need course-specific content. If you finished one prep, mark what may carry over to another. This is especially useful for teachers moving between English, social studies, science, math, robotics, engineering, electives, or other secondary classroom courses during the same day. The content may shift constantly, but the planning process doesn’t have to feel brand new every time. A clear next step keeps you from spending ten minutes deciding where to begin. It also makes it less likely that an easy errand, inbox check, or familiar administrative task will replace the instructional work you meant to do. For teachers who already feel behind in one class while getting ahead in another, planning period for multiple preps offers a better way to measure progress. The goal isn’t to touch every class every day. The goal is to make sure your focus is intentional and connected to what students will need next. One class may receive the full block. Another may benefit from a structure you’ve already developed. A third may only need materials gathered or a next step recorded. That is still a plan, because you made the decision after looking across the schedule. Host Khristen Massic connects this work to the larger process of protecting your planning period. First, decide what belongs in that time. Then set an order. Then schedule the work that matters before the period begins. The Planning Period Reset Toolkit is named in the episode as a resource for sorting through the work competing for planning time and identifying what actually needs attention. The broader lesson is clear: your planning period needs more than empty minutes. It needs a starting point. The episode is for any secondary teacher whose planning time gets hijacked by whatever task is closest. It’s for the teacher who finishes a two-week plan for first period, then realizes the other classes still need tomorrow’s lessons. It’s for the teacher who has plenty to do but wanders toward the mailbox because choosing among ten reasonable tasks feels harder than completing one obvious errand. And it’s for the multi-prep teacher who wants a more sustainable teacher work life balance without pretending that every class can be planned at once. Use the whole day as your starting point. Protect your planning period from low-priority drift. Choose the prep that needs attention, carry forward structures that still work, and leave yourself a clear next step before the bell sends you back into the classroom. That’s how planning becomes more manageable across the whole teaching day, instead of leaving you ahead in one class and behind in the rest. Stop letting the nearest task run the show.

2. 

   29 Sept 2026

   Ep 371: Teacher Time Management Starts With Clear Boundaries

   Teacher time management starts with clear boundaries, especially when a planning period exists on the schedule but never seems to belong to planning. On The Secondary Teacher Podcast, this episode examines what happens when grading, email, printing, copying, and materials preparation take over the one block of time meant for thoughtful lesson work. The problem isn’t always a lack of time. Sometimes the real problem is that every visible task gets treated as the next task. Links mentioned in this episode: Grab the Secondary Teacher Systems Toolkit here: https://khristenmassic.thrivecart.com/systemstoolkit/?ref=pod (https://khristenmassic.thrivecart.com/systemstoolkit/?ref=pod ) Planning for the next school year? If your day is organized by class period, your planning calendar should be too. Grab my Editable Class Period Calendar here: https://khristenmassic.com/secondarycalendarpod (https://khristenmassic.com/secondarycalendarpod) Get the Planning Period Reset Toolkit—a free set of quick-start tools to help you protect your time, focus faster, and finally finish something… even during chaotic school days. https://khristenmassic.com/reset (https://khristenmassic.com/reset) Shop my Teachers Pay Teachers store: https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Store/Khristen-Massic-Cte-Teacher-Coach (https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Store/Khristen-Massic-Cte-Teacher-Coach) That pattern is familiar in a middle or high school setting. A teacher sits down during a planning period, opens the gradebook, sees assignments waiting to be entered, and starts grading. An email arrives, so the inbox gets attention. A copy needs to be made, materials need to be gathered, or a student needs help, and the original plan for the period disappears. Each task is legitimate. The trouble comes when legitimate work automatically becomes urgent work. The episode begins with a specific example: having a planning period every day but using it almost exclusively for grading and email. Lesson planning happened at night or over the weekend, while school hours were spent catching up on tasks that were easier to identify. That arrangement created a running list of unfinished work, including printing, copying, and getting materials together before class started. Even after the lesson had been thought through at home, it still wasn’t necessarily ready to teach. For teachers with multiple preps, that gap can grow quickly. Planning means making decisions for each course: what students will do tomorrow, what they need before beginning a project, whether an activity fits a particular class, and what materials are required. Those decisions take focused attention. Grading and email offer a more concrete starting point, so they can win the planning period simply because they’re easier to open and begin. “I’ll figure it out tonight” may sound manageable once. Repeated every day, it turns nights and weekends into the default location for planning. The first step in the 4S framework is set in order. That phrase has nothing to do with color-coding folders, organizing a desk, or finding a perfect planning template. It means getting honest about what you want your teaching day to look like within the schedule you actually have. The conversation focuses on one clear goal: use the planning period to plan. That can mean deciding what comes next in a lesson, preparing materials, or making meaningful progress on upcoming work before leaving school. Clear boundaries for teachers have to fit real classroom conditions. The episode doesn’t pretend that a perfect day will include no interruptions, complete student engagement, and every task finished before the bell. Secondary teachers have duties, meetings, schedule changes, student needs, equipment, materials, and several preps competing for attention. The more useful question is narrower: within those conditions, what should this particular block of time protect? Maybe it’s tomorrow’s materials. Maybe it’s progress on a unit instead of only the next morning’s deadline. Maybe it’s avoiding the first 10 minutes of every planning period spent trying to remember where to begin. Protecting planning time also requires examining the work that keeps crossing the boundary. Simply declaring “no grading during planning” won’t solve the problem if the same assignments, deadlines, and grading process remain in place. The work still exists. It has to live somewhere else, or happen differently. That’s why grading during planning is treated as a process question, not a test of personal discipline. The better question is whether grading must happen in that block, or whether some of it can be shifted to another point in the teaching day. One change described in the episode came from the introduce, practice, produce structure discussed in the Unit Planning Lab series. During practice and produce phases, students were already working while the teacher moved around the room, answered questions, looked at progress, and helped students who were stuck. Projects offered a natural opportunity to assess work while it was developing. Feedback could happen while students still had time to make changes, rather than waiting for the final product and creating another large pile afterward. That approach doesn’t mean every assignment should be graded while students work, and student attention still matters. It does show how a process can support teacher time management starts with clear boundaries. A boundary isn’t always a rule that says what cannot happen. Sometimes it requires changing when or how a task happens. If grading can be handled in part while students are practicing and producing, the planning period has a better chance of becoming available for planning instead of serving as a permanent catch-up block. The distinction between necessary and urgent matters throughout the episode. Grading matters. Email matters. Printing and copying matter. Materials need to be ready before class starts. But a task can be necessary without needing to happen right now. A gradebook with unfinished entries is visible, but visibility doesn’t automatically make it an emergency. An inbox can demand attention simply because a message arrived, but that doesn’t mean email is the most important use of focused time. This is where teacher time management starts with clear boundaries becomes practical rather than aspirational. During a planning period, the useful questions are direct: What needs focused attention when students aren’t in the room? What can happen while students are working because it connects to what they’re doing? What can wait for another point in the day? What keeps happening because it has become a habit? The goal is not to produce perfect answers immediately. The goal is to notice whether time is being chosen or merely claimed by whatever appears first. The episode also makes an important point for teachers who feel buried under too many possible improvements. It’s easy to identify fifteen things that need attention: get the planning period back, take less home, handle email differently, prepare materials earlier, and create routines that work across multiple preps. Treating all of those changes as one giant project creates another source of pressure. Set in order begins with one block of time, the planning period, and one decision about what that time should accomplish. That decision comes before a detailed schedule. The episode specifically cautions against jumping straight into an hour-by-hour plan. First, decide what belongs where. If planning is supposed to have a place, identify the work that should live there. Then look at what is currently taking that place. Maybe grading is the dominant task. Maybe email is the default because it’s easy to open. Maybe the first several minutes disappear while trying to decide what to work on. The schedule comes later, after the categories are clearer. This conversation is especially relevant to secondary teachers who teach several different courses, including CTE teachers managing equipment, materials, and project preparation. It speaks to teachers who finish the school day carrying unfinished decisions home, then return with another list of things that must be printed, copied, gathered, or completed before students arrive. It also fits teachers whose planning periods exist on paper but have gradually become grading blocks, email blocks, or general cleanup time. The episode doesn’t promise that setting boundaries will remove every interruption or eliminate work outside school. The goal is more precise. Stop treating nights and weekends as the automatic solution whenever the planning period gets handed over to another task. Stop waiting for grading to finish before planning, because there may always be more grading. Give planning its own place instead of hoping it will survive after everything else is done. For teachers ready to examine that pattern, the Planning Period Reset Toolkit is named as a starting point for sorting through the work competing for planning time and identifying what actually needs attention. The episode also points ahead to a future discussion about grading shifts, while keeping this conversation focused on the first step: deciding what the planning period is for. Teacher time management starts with clear boundaries, but boundaries become useful only when they’re connected to actual processes. Look at the block. Name what you want it to protect. Notice what keeps taking it over. Then ask whether that task can happen while students work, at another point in the day, or through a different approach. Finish something that makes tomorrow

3. 

   22 Sept 2026

   Ep 370: Secondary Teacher Tips Work Better With a System

   If you’re constantly asking how to decide what to work on during your planning period, this episode of The Secondary Teacher Podcast is for you. Secondary teacher tips can help with today’s problem, but the bigger win comes from building a system that keeps you from solving the same problem again tomorrow. Helpful links mentioned in this episode: Grab the Secondary Teacher Systems Toolkit here: https://khristenmassic.thrivecart.com/systemstoolkit/?ref=pod (https://khristenmassic.thrivecart.com/systemstoolkit/?ref=pod ) Too many preps and not enough time? Let’s make your planning period actually work for you. Hop into the Unit Planning Lab here: https://khristenmassic.thrivecart.com/augustlab/?ref=podcast (https://khristenmassic.thrivecart.com/augustlab/?ref=podcast) Planning for the next school year? If your day is organized by class period, your planning calendar should be too. Grab my Editable Class Period Calendar here: https://khristenmassic.com/secondarycalendarpod (https://khristenmassic.com/secondarycalendarpod) Get the Planning Period Reset Toolkit—a free set of quick-start tools to help you protect your time, focus faster, and finally finish something… even during chaotic school days. https://khristenmassic.com/reset (https://khristenmassic.com/reset) Shop my Teachers Pay Teachers store: https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Store/Khristen-Massic-Cte-Teacher-Coach (https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Store/Khristen-Massic-Cte-Teacher-Coach) The problem isn’t a lack of ideas. Most secondary teachers, especially those managing several preps, already have plenty of ideas saved, downloaded, screenshot, or filed away for later. The problem is that a tip usually arrives as an answer to one specific situation. Try this bell ringer. Use this activity when students finish early. Here’s a faster way to give feedback. The advice may be good, but the next time you sit down to plan a different course, you’re back at the beginning. That cycle gets expensive when you teach three, four, or five different preps. You can have a strong activity for engineering design and still spend the next planning period wondering how to start robotics. You can have an efficient way to organize absent work and still lose time deciding what deserves attention before tomorrow. This episode looks at the difference between collecting more teacher tips and learning how to recognize the structure underneath the tip. One of the clearest examples comes from the opening routine used in an engineering design class. The content was Kickstarter videos. Students looked closely at a design, noticed its features, wondered how it worked, and questioned whether it solved the problem its creator claimed to solve. The routine used “I notice, I wonder” with a think-write-pair-share structure. Students thought about what they saw, wrote observations and questions, discussed their thinking with a partner, and brought ideas into a larger conversation. That routine worked. The mistake was assuming that reusing the bell ringer meant reusing the same video. When the same students appeared in both engineering design and robotics, showing the same video again wasn’t a good option. Some videos that fit engineering design didn’t connect to robotics. The better insight came later: the video didn’t need to stay the same. The structure did. For robotics, the input could have been a robotics video, a photo of a mechanism, or an article about new technology. Students could still notice and wonder. They could still write, talk, and share. The content would change to fit the course, while the classroom routine remained familiar. That is the practical difference between reusing a resource and reusing a repeatable classroom structure. This matters for any secondary classroom where the content changes from prep to prep. Welding students need different content from manufacturing students. An introductory course and a capstone course are working toward different goals. If students are enrolled in more than one of those classes, the exact same resource may not work twice. But the way students interact with a resource may transfer beautifully. When evaluating secondary teacher strategies, the useful question isn’t only, “Could I use this activity?” Ask what students are actually doing. Are they observing? Comparing? Questioning? Explaining? Practicing? Giving feedback? Talking through a decision? Once the student action is clear, it becomes easier to see whether the same structure could work with a different text, image, demonstration, problem, or piece of equipment. That shift reduces the number of decisions waiting for you during planning time. You still have to choose content that fits the course. That work doesn’t disappear. But you don’t have to invent a brand-new process for every class, every lesson, and every prep. Students can learn how a familiar routine works, and you can spend more of your attention on the material that matters for that particular course. The episode also pushes back on a common misunderstanding about systems. A system is not a giant collection of perfectly organized folders. It isn’t color-coding every document or creating an elaborate setup that takes longer to maintain than the original problem. The 4S framework discussed here begins with Set in order, Schedule, Systemize, and Sustain. Each part addresses a different layer of teaching that needs to keep working across a full school year with multiple preps. Set in order means getting honest about the teaching day you actually have and what stands between you and the day you want. Schedule means giving important work a real place in the time available, not an imaginary block of ideal planning time. Systemize means creating repeatable processes so you stop rebuilding everything from scratch each year. Sustain means checking what works and making small adjustments before the system quietly falls apart by November. That sequence is especially relevant to middle and high school teachers whose planning periods are crowded from several directions. Grading competes with email. Meetings compete with lesson preparation. Equipment setup competes with finding materials. Student support competes with tomorrow’s unfinished lesson. If you teach multiple preps, those demands arrive at the same time, but they don’t all deserve equal attention. The question becomes more precise than “What can I get done?” It becomes: What needs my attention now? When will I work on it? Which part can become repeatable? What needs to change for this course? What can remain familiar for students? Those questions turn planning from a frantic response to the loudest task into a decision-making process you can return to. The Planning Period Reset Toolkit is introduced as a way to sort through the work competing for your planning period and identify the next thing that needs attention. The situation it addresses is familiar: forty-five minutes available and roughly three hours’ worth of possible tasks. Losing the first ten minutes just trying to decide where to start makes an already short planning period feel even shorter. A process can’t create more minutes, but it can support a more intentional decision about the minutes already available. The strongest teacher tips in this episode are the ones that help you see beyond the immediate material. Reusing bell ringers does not have to mean repeating the same video. A discussion structure does not have to belong to one unit. A feedback process does not have to be rebuilt for every assignment. The resource may change. The student work may change. The structure can often stay stable. That idea also protects students from unnecessary confusion. A familiar routine gives students a known way to enter the work, even when the content is new. They may be looking at a mechanism in robotics, a design in engineering, or a new technology described in an article. The subject shifts, but the process of noticing, questioning, writing, discussing, and sharing remains recognizable. For teachers, the benefit is just as concrete. You can build a toolbox of structures that move between preps instead of a pile of disconnected activities that only work in one setting. A structure becomes more useful when it can travel. It gives you something to return to when a different course, different students, or different lesson demands a new version of the same kind of thinking. That doesn’t mean every activity should be forced into the same format. The episode makes room for the fact that some approaches genuinely need to change. Content, course goals, student experience, and the resources available all matter. The goal isn’t to make every class identical. The goal is to stop treating every planning decision as if it has never been made before. This is where “reusing the structure” becomes more useful than “reusing the activity.” An activity is often tied to a particular resource. A structure describes the pattern underneath it. The Kickstarter video was one input. Notice and wonder was the thinking move. Think-write-pair-share was the interaction pattern. That pattern could be used with different course content without pretending that engineering design and robotics are the same class. The episode is made for secondary teachers who are tired of starting from scratch, especially CTE and elective teachers balancing multiple preps. It speaks to the teacher who has a folder full of promising ideas but still spends planning periods making the same kinds of decisions again and again. It...

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5.0 / 5

12 ratings

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5.0 / 5

3 ratings

Podcast Authority Score: 70 / 100

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Engagement

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