As an educator, you likely "wear many hats" and perform a daily juggling act to take care of all of your responsibilities. And you certainly have no surplus of time on your hands. But teachers who cannot balance their responsibilities and priorities may quickly find themselves feeling 'burned out' or that they are in a sinking ship. The tips that follow will help you save time so that you can be more effective in your career while still having some time for your own self. Read on while you can still salvage your sanity.

Get Organized

Organization is the key to saving time, and organizing your classroom and your students will help you take control of your time in a more efficient manner. Make certain that your classroom is accessible when it comes to the materials and supplies that you will need. Being able to quickly and easily find things when they are needed makes the day run much more smoothly, even if it takes time to actually organize everything initially.

You should also invest some time in preparing your lessons well before they are presented. In fact, many teachers plan their lessons during the summer months so that the workload is lessened when they return in the fall. Your students must also be organized. Begin by charting a seating arrangement that makes it easy to remember their names during the first few weeks of school. Create weekly handouts for your students that clearly state the goals for the week, including classroom and homework assignments and their due dates.

Enlist Helpers

A big task for most teachers is grading papers, but peer grading can cut down significantly on this chore. Allowing students to grade papers while you discuss the correct answers not only reinforces the concepts that you are teaching, but eases the paperwork that you will need to do. And while you can't allow students to grade papers like essays or book reports, you can allow them to grade any paper that features a multiple choice answer or a fill-in-the-blank answer, as well as spelling tests and so on.

Grading papers also provides the students with a short break to unwind, and makes them feel important. You can also assign classroom chores to specific students each week, and use a chart to indicate who does what, when. Students love to feel like they are an important part of the classroom organization, and chores like cleaning the whiteboard and dusting the bookshelves are simple and easy for them to complete - and frees up your time to do other things.

Use Printable Handouts

If you are creating your own worksheets, you likely are taking up a lot of your own time in doing so, first in creating the question and then in creating an answer key. You can find tons of printable handouts on the Internet for concepts ranging from math to language arts and history. Take advantage of the hard work that someone else has done and save some time in the process. The only effort required is to make some copies.

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