Five Ways to Hack a Planner to Work for Students & Yourself
The start of a new semester is an IDEAL time for educators to guide students through thinking about their planners!
And…therefore, set up an excellent foundation for the executive function skills, learning strategies, and study skills you’ll be working on throughout the semester. But don’t worry! Even if you’re smack dab in the middle of a semester, it’s NOT TOO LATE to get organized in this way!
Watch the full video below or read on for a summary!
Let’s start with some questions to consider:
Do you have a paper planner? Or do you mostly plan digitally?
If you have a paper planner, do you know where it is?
If you know where it is, have you actually been using it?!
If you have been using it, has it actually been helpful?
How could you make it even MORE helpful? Or at least more motivating to use?
I like to ask myself these questions, as well as my students, because, goodness knows, I need a bit of a January organization reset, too! If you’ve been following me for some time, you know I’m a BIG believer that educators need to try out all the tools they teach students, so they can tell real life stories to students about what works and what doesn’t in their own habit hacking attempts.
In today’s video for students, I actually walked myself through a planner-hacking process, so I’m modeling to students how I put these anti-boring tactics into practice in my own life.
You’ll want to watch the full video (above) to see what my planner looked like before AND after the hacking process. There’s no substitute for seeing my excitement about my new tools, as well as the extreme mess on my couch afterwards.
In this blog entry, though, I’ll share an overview of what I did to hack my planner:
Add a pocket. There are often random pieces of paper that I need to keep track of, and I want those pieces of paper to travel with me from my permanent desk (at home) to my portable desk (at coffee shops). Adding a pocket to my planner ensures that these pieces of paper stay safe and don’t fall out.
Add a bookmark or some other page marker. I also wanted to be able to easily turn to the current week whenever I open my planner. I thought adding a bookmark would be the way to go, but when I tried to make a bookmark, I realized that it would easily get lost. Instead, I grabbed a binder clip, which did the trick and would be much more secure moving my planner from place to place.
Decorate the outside. This is my favorite way to fall in love with my planner. I like to cut and paste pictures and words out of magazines, but my students often like to print out logos and images off of the internet. A glue stick and packing tape are all you need to personalize your planner and make it something you like to look at. I always set a goal to cover every inch of space so I can no longer see the original planner cover any more! The decoration process is what shifts my motivation more than any other hack, so, if you only do one thing, I recommend you do this!
Attach a writing utensil. There are times that I think of writing a to-do list in my planner, but I can’t find a writing utensil. Do you think I go hunt down a writing utensil? Nope! Instead, just like students, I tell myself, “I’ll remember this to-do item,” and I go about my day. Do I actually remember? Nope!! So this year I’ll experiment with having my pen attached to my planner so I no longer have this excuse for not writing things down. I’m always a fan of using the resources at hand, so some fancy, schmancy dental floss did the trick to tie the pen to my spiral binding.
Add sticky notes. There might be times when I’d like to add a to-do list that travels with me from week to week, and a sticky note is the best way I can think of to accomplish this task without rewriting the whole list. However, in the past, my blank sticky notes have fallen out of my planner, so I needed to create a pocket that would keep them accessible and safe. Check out the video to see exactly how I did this.
Are these the only ways to hack your planner? Heck no. These are just the five ways that I chose to hack my planner. Doing a careful task analysis with your students to help them discover what is working and what isn’t, and then helping them troubleshoot the areas that aren’t working, is an important step in this process.
If you’re curious about how to do a task analysis, come join us in the Anti-Boring Learning Lab for educators of all kinds: teachers, academic coaches, tutors, and so many others! Our Community Calls are vibrant, fun, and helpful, and we are often sharing ideas for better questions to ask students, as well as processes to lead them through. We’d love to have you!
For now, though, I’d like to end this blog entry (just like I ended the video) with some ideas about how to apply the planner hacking process in your work with students.
Lead a workshop. When I first started my academic coaching practice, I had transitioned from being a classroom teacher. This means I still had group teaching on the brain, and I started leading workshops where I would guide groups of students through hacking their school planners. I brought all the supplies -- magazines, scissors, cardboard, packing tape, glue -- and the students brought their school planner. I would then lead them through a process, from visioning to final execution, where they would walk away with a new beautiful planner. We usually did this at the beginning of the school year, though it’s a wonderful thing to do mid-year as well.
Devote a coaching session to the task. With my 1:1 coaching clients, I would often devote an entire session to hacking their planners. In this case, it was more efficient to have students collect their images at home, and bring them into the designated session. I’d bring all the additional supplies, and for 50 minutes we’d make a mess on the office floor. I’d be their “assistant,” adding pockets while they decorated the cover, and voila! By the end of the session they had a big smile and a decorated planner.
Ask students to do it themselves. When time is of the essence, you can always ask students to do it themselves. If this is the case, you’ll want to show them how to use packing tape to cover the collage they make, and talk them through how to add pockets etc. When they bring it into class or a coaching session, it is a really fun conversation and a wonderful way to get to know each other better.
What are the benefits of decorating student planners? There are so many! The obvious one is that a student’s sense of ownership of their planning device improves, as well as their motivation to use it.
But there are also benefits to the teacher-student and coach-student relationship. It might seem like a waste of time to devote an entire session only to the planner! But while you’re sitting on the floor or at a table creating, you get to have wonderful conversations about a students’ likes, dislikes, favorite sports team or favorite food, disappointments, joys, or goals for the school year. I found this to be a wonderful relationship-building activity at the beginning of the school year, or a fun and playful relationship reset in the middle of the school year.
Also, if you coach students across multiple school years, it can be helpful for them to remember their growth over time. I recommend that at the end of the school year, you guide students through saving the cover art from their planner. How fun is it at the end of high school or college to review all their collages and consider how far they’ve come?!
If you try this with students or for yourself, drop me a comment below to let me know how it goes!
Have fun planner hacking, everyone!
