Customizing My Erin Condren Teacher Planner for High School

UPDATE: This blog post outlines the older layout for Erin Condren Teacher Planners! I will be writing a new post soon about their updated version - it includes almost all of the customization described below, so I still highly recommend it! 

If you are interested in purchasing your own Erin Condren Teacher Planner, use this link and get $10 off your first purchase! 

The video below includes an updated walkthrough of the planner and how I use it for secondary science!

This post is a long time coming, so bear with me as I give you all the details! I finally finished customizing my Erin Condren Teacher Planner for the 16-17 school year. I ordered it in May so I knew that I would have time to customize it and use it over the summer. I could not be more thrilled!

I loved this planner as soon as I saw it, but realized that some of the sections were really geared toward elementary teachers or teachers with a small number of students. I began searching for blog posts about customizing the teacher planner and I found TONS of amazing posts about how elementary school teachers customize it for their needs, a few about how middle school teachers use it, but very few about using the planner for High School. Us high school teachers need fun planners too! I consider myself a relatively creative person, so I decided to tackle this challenge: Customizing an Erin Condren Teacher Planner for High School!

So much of the planner is already perfect. Some of the things I did not customize are the monthly layouts and notes sections. There is a tab for each month, a two page monthly spread, and three notes pages for each month. Perfect! I already made use of some of the notes pages at a recent PD session!

The sections I don't find useful for high school are the attendance section, grid paper, checklist section, and Birthday section. Luckily, I have an amazing idea for each of these! The video below has a quick overview of the changes I have made!

All the customization was done with washi tape, stickers (some included with the planner), double sided tape, and regular paper from my printer.

We don't celebrate birthdays in class, or we'd be celebrating all the time, so I decided to change the class birthdays section into a long-term To-Do list and an area to keep track of books to read, items to order, and ideas for the future. It will slowly fill up during the year and will be a great place to look back to in May when we are wrapping up. The stickers on this page are from the back of the teacher planner! I may end up ditching the two-toned look and just put straight washi across. I haven't decided yet.

The attendance section isn't very useful for me, because we take electronic attendance. I use the electronic attendance constantly, so I don't want to make a paper version. I decided to change my attendance section into an Email/Contact Log for parent contact. Although I keep copies of all the emails I send, they get filed away into a folder. Parent emails can be obscure and it gets easy to lose track of the dates you emailed and whether the parent responded. The attendance log already has a column for check marks -- perfect for checking whether a parent responded. There are also columns for name, date, and reason for contact. 

The grid section seems pretty useful for me, especially for seating charts and data tracking. For me, we change seating charts all the time and my classroom is an odd shape due to science benches. It didn't seem feasible for me to use the section that way. I have around 150 students, and about 10 students who enter or leave throughout the year. Our data tracking is already online, so I am going to stick to that. I decided to use the grid section for a Behavior Log and Intervention tracker. As the adage goes, 20% of your kids cause 80% of your problems, so for each class, I usually only have a handful of trouble makers. I plan on using the grid area to track their "bad" days and what we tried to do to fix it. If I end up meeting with the parent or counselor later, I have a quick place to look back and reference what has occurred in our classroom. Luckily, the grid pages are decorated but not labeled, so no customizing needed!

I love the layout of the lesson planning pages -- the days are horizontal and the preps are vertical. I love that each day is a different color and there is plenty of space for me to write without having to miniaturize my handwriting. There is room for seven preps, but most high school teachers don't have that many. I have two and a half preps -- Chemistry, Biology, and an ESOL section of Biology. I call the ESOL section a half prep since we are covering the same material and will be doing some of the same activities, but some of the plans will be modified. I didn't need seven sections for lesson plans, but I wanted to use up all the space that was provided. I thought about what other types of things I normally write in my planner throughout the year -- meetings, conferences, To-Do List, Reminders -- and knew there had to be a way to incorporate all of that. This was my solution!

I used thin solid colored washi tape to create four different sections. Two of the sections are two columns wide. This is where I plan on putting my lessons for Biology and Chemistry, since those are my main preps. The first page has three columns total, so I will use the first column for Biology and the single column for ESOL Biology. The second page has four columns total. The first two are for Chemistry. The last two columns are for To-Do lists and Meetings. I am super excited to start using this section. I love being able to have everything I need for the day in one spot.

The checklist section is basically a gradebook -- which is grade for elementary teachers who only have thirty kids. It doesn't seem big enough to keep track of grades for all 150 students I see for the entire year. I decided to use this section to record assessment data. By the time we take our first tests, most of the schedule changes are complete and my rosters are more stable. At the semester change, I may have a few students switch, but most of them stay the same. I plan on tracking mastery data for standards and assessment scores. I am keeping a row at the bottom to track averages. This is going to be super handy when I am sitting in an IT meeting and trying to remember what student tests looked like. It also allows me to record their raw score and curved score for interims, EOCs, and other curved tests we give.

So far, I could not be more ecstatic about this purchase! I will be using my planner during the summer for summer school, meetings, conferences... but I will keep you all updated if I make any other changes once the school year begins!

Update: Two weeks into the school year - AND I'M IN LOVE! I have kept everything the same minus a few additional stickers and washi scattered around. The best purchase -- Highly recommend high school folks!

If you are interested in purchasing your own Erin Condren Teacher Planner, use this link and get $10 off your first purchase!