How to prep classes faster and more efficiently

I teach on the quarter system, and our summer break is about halfway over. Those of you that start up in August are even closer to your first day of class. That means we are all starting to think about prepping for the coming quarter.

The quick fix for chaotic teaching prep is to stop organizing by document and start organizing by topic. Read on for the details.

If you are like me, you are probably teaching at least one class that you have taught before. I have a couple of classes that I am assigned to on "heavy repeat." In my case, I like this because I can try to sell my students on the other professional and technical writing classes in our program, and there is the added benefit of familiarity. It's nice to feel like I know my subject matter inside and out, and that I can anticipate pretty much any question that a student may throw my way.

And this repetition should lead to shorter prep times, at least in theory. The American Faculty Association published a guideline years ago that faculty should plan on four hours of planning time per hour of class time for a new prep, but just two hours of planning time per hour of a repeat prep.

But to be honest, I often find myself spinning my wheels when planning materials for a repeat prep. The flipside of familiarity is not contempt, but chaos. I have created so many versions of the lectures for my core classes, that I am nearly drowning in content when it comes time to prep for a particular course or even a single class session. The reason for this is that I have always planned my lectures by the day, using individual documents for each day. So the next time I teach a class, I have to dig through all of my documents to find the individual ideas I need to cover in a given lecture or assignment description. Assignments get tweaked, lectures don't go exactly as planned, and pretty soon finding the specific description or lecture that I know I wrote already becomes an exercise in futility.

Why documents suck at reusing content

The reason that planning lectures and course content this way is so difficult is that it uses separate documents as the smallest unit of organization. Don't get me wrong, documents are great at certain kinds of writing tasks. But they are not good at helping us keep ideas organized.

There are several reasons why documents are terrible tools for preparing teaching materials. Here are the three big ones:

• Nearly all document formats store your ideas in a binary code that is difficult to search from outside of the document itself. So if you want to find every reference to an idea like "APA style," you have to open each individual document where you think you might have discussed the idea and use the search function. Wouldn't it be great if you could search all of your teaching materials at once for a phrase?
• Documents make it nearly impossible to reuse content. Here's a typical document-based workflow: I write an assignment prompt in Word. I print it up and share it on paper with my class, and I also copy and paste the assessment criteria into PowerPoint to have on the screen for a class discussion. Then I copy and paste both the description and the assessment criteria into Canvas so that students have that information when they are working on the assignment at home. Along the way a student points out a typo or asks a question that makes me realize I need to make a change to the assessment criteria. Now I have at least three places where I need to make that change. And the next time I teach this class, I have to figure out whether I made the change in all three places, or whether I need to find the one that has the corrected version. Wouldn't it be better to have each piece of content live in just one place and then be able to use it in whatever format I need?
• Documents encourage us to focus on presentation instead of content. Microsoft Word lets us tinker with formatting until our fingertips bleed. But as any teacher knows, spending too much time adjusting font sizes can get in the way of developing ideas and reasoning. But that formatting doesn't really help prepare most teaching materials. Lecture notes are usually delivered orally and online materials are formatted by the LMS.

The solution: Think topics instead of documents

There is a much easier way to manage content, and it comes from the world of technical writing. If we just stop thinking in documents and start thinking in topics, we can make it easier to find individual ideas across all of our teaching materials, share those ideas consistently in multiple arrangements and formats, and focus on the content rather than the formatting of our teaching materials.

Searching for a specific term across all your teaching materials is fast and easy in Sheetbend

There are lots of existing technical writing tools that solve this problem. But to be honest, I find them overly complex and difficult to use and far too expensive for educators. That's why I built Sheetbend. Sheetbend makes it incredibly easy to turn your existing documents into topics. It also lets you search all of your existing topics at once, arrange and rearrange them for different output formats, and focus more on your ideas and less on how they are formatted.

Benefits of Topics

Taking a topic-based approach to creating teaching materials will provide a wide range of benefits:

• Working with topics will save you time. When I first built Sheetbend and started using it for lecture prep, I was able to build a lecture from my existing topics in a matter of minutes, compared to the hour or two it would have taken me if I were digging through documents.
• Thinking in topics will save you mental energy. Instead of asking yourself questions like "Didn't I write this already?" and "When did we cover this last?" and opening endless documents looking for that one perfect lecture where you described a difficult concept just right, you can go straight to the topic you need, review and tweak as necessary, and move on to the interesting and rewarding work of getting ready to teach the subject that you are an expert at.
• Reusing content as topics will make your materials more consistent. When each topic exists in a single place, then making changes to that topic means that the changes will show up everywhere it is used. So the phrase that you change in an assignment prompt can easily be pushed to your lecture printout, the PowerPoint, and the LMS version of the assignment.

Try it out for free

Interested in whether a topic-based approach to teaching materials would work for you? Sign up for a free account and see for yourself. Free accounts give you up to 50 free topics. If you need more than that, or if you want to save your topics to a folder on your computer rather than in your browser's storage you can upgrade to a paid account.