The work that teachers do is incredible and so important. One project or discussion could be what opens the door to broader understanding or passing a developmental milestone for a child. And yet all that lesson planning and assessment review could put undue strain on a teacher to where they find themselves lesson planning in the evenings or on weekends.
Improving teachers’ daily productivity and efficiency can help make their jobs more rewarding and prevent burnout and unnecessary turnover within a childcare center. Here are eight tips for ensuring teachers have a great school year.
- Keep Assessments Simple
You’re working with young children, so nothing needs to be elaborate to understand how children are learning and developing.
Your goal is to demonstrate that a child is learning and on track with their peers. Use games and activities to assess a student’s education and track achievements in the iCare Software Journal. Teachers can complete batch updates for all students in the class who have accomplished that milestone. This helps speed up the assessment tracking.
Input your state’s developmental milestone tracking to make things simple for teachers so they don’t have to do any typing and can use the simple drop-down menu.
- Complete Lesson Planning
Knowing what you’ll be teaching in advance can help teachers prepare for the day or week ahead. Logging into the childcare app to review what’s coming up can help teachers better understand what to expect and how to prepare for it. That improves their classroom efficiency and gives them more time to focus on their students.
Don’t forget to leave room for children to choose their activities during lesson planning. You don’t want too much structure where the child’s developing mind has no room for making selections.
- Provide a Foundation for Work-life Balance
Expecting too much from teachers can lead to burnout because they must log on from home to complete planning and organization. Providing fast and simple access to information is the best way to ensure teachers have a work-life balance.
Allow teachers to sign in to your childcare management app to review calendars, events, and enrollment to prepare. But keep it structured and organized so that teachers don’t spend long preparing and can get back to relaxing and enjoying their free time.
- Make Attendance Tracking Simple
Although attendance tracking is essential to power accurate billing and information, it’s also a huge time suck for teachers and can lower their overall productivity. The right daycare app makes attendance tracking fast with drop-down menus and checkboxes.
And with a parent app, attendance can be incredibly simple for parents and teachers by putting it all on the parent’s smartphone with geo alerts to check in or out once a parent is on the property.
- Check in with Teachers
You won’t know if a teacher is struggling with some aspect of their work unless you ask them and provide them with a platform for sharing their thoughts and opinions. Set up regular check-ins and listen carefully to what your teachers are saying. It could be that they need additional training with your school’s technology to improve efficiency and understand the tools available to them. Or it could be that you aren’t maximizing those tools and need to find better ways to use the software and apps available.
- Give Teachers a Supply Budget
To engage students fully, teachers need a small supply budget for activities and supplies to make lesson plans come to life. Teachers who have no budget might need to collect supplies through various means or even purchase them using their hard-earned salary. This isn’t good for morale or for offering teachers the greatest productivity and efficiency tools.
Teachers can use childcare center communication software to message administrators about supply needs to prepare for future lesson plans. Or input reimbursement requests for materials they’ve purchased to support classroom activities.
- Give Teachers Time to Network
Early childhood education can be isolating. Each teacher stays in their classroom throughout the day and educates their cohort of young children. There is little opportunity for the teachers to mingle and learn from one another.
To reduce that feeling of isolation, ensure teachers have time to network with one another and learn from best practices that others are engaging in. Spending valuable time with coworkers can help give teachers a sense of belonging and purpose.
- Invest in Professional Development Opportunities
Get teachers out of the classrooms and into training seminars and workshops. While your budgets might be tight and have limited room for such opportunities, it’s an investment worth making. And you’ll be surprised at how having the best teachers can bolster enrollment and create the foundation for becoming a leading preschool in your area.
Childcare Software for Teacher Productivity and Efficiency
Childcare software is the best tool you can provide your teachers to increase their productivity and efficiency. From parent-teacher communication to lesson planning and developmental milestone tracking, the right technology can make all the difference in attracting and retaining top talent.
Schedule a demo of iCare Software to put your teachers on the road to success this school year.