Having worked as a resource teacher in an elementary school, I know the agony of creating a schedule for your students with a pull-out model. I hear this from many resource teachers, and it seems to be a grueling task at the beginning of every school year. 

Though it is daunting, creating a schedule is easier and more effective when you list all your student’s times. You’re creative and thorough. You set aside time for IEPs. You think of group setups and take on balanced loads. A well-established schedule allows you to have more meaningful, specially designed instruction sessions for students with disabilities. 

My experience creating a schedule as a resource teacher wasn’t easy either, and I broke it down into tasks to make the process worth the time I was putting into it. Here is an in-depth guide and some beneficial tips and things to consider when making your schedule:

Resource Teacher Scheduling Tip One: Make Lists

Make a list of all your students, their teacher, what subject, and the number of minutes per subject.

This list will help so much when you double-check your schedule. When I had one place for all this information, it saved me time during the process. It seems like a lengthy task to gather all this information on one document, but when I had this already completed, I had a quick reference as I checked my schedule. When I didn’t have this done, I spent a lot of time going back and forth through their online or physical files to double-check the service times for each student. If you are going to shortcut somewhere, this is really not an area to cut out.

Sticky Notes Simplify the Scheduling Process

Using the sticky note system to help you get started with your schedule. Once you have your list made with all your students and their service times, then transfer that information on a sticky note: include the student’s name, teacher, grade, and track time (in our district, we had an “A” and “B” where students came and left at different times).

The purpose of this is so you can move the note around as you create your schedule. Sticky notes replaced having to erase and recreate.

Pick a color for each subject (yellow for reading, blue for math, green for writing). Each note represents 30 minutes. So, if one of your students has an hour of reading, then you would create two notes for that subject for that student. Sticky notes give you so much flexibility as your schedule comes together. 

Times Resource Teachers Need to Consider

Find out when you have a para available in your classroom.

If you have a principal like I did, I was told when my para was available. Some teachers could let the principal know when they needed the para, but some do not.

When you have this information, you can plan those larger groups when you have another person to instruct.

One year, I had 18 fourth-grade students for math and you better believe I manipulated my schedule so that my para was available then. I had her instruct one group of 6 while I instructed the same thing with another group of 6, and then the rest of the 6 students came during the next class as I taught solo. Had I not scheduled that group of 12 when my para was there, I know that the instruction would not have been as effective as it was.

Remember to set time aside for lunch

It is so easy to fill in your time for lunch with another group – AVOID THIS! Of course, you have time to fit in another group during your lunch break, but this is imperative for you during the day. 

You need to give yourself a small break to eat and relax. Too often, I’ve seen resource teachers eating their sandwiches or gulping down a protein drink as they instruct a group of students. I’ve also been guilty of shoving food in my face as I am traveling to another school for the other half of the day. First, no one wants to watch you eat, and second, you need that time to give your brain time to relax. Your mental health is part of the balance you need to prevent burnout.

Resource Teacher Group Lengths

As a resource teacher, you need to figure out how long each group needs to be so that you can create those times in your schedule.

My groups were broken up into 40-minute intervals. To clarify, this did not mean that every student came for 40 minutes, but most did. Teaching time was based on the service times on their IEPs, and it worked well for me. I know that other teachers had times of 30-minute- or even 15-minute intervals. 

Find out when recess, lunch, and specialties are for each grade level/teacher 

This will help you decide when to have certain students come to your room. I tried to avoid pulling students away from any specialty times. Certain specialties, like PE, are illegal to have the students miss. 

It may also help you determine when you will take your lunch – for me, the natural lunch time was from 11:30 to 12:05 because all grade levels were unavailable until then. 

Consider other things, like if grade levels may have rotations with science or social studies. I did my best so that my students could take advantage of these opportunities.

Get your grade-level teacher’s schedules

I tried to avoid those times with my students, but it was kind of an impossible feat when I had students who would come into my classroom for 3 hours. 

Some things that I did to compromise this would be that if they were going to miss Library time, then I would have them go to the library with their class, and they would quickly check out a book and come back to my class. Another time, I couldn’t avoid rotation time for science with one of my first-grade students, so the teachers gave me the lessons. I used those lessons to help the student with reading comprehension based on the information being shared within the rotation with science.

With this in mind, don’t hesitate to ask a teacher if they can switch things around. One time, as I was putting the schedule together and looked at one of the teacher’s schedules, I noticed that her student would miss the mini-lesson for writing but would be there for a read-aloud. I asked her if she could swap those two times, and she willingly did that for me. That was not always the case, but it never hurts to ask.

Think Outside the Box

Don’t be afraid to be creative with all the schedules you have to work around. There are many ways to accomplish what you need; sometimes, it takes thinking outside the box to make this happen. As a resource teacher, creative problem-solving is your bread and butter.

One time, I had 2 students in a group of 5 whom I needed to come at 10:00. Three of the students could be there, but because this particular teacher had a different specialty schedule than the rest of that grade level, those 2 students would not be able to be there. I asked one of the other teachers in that grade level if those students could join their specialty class. It worked out great! 

Double Check Your Schedules

Check it twice! So, maybe this makes you feel like Santa Clause, but there are so many things that resource teachers have to keep track of, and it’s easy to overlook one tiny piece. 

Double-check with their gen ed teachers. I don’t know how many times I gave a final copy of a schedule for one of my students to the gen ed teacher, and she kindly reminded me that it was during the student’s recess – UGH! 

Build in time to write and hold IEPs 

This time is so important to have as a special education teacher. Giving yourself as little as 10 minutes each day will make a big difference in your organization with the students’ files and keeping up with writing IEPs.

I have looked at many schedules that teachers have shown me that did not include time for writing IEPs. Well, guess when they would have to write them – at home! I wrote a few IEPs at home during my first year, but I decided to stop this before it became a habit because I needed to have that mental break from work and focus on my family. It was vital for me to keep balance in my life, and it wasn’t worth it to infringe on my time with my children.

In the district we worked in, we decided that the best way to solve this was to have Mondays available for paperwork, progress monitoring, and holding and writing IEPs. Students came into our classroom for service time only if they were self-contained. Now, this was not “prep” time. This was a day jam-packed with data collection, meetings, and keeping up with goals.

Send the schedule to the student’s teacher and parents

Schedules should be sent out as soon as they are finalized. Remember that you would not send your entire schedule just for that student.

When I handed the gen ed teacher the schedule for their student(s), I also discussed creating a way to remind them to send the student. With me, I told the teacher that if the student had yet to arrive within the first 5 minutes, then I would call their classroom and let it ring once and hang up. That way, the teacher did not have to stop and answer the phone, and they knew that the student(s) had to get to my room quickly. 

The parents must know where their child is all day. I wanted to make sure they knew when the service times were happening. I also wanted them to know where their child was in case they needed to check them out from school.

How do you want to form groups

When making the groups, consider if you want to pair them by skill, grade level, or behavior. This is something for you to decide because it is a preference. If you group the students by skill level, then you can plan your lessons around the skill deficits that may be shared amongst almost all of the students. In our opinion, this would usually be the best way to create groups. 

With this in mind, you must also be sensitive to students who may be a grade or two above the other students in the group. That student may feel uncomfortable or hurt their confidence, so just be aware. The advantage of grouping students by grade level is that the students will probably all have the same schedule throughout the day, making your scheduling a little less complicated.

You have to consider putting a few students in a group that may have different skills or be in the same grade level as the rest of your students. For example, I had a student exhibiting problem behaviors within a group of students at his grade level. It was highly distracting, and he was clearly seeking their attention. I changed his group, so he was with students a couple of years older. This helped a ton to extinguish so many of the behavior concerns that I was having before.

Don’t Take on Too Much at Once

Ensure you don’t have too much going on at once because you never know what might happen. Think logically, if I have created 3 groups of students to come into my classroom at the same time and I’m all by myself, would that work? This does not seem reasonable. How would you provide effective, specially designed instruction if you spend your entire time ensuring that 3 different groups are on task? If you see this happening within your schedule, you may want to consider making some changes as soon as possible.

Preparation Paves the Path to Success

Now that you have our expert advice, creating your schedule will be a breeze, right? Well, it will still be a hefty task, but with all of these tips, you will find that these will help you make a stronger schedule and save you more time. Skipping some of these steps may cause the schedule creation drag on. Here’s an example:

I gave these same tips to a new teacher. She had decided that she wasn’t interested in these tips and proceeded to go through this process her own way by writing them in the schedule with pen, having several groups come in at the same time without para support, not writing down the student’s services and times and not getting schedules from teachers. Sadly, her schedule was changed several times in the year, and she found that some service times were incorrect and had to make up those times within those remaining months, creating a very long year!

Trust me, start on the right foot and be as prepared as possible for the school year. Putting forth all the work up front to start your schedule will make it a good one. You’ll have too many other things to work on throughout the year, and having a schedule that isn’t working will cause added stress. Another thing that may bring some comfort is that it usually does get easier from year to year, especially if you’re at the same school.