How long should be spent planning

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If there’s centralised resources. How long should I be spending. Today I spent day 30 m on a lesson. I think in order to be more efficient I need to reduce it I just don’t have loads of ideas on how to ywt. Any ideas? I’m also an nqt

Also an NQT who has spent pretty much all weekend planning. So no answers but following for ideas.
Am completely shattered now and it's Monday again soon

Hey. I know the feeling:( I’ve only got 1 day ahead and it’s taken me nearly all day had yesterday as a rest day because if I can’t find a balance now I will never find one. I just really needed yesterday to be able to start myself off. Hope your Monday goes wrll

Centralised resources are great and it does get quicker with experience. But I can still spend more than 30 minutes on a lesson depending on what it is I'm teaching, conversely some lessons I can sort out in 5 minutes.

I suppose the first thing to consider is what are you actually doing during the planning time? (Are you making resources? Coming up with questions? Etc) If you can work that out then you can think about what was useful and what was unnecessary.

Totally depends. Sometimes can pull a lesson together in my head in 5 mins without writing anything down and deliver it 5 minutes later. Sometimes I spend an hour or so thinking about a lesson before I even start on resourcing it, or producing something for the children to look at. If there are centralised resources, I want to spend time resourcing for specific children. Well, I don't want to, but I have to.

At the beginning I found it was an hour to plan an hour though. I don't think anyone outside of teaching understands the time involved.

If you have centralised schemes of work and resources, you should be able to just tweak them to suit your class. We're expected to teach exactly what's there (however terrible)
Don't spend time making things pretty or making powerpoints which could just be questions on the board.
Do spend time planning your differntiation.

Thank you guys that’s helpful. Slowly I’m learning haha. It feels like a huge learning curve

Well, of course it is, you don't learn anything about the real job of teaching until you have to do it day on day!
Don't beat yourself up so much😁

This is my 7th year teaching and I still struggle with managing it. To be honest the lesson plan itself doesn't take too long. It's the resources! I work in an inclusive school with many SEN students so the differentiation takes alot of time and also making the material am using whether tweaked or scratched is accessible for all.

Exactly the same as Rule.

After 20 years I can still spend far too long on a lesson or come up with a smasher 2 mins before it starts. But it's Sen and every cohort are entirely different. I have to really think about what's going to pull them in with the cohorts I have this year. And it takes a lot of thinking and then making or gathering specific resources.

I'm part time but have my youngest in an extra day at nursery in order to ring fence that time.

Today I had to jump in when someone left totally unsuitable cover and it was fine, no prep at all, and no IT as I couldn't get the PC to log me into the system.

On the other hand I've spent hours adapting lessons for them to fall completely flat.

You also need to get a handle on exactly how much differentiation you need to do, if you look at our system I'd need about 10 versions of each worksheet on various colours in various fonts, but in reality that's out of date, and actually even the visually impaired pupil can now see most things with their glasses on, so don't waste time on that unless it's really needed. On the other hand, I find task management boards do help for longer tasks for the ones with poor memory for verbal instruction, so those are worth doing.