Planning for a Long Absence: Leave, Surgery and Extended Time Away

A single sick day and a three week absence are different problems, and treating the second like a longer version of the first is where extended leave plans go wrong. One day needs a lesson. Three weeks needs a system, because the person covering your room has to make hundreds of small decisions you will not be there for.

Whether it is surgery, parental leave, a family situation or anything else, the goal is the same: leave, and actually be gone. Here is what that takes.

Pick a unit that survives being taught by someone else

The instinct is to hand over your best unit so students do not miss it. Do the opposite. Your best unit is usually the one that depends most on you, on the questions you ask and the tangents you take, and it will not survive the handover. Save it.

What you want for an extended absence is a sequence of self contained lessons that share a structure. Ten research and group project lessons that all run the same way are far more teachable by a long term substitute than ten different lesson formats, because after two days the substitute knows the routine and so do the students. The content varies. The mechanics do not.

This is the single biggest lever. A repeating structure means the substitute is only learning your room once.

Write the sequence, dated

Not a folder of lessons, a calendar. Every day of your absence gets a date, a lesson and a one line objective. Include the days you expect to lose to assemblies and testing, and mark them, because a substitute who does not know about the Wednesday schedule will burn a lesson on a twenty minute period.

Build slack into it. If you are gone fifteen days, plan twelve lessons and mark three as catch up days. Something will run long, and a plan with no slack forces the substitute to either skip or improvise, and they will skip.

Decide grading before you leave

This is the part most people leave undecided and it causes the most trouble. Someone has to enter grades while you are gone, or nobody does and you return to three weeks of ungraded work plus your normal load.

Make it explicit. Which assignments get graded during the absence, on what scale, by whom. If the substitute is grading, leave a rubric so simple it cannot be misread: a three point scale with a sentence describing each point beats a detailed rubric that requires your judgment. If you are grading on return, say so and tell the substitute exactly how to store and label the work so that a stack of three hundred pages arrives sorted by class and date rather than in the order it was collected.

The handover document

Two pages, no more, written for someone who will be in your room for weeks rather than hours.

• The routine. What happens in the first five minutes of every period, every day. This is the thing that keeps the room stable and it should never change while you are gone.
• The seating and the reasons. For a long absence this matters. Note the pairs that should not be moved together, without editorializing.
• Who to ask. Two colleagues by name for content questions, one for building questions, one for technology. Tell those colleagues you have named them.
• What needs a decision from you. Be honest and be narrow. Most things do not. Name the two or three that do, and say how to reach you for those and only those.
• The families. Who is handling parent contact while you are out. If it is not you, say so clearly, including to the families themselves before you leave.

Tell the students the plan

Before you go, spend ten minutes in each class explaining the shape of the absence: how long, what they will be working on, how it will be graded, and that the work counts. Students behave differently for a substitute when they understand the structure is yours and it continues in your absence.

Skipping this step is the most common mistake, and it is usually skipped because the last days before a leave are chaotic. Put it on the calendar as a task, because ten minutes here saves the substitute a week of establishing authority from nothing.

Plan the return

Your first day back should not be a new unit. Leave yourself a landing day: collect, sort, look at what actually happened, and talk to your classes about it. If you plan to start something ambitious on day one you will spend that day doing three weeks of triage instead, and doing it badly.

The measure of a good extended absence plan is not that everything went perfectly. It is that you did not work through your leave, and that the work waiting for you on return is a normal amount. That is achievable, and it is decided almost entirely by what you set up before you left.