What to Do When You Have a Sub

Is there anything harder than missing a day of work when you’re a teacher? Trying to explain to a stranger the intricacies of taking attendance in Synergy, who’s supposed to sit where, what students are supposed to be working on, what announcements to make, and instilling just enough sage advice to keep the chaos at a minimum is not an easy feat! And if you’re all in with EFFL, knowing what to give a sub can be even more of a challenge. Today we want to give you three options you might consider for the next time you can’t be at school. These options take into consideration if your absence is planned or unplanned and if your schedule demands that you continue with a new lesson or if you have room for a practice day. Let’s get started.

1. If you still want students to complete an EFFL lesson

Sometimes you still need students to complete an EFFL lesson even when you aren’t there. To help this go well, you’ll want to prep students on the day before your absence (if possible) by telling them they’ll go through the same routine as usual. (Yes class, you’ll still be learning even if there’s a sub!)

The easiest way to do this is to use the Math Medic video subscription and have one of our expert teachers take your class through the activity. The video will introduce the lesson, then prompt the sub to pause the video so that students can work through the Activity in small groups. If you want, you can give the sub some loose instructions about how students should be working in their normal groups of size 3-4, and that they should pick a reader, and use the read-discuss-write protocol. When students are finished with the front page, simply unpause the video so students can watch the debrief and add margin notes to their Activity. After recording the QuickNotes with the video, the video will prompt the sub to pause the video so students can work on the Check Your Understanding (CYU). Once students are done, the sub can play the rest of the video that goes over the answers to the CYU. 

If you don’t have a video subscription, you could pre-record a video of yourself doing the debrief and have the sub play it. This of course only works if you know ahead of time that you will be gone. Otherwise, you could have the sub put up the answer key and have him/her go through the margin notes (everything in red) with the class. I usually opted to have a student do this instead, since I was not sure what a sub’s comfort level will be with the content. When I knew I would be out, I would on the previous day ask 1-2 student volunteers in each period to stay after class for a few minutes so I could explain the next day’s margin notes to them. Then those students would “teach” the class the next day. Things didn’t always go perfectly, of course,  but it gave them a good start and really empowered them to take ownership of their learning. 

2. If you want students to have a practice day

If you have a subscription to the assessment platform you could quickly make a review assignment using the assessment builder. Simply use the filter to select all the lessons you’ve done so far in the unit or even previous units if you want to offer some spiraled review. 

For some added fun AND accountability, you could make one assignment with only basic questions, one with only intermediate questions, and one with only advanced questions, then title them “mild”, “medium”, and “spicy”. Assign 1, 2, and 3 chili peppers to each question, respectively. Tell the students they have to have earned 15 chili peppers by the time you return (or 20, or whatever sounds reasonable to you).

You can quickly print the answer key if you want students to be able to check their work, but consider leaving those with the sub and having students come up to see it when the sub has verified that they made a good faith effort on the problems.

3. If you have a last minute absence and have less than 5 minutes to prep

Have a colleague print off one of these 10 math tasks and have students work in groups to solve the puzzle. This is a good opportunity to use non-permanent vertical surfaces if you have them. For accountability, have students turn in the page at the end of the hour or submit a photo of their work on the boards (and post to Google classroom, or your school’s LMS).

While the content may not be directly related to what students are currently learning, all of these tasks feature at least one of the mathematical practices, making it a worthwhile activity for any point in the year.