Join us for a FREE live event: The 40 Hour Teacher Teacher Workweek Online Summit

The first virtual event entirely focused on saving teachers TIME! And the best part? It’s totally FREE!

The 40 Hour Teacher Workweek program is an online course first created in 2015 (with a total update in 2020), and we’ve now had tens of thousands of teachers complete the course.

With so many different personality types and teaching contexts, the amount of new ideas to spring out of the course was inevitable. I’ve always been impressed by the tweaks, offshoots, extensions, and transformations teachers have done as they’d made my ideas their own.

And now, I’ve finally got an awesome way to feature them and share their phenomenal work!

In the 40 Hour Teacher Workweek Online Summit this April:

• 30+ presentations are included
• Opening and closing keynotes by 40 Hour founder Angela Watson
• All session presenters are current K-12 classroom teachers + 40 Hour members
• No fluff, filler, icebreakers, or pitches: each session is just 15-20 minutes long
• Chat with other teachers during the live sessions to get personalized advice

This event is entirely online, completely FREE, and beneficial for all K-12 teachers!

Some of our presenters will take you on a video tour of their classrooms to share organizational tips and classroom routines. Other presenters will screen share their way through tutorials of how they organize digital files, save links, manage assessment, or plan lessons. Still others will give a fast rundown of all their best timesaving tips for grading, differentiation, email, and more.

You can join us LIVE for FREE in April:

If you can’t attend live or the event has already passed by the time you see this, you can purchase a forever-access pass to all the sessions, both elementary and secondary, and get time-stamped transcripts, notetaking guides, and all the presentation links in one document so that you can reference them easily. Forever-access is $19.

If you can’t attend a session or want to watch and rewatch at your convenience, the Forever Access Pass will get you the recordings, plus a notetaking guide, summary of key ideas for each session, full time-stamped transcripts, and special bonuses. It’s just $19 right now (the price will increase once the event begins).

Questions? Check out the FAQ here,

Please share this free event widely with teacher friends and colleagues!

Just send folks to join.40htw.com/summit.

Audio announcement transcript

Hey there, it’s Angela. I just wanted to make a quick announcement to make sure that you didn’t miss the 40 Hour Teacher Workweek online summit that’s happening in April. I’ve mentioned it in the most recent podcast episode, and it will be in an upcoming episode as well. But if you don’t listen to those, I want to make sure that you see this announcement, so that you can take part. Here’s what’s going on.

Last year in 2023, in the summer, I hosted the very first 40 Hour Teacher Workweek Online Summit. This is the only free event that is focused entirely on saving teachers time and helping you do your job more effectively and efficiently. So last summer we had over 10,000 teachers attend, and got so much positive feedback. In large part, because every single one of our presenters is a current K-12 classroom teacher, sharing exactly what works with their students and their current workload. All of the presenters are also from our 40 Hour Teacher Workweek community.

By this point, we’ve had around 60,000 teachers go through the 40 Hour Program, and they are now applying to present in the summit to share how they have streamlined their work. So that they have been through this training, they know how to apply these principles that I’ve taught them, and now they’re sharing exactly what it looks like in all these different teaching contexts: different grade levels, different subject areas, different counties, states, cities, countries, all around the world. So if you attended this last year, I think you’ll find that a lot of the the formatting is similar to what you’ve seen before. Right?

So we’re still doing teacher-led sessions that are just 15 to 20 minutes long. We’re still going to do them with a live chat so that you can interact. The presentations themselves are prerecorded and submitted to me. There’s no way I would take a chance with having 30-some people being able to go live. I mean, you all know what the technology glitches are like.

So they record their presentations, send them to me in advance, so I can check to make sure the audio is clear, there’s no glitches. We have all the links to their handouts and their templates and that sort of thing. But a lot of times the presenters are live in the comments, which is really cool because that means they can answer your questions. So if there’s something that, you know, you hear in the presentation, you’re like, wait, I want to hear more about how that works.

The presenter is there to respond to you in the chat. So that’s a pretty cool feature that we had last year that we’re going to keep. What’s different this year is that I’m splitting this into an Elementary Summit and a Secondary Summit. There’s still quite a bit of crossover. I think there’s a lot of value in the Elementary sessions for secondary and vice versa.

A lot of this content still to me seems like it could be K-8, K-12, 5-12, etc. But I did want to separate them just to make sure that you’re not having to watch anything that is not particularly relevant to you. So the schedule is already released, you can see exactly what’s happening, and a new session starts every 30 minutes, from 10 AM to 5 PM on Saturday. So we’ve got a session at 10, 10:30, 11, 11:30, and so on. And what I like about this format and what I heard is really good feedback on the last time that we did it like this, was that this is bite-sized chunks so you don’t get overwhelmed, like, if you were listening to an hour-long presentation or, you know, a full day of hour-long presentations.

And you get these 10 to 15-minute breaks in between sessions. So, you know, you can go change out your load of laundry, fix yourself a snack, whatever it is that you need to do, during that time. A lot of people also use those breaks between sessions to reflect. They fill out the note-taking guides, they plan out any ideas they want to implement. So if you don’t want those breaks, you can actually use them, to think about how you want to utilize what you’ve just learned, and then prepare mentally for what’s coming up next to start looking at their handouts and their templates and everything.

So it’s designed to be not overwhelming. And, one of the things that I really like about the change in the format this year, in doing an elementary summit and a secondary summit, is that the sessions will be running on a Saturday from 10-5 EST. So that would be 7-2, if you’re on Pacific Time. Here’s a timezone converter for quick reference.

And then what I’m going to do is a kickoff keynote on Friday night before the summit begins.I’ll spend about an hour and do a deep dive into some really powerful topics. We’ll be talking about AI. We’re going to be talking about the future of education, trends, all kinds of very interesting topics, and they’re going to be different for elementary, with some of them for the secondary summit. So I’ll have my keynote kickoffs on Friday night, and then the sessions will run throughout the day on Saturday from 10 to 5.

And, again, if you can’t attend live, or if the event has already passed by the time you listen to this, you can purchase forever access to all the sessions. You’ll get everything, plus the transcripts, note-taking guides, all the presentation links in one document, so you can reference them easily. And that is just $19. So, I really hope that you will sign up for this. I hope you will show up, interact in the chat, share ideas with other teachers.

This is such a positive community. It’s a place where with all of the bad press about teaching and how it seems like everyone’s quitting and everyone’s unhappy and everyone’s burning out — this is a place to find the folks who have made it work, who have said, No, this career is still for me. I still want to do this a while longer or I need to do this a while longer. This is my best career option and I am going to make the best of this. I am going to do what I can to love my work, enjoy my work, and make sure that I am setting boundaries. That I’m not letting this job consume my entire life. I’m going to maximize my contractual work hours, so that I’m not spending my evenings and weekends working endlessly for free. And that really is the focus here.

And what we continually find in the 40 Hour community is that there is an overlap between what is best for teachers and what is best for kids. Often the needs of teachers and kids are pitted against each other. Right? Like if we’re prioritizing kids, then teachers just need to sacrifice and do whatever it takes and work 90-hour weeks if they have to, you know? Or it’s what’s best for teachers, we just assume it must be bad for kids, that it’s taking the easy way out and kids are going to get short changed. And that simply isn’t true.

There is an overlap, and we can find what’s best for teachers and what’s best for kids. And that’s really what 40 Hour is all about. So I invite you to our 40 Hour Teacher Workweek Online Summit happening in April 2024.

Come and hear what is working for teachers. And I guarantee you will leave feeling energized, feeling inspired, feeling like you are not alone in the problems you’re facing, and most importantly, feeling like there are solutions. There are ways to make this teaching job sustainable. So join us in April, or go to 40htw.com, and you will be able to sign up for the free event.