Lesson Planning

There are lots of ways to lesson plan. In school, I was given a 5-page outline and given instructions to make it longer. Each daily lesson would end up being 7-12 pages long. This is a ridiculous amount of time to spend on a single lesson. I understand that it helped teach that you should plan every bit of your lesson, but it also set a precedent of how lesson planning should be as you are actively teaching. Some people believe every lesson should be a 5 E lesson, but I think 5E lessons are lacking in many ways, and doing one every day is too difficult to do with fidelity for many reasons.

After teaching for so long and in as many different schools I have worked, and talking to teachers at many other schools, I can say most schools do not require daily lesson plans with one exception. Evaluations and observations, usually need a formal lesson plan. What that lesson plan looks like depends on your district and specific administrator. I worked for the same school for 5 years, and in that time had 4 different administrators doing my evaluations. They each required different things for lesson plans, and when it is time for this, I recommend talking to peers to see what they submitted and asking your administrator what they would like to see.

One year, one of my goals was intentionality. I wanted everything I did in class to have a purpose and be intentional from lesson planning and assessments to lectures and activities. I wanted everything to connect and have a purpose. This helped me envision my practice as a whole and how I truly want my lessons and units to look.

Often what schools teach and administrators want is thorough in certain aspects and completely lacking in others. But a successful teacher needs a plan; otherwise, you run out of things to do and students can get "restless". It can also be challenging to know how to plan for certain aspects like authentic student choice, and individualized education or topics.

Here are some tips and examples of how to prepare units and lessons, and what planning that's helpful should look like.

Develop a list of everything you want in a unit. Do you want vocabulary and reading? What types of assessments do you want, and how many? Do you want a career focus and/or anti-racist education? Traditional science classes focus on experimental design and interpreting results, but not all units have experiments that are easily understood or directly connected to topics. Worse many experiments are very reliant on students following precise directions, which can give wildly different results and interpretations. Some units or school teams have a focus on math, graphs, or making models. Using this you can ensure you are meeting that focus and allows you to set up routines so that every unit looks similar and students know what to expect. This can also streamline your planning, and allow you to plan multiple days or weeks in advance.
Look at the standards and decide which connects to overarching units. For example in Earth Science NGSS has provided one connection of four different standards as Space Systems. I also have a few others that I like to use, like Climate Change or Weather. These connect a few different standards.
(Optional) Research jobs that are associated with each unit and are easily understandable by you and the student. These jobs do not have to be scientists, but not all jobs in the science fields are scientists. You can be creative and bring your knowledge into the classroom. Maybe you can knit, make jewelry, know mechanics, carpentry, acrylic nails, publishing, graphic design, or engineering. These are ways that science affects us in our daily lives and people make careers out in very unexpected ways. If you are choosing this option divide the careers into two groups. Ones that have a specific outcome, and those that have student choice. A job like a satellite imagery specialist or meteorologist does not have much choice in content, but jobs like teacher or scientist have an unlimited amount of student choice.
Once you have your topics and optional careers, ask the students what they are interested in. Some jobs have very specific outcomes and others can offer a wide variety of choices. Allow students who want structure and definition in their learning to have it, while allowing those who need choice and their understanding as well. Group the students that choose individualized topics and ask them what they would want to know about that topic and brainstorm long lists of questions. You may have to have some examples but make sure to include them all in the list no matter what.
On your own reduce the list to questions that connect to standards and make sure each job connects. This may mean one class of students are all learning different standards, but that's OK.
Then develop your units, or leftover units, based on these questions.
Identify a main project based on these questions. If you are doing a career focus, then the final project should be common for that career to do daily. Maybe it is showing the results of an experiment and writing an official report. Maybe it is teaching a lesson or presenting the weather. If you are not doing a career focus, then you can identify a project you are comfortable with allowing them to do or check out my alternative assessments page and develop a small focused list of projects the students can do that connects with the unit.
Now comes the part many people are more familiar with, like vocabulary and initial exit tickets. Decide what students need to know to complete the project. Divide these up into Depth of Knowledge categories and match them with assessments and other parts of your unit that you have already decided on. This will help you decide what each activity should look like and what the assessment should cover. I encourage using things like reading, listening, and speaking as part of your assessments. Vocabulary should be broken into everyday words, academic words, and high-level content words. All assessments should be tiered so that you can evaluate where a student is in their learning. In science specific assessments should also be focused around that specific standards Cross Cutting idea while evaluating their knowledge about the Disciplinary Core Idea.
Then put the assignments in order of how students should complete them. The assignments should start easy with questions about what students currently think about their chosen topic, and as long as students have an authentic answer, then it does not matter if that answer is incorrect or if they have a specific opinion. The point should be to pre-assess. The students should also come back to this and evaluate this idea. A simple I thought, but now I think... because I know..... can work, or it can be much more in-depth into cognitive learning. The assignments should increase in difficulty from learning about a topic to doing an activity with the knowledge gained. The final assignment can be a culmination and showcase of the project/activity/experiment/creation of a student to explain to other students. I also make students write a final report about their lessons as part of their summative assessment.

At this point, you have only designed the overarching unit and described what lessons/activities the students should do. Daily lesson plans for me look a little different because I operate an individualized classroom with individually chosen topics. My students come into the classroom and work without the need for me to tell them what to do. Writing one daily lesson plan for all students is difficult. I allow the activities I set up to be the lesson plans for the day. I say today we are going to work on tasks 1-3 or you should be finished with task number 5 by the end of today. Some students will already be on task 7 or 8 but that's ok. Those students may get stuck on those numbers because they are more difficult, or choose to take a day off, and that's ok too. As the teacher, I can set the pace for where students should be, and give deadlines to keep students on track. I will usually write a schedule and post it to the class, so everyone can see when due dates are coming. When students are finished with the day's learning, then tomorrow they can pick it up in the same place and continue working.

My real daily lessons are the activities I choose, so I develop readings and worksheets, and activities around each. Students may work 1 day on vocabulary, and 2 days on reading/notes, and 5 days on their final project. When writing traditional lesson plans there was always a timeframe section, and it's okay to spend 1 or 2 weeks on a specific project. Develop each assignment with a combination of what you want the students to truly understand about the content and beyond the content, as well as parts of the standard that apply to that section. For science projects, make sure you write detailed directions and rubrics that are easy to understand and combine Science and Engineering Practices with Disciplinary Core Ideas. Any formative assessment that is not the project should be guided by the Disciplinary Core Idea and use language from the crosscutting concept.
Once you have your assignments made, look at each and one and use it as the highest-tiered assignment or an assignment that has no support. You need 2 or 3 other versions depending on your students. Add in supports needed in this assignment, one version may need a high level of language supports or maybe a medium level of language supports. Students may need high levels of visual, or more in-depth directions. You can also add in things like STOP! in the shape of a stop sign to get students' attention and have them check in with you. In professional development, we get overwhelmed with support recommendations and options. I recommend choosing the ones that work for you and sticking with those. Students' learning needs can be varied but you can be creative when you are individualizing content in this way.
If you need to write goals on your board daily as part of school protocol, write vague ones that are easily applicable to all students, like Students will be able to understand necessary vocabulary by completing their worksheets, or students will be able to create a project based on prior learning. Make sure students know where those are posted, so if asked they can point to them or look and read them. Their true goals are embedded in the activities they are completing at the time, which you already laid out and numbered, and should be available for them however you present your information. I use hyperlinked spreadsheets, but posting them on their notebooks, or worksheets is also great.
I was also made to do daily bell work assignments, but that doesn't work out for how I run my class. It doesn't make sense for students in the middle of a project or starting their work by themselves to stop and answer some random question that may not apply to their chosen learning. What I did was ask them classroom culture-building questions that make them reflect on their own lives, think about the future, and listen to what others think or have experienced. Some of my questions are like, How much money would you lend a relative or friend or in-law? How important is it to vote? What would you do if you had a kid and it made a mess in the kitchen or had a certain experience at school? These questions can give a lot of insight into who students are and what they have experienced. It also is amazing at building classroom culture, just be clear about routines you want to set in place.
If you decide to do specific assignments and you find it is not taking the entire period, then it is a good time for questions like the ones above or other community-building activities. Students should have fun in your class. You can also pull a page out of some major companies that are doing things differently, and allow this time to be free experiment or research time to work on anything the students want. All classes have free time no matter how dedicated teachers are to filling every minute from bell to bell. What is important to keep in mind is that you don't need to over plan some activities to make sure, because then you will just be constantly behind. Instead, plan activities that can be used that will be a 5-minute activity or 10 minute and in that time students should have fun, and not try to learn new things. You could have students pass a beach ball around saying their vocabulary word when they hit it, talk about the latest science news, or promote a little-known scientist who is a woman or person of color. Talk about a debate topic that is recently going around. I one time filled 20 minutes with a debate about fish being wet, and what an effect of the observer is. This heated debate wasn't about the lessons they learned that day but was about evaluating science in a way that applies to all. These kinds of things are much better for them, the classroom as a community, and look better if an administrator walks in for a surprise observation. Do this even if it's just a couple of students who are finished if you have time. This can build relationships and again it looks like your high quality teaching while having fun, because it is.

The most important thing is Tip #1. Once you have decided everything you want to do in a unit, then you can stop the day-to-day lesson planning and ensure cohesiveness in your units. Evaluating, discussing, and breaking down any specific standard is relatively easy, but deciding how that standard connects to everyday lives and is important, can be extremely difficult. Following these tips can help. Lifting the burden of planning lessons everyday or couple of days was an extreme stress relief and allowed me the free time to do other things. Remember, in an individualized classroom not everyone will be learning the same things on the same day, so ask your administrator what things they would like to see in a daily lesson plan and make sure that you can write something that meets their wants, or ask them if you could show them how you lesson plan and use that as evidence.

Feel free to ask me more questions, my email is at the bottom of the home page.