Lesson planning can be overwhelming for all teachers, especially the newest members of our profession. There are a wealth of resources available to teachers through the Internet, and choosing from them has become a bigger part of lesson planning than at other points in history when teachers were limited to materials on their bookshelves. That's good news and bad news—it encourages collegial sharing and increases the amount of freely available, high-quality materials, but it also makes planning harder because there are more choices to make.
Two habits will make lesson planning smoother for new teachers. First, instead of jumping into planning activities, spend time deeply studying the content you will be teaching. This will help you thoughtfully and strategically navigate the vast landscape of online resources and materials. Next, draw on the expertise across or down the hall to troubleshoot and polish your plans. Collaborating with colleagues on lesson ideas makes planning an iterative process based on revision and improvement, which leads to better student outcomes.
Here are some common lesson planning sticking points to consider. Being wary of potential pitfalls associated with these items will sharpen your mathematics and literacy lessons.
Math Lesson Planning Tips
Choose materials and resources appropriately. Sometimes an activity, problem, or approach looks familiar and you think you know how it will play out in the classroom. Always work completely through a task or problem before using it with students to make sure it aligns with the learning standard or goal.
Draft learning goals. Write a learning goal that clarifies what students should understand by the end of the lesson. "Adding fractions" isn't a learning goal, but "Understand that to add fractions, you need to add same-size pieces" makes it clear that students will learn about the importance of common denominators when adding fractions.
Anticipate student responses. You might think it's not possible to know what students will do before you ask them to do it. But teachers do have some idea based on their experience with the grade level or information from a colleague who has previously had the student. Try to predict what students might do correctly and incorrectly. This helps immensely as you watch students work and hear their questions during a lesson. Every time you introduce a lesson, you learn more about what students will do and can add that to your classroom plan for how you address misconceptions or provide extensions for students who quickly acquire new knowledge or skills
Prepare questions. Similar to anticipating student responses, you can also prepare questions for the class. For example, LearnZillion's lesson plans include questions you might ask during the lesson, but there may be other questions worth adding that are more relevant to the students in a specific classroom. Preparing questions in advance can help prevent you from thinking the lesson was a success just because all students can "do" something correctly. Ask students "why" and "what if" questions to ensure they understand the content. To continue the adding fractions example, you might ask a simple question such as, "Why do you need to rewrite the fractions with common denominators?" Many students will say something like, "Because otherwise, I would get the wrong answer," when you want to hear them say, "Because I need to make same-size pieces so that I can add the fractions together."
Write and practice the ideal closing. This may sound too prescriptive, but it's really important and helpful. Although you may not say exactly what you wrote, it's important to think about what you will say if the lesson goes as planned. What are the last words about this concept that you want students to hear when the lesson ends? Write it down and say it aloud to make sure it's clear and understandable. The secret here is that your closing or summary statement should include almost the same language as your learning goal. After all, that's what you stated that students should learn as a result of this lesson.
Make a one pager of the plan. Condense a more extensive plan into one page with anticipated responses, questions to ask, reminders for yourself, and the ideal closing. Carry this around on a clipboard during the lesson and make notes. You can easily forget even surprising or exciting questions, comments, and strategies from students before you have a chance to reflect on the lesson later in the day.
Reading Lesson Planning Tips
Select the right text. Choosing the right text or texts to anchor a lesson or unit is critical! Sometimes teachers skip this step or just rely on the same texts they've always used. That's understandable, but it's important that reading, annotating, and applying text-analysis tools happens before planning lessons and units. Preplanning has several major benefits. First, it allows you to fully understand the complexities and anticipate the challenging parts of the text. It also gives you an opportunity to go through the process of reading and analyzing the text in a way that mirrors what you expect of students.
Prepare high-quality questions in advance. It's hard to come up with worthwhile questions that drive students back into the text on the fly. The most successful lessons are ones where teachers have preplanned a series of text dependent questions that create a pathway connecting students to the text's big takeaways. Text-dependent questions help build student word and world knowledge, which will support students' abilities to independently tackle similarly complex texts.
Answer your own questions. Make sure that you've anticipated what a grade level response to your text dependent question looks like. If you haven't written appropriate student responses to your questions before you ask them, you won't know what you're looking or listening for and are more likely to be caught off guard by what students actually say (which might mean missing an opportunity to leverage a teachable moment).
As you incorporate these tips into your daily planning routine, they will become part of your muscle memory as a teacher, helping you to successfully navigate the challenges of classroom lesson planning.