"Lesson" Planning Level 2: "What's the best way to teach this content, concept, or skill?"

After a few years in the classroom, you’ll find that you’re no longer struggling to know what tomorrow holds. You’ll probably have a few go-to lessons and tricks up your sleeve. You can probably name the units you teach and the order that you teach them, and know roughly how long each one takes, and what major project or assessment marks the summation. ​

A lot of teachers stop here, and live in level two their entire career, and honestly, it’s easy to understand why. Each year the calendar changes, making predicting the weeks before or after breaks difficult. State tests are always a factor. You’re never really sure what changes administration will try to enact, or what additional hoops you’ll have to jump through. Level two is comfortable.

Let’s use this blog post to answer two questions: why is level two so comfortable, and how do we blast out of that comfort zone to continue progressing down the path to planning greatness?

When you look at this image (or click to see the Slides presentation) you'll notice a level-two planning structure that I use. It's a week-long structure that we use three times during a single unit.

Why is level two so comfortable?

Level two has a stress-free planning timeline: 3-5 days, or in teaching, about a week. By this level you have some go-to lessons to fill the odd Friday for a class that’s a bit ahead, and plenty of online resources to search for enrichment materials if you need them. At this point, chances are most teachers have reached some semblance of a logical, planned progression, like “teach, practice, perform,” or any other logic-based teaching approach.

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Notice how the entire week fits together, and sometimes, a "lesson plan" encompasses multiple days? Classic level two planning from my Food Chains unit.

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A week is a comfortable time for which to plan: it’s punctuated by weekends, there’s a definitive beginning and end, and you never need to look too far to see the horizon. Each weekend, teachers at level two plan about a week’s worth of material, and ask themselves “what’s the best way to teach this content and skill this week?” They know what strategies seem to work, and which strategies don’t, and have some materials to draw on from years past to refine, or copy into a new year.

Teachers at level two can be heard in the faculty room talking about feeling “caught up,” with grading or even feeling calm because they had the time to “get ahead” with planning for a few days. It’s a great place to be after years of, “what am I doing tomorrow?!?!” ​

At this point in most teachers’ career, they’re still Google searching, looking into file cabinets and workbooks for materials, and frequenting Teachers Pay Teachers, but now they’re modifying and augmenting, and picking the best materials they find based on experience, not the first materials they find based on instinct. That change, in and of itself, reflects one of the main reasons why it’s so comfortable for teachers to maintain level two of lesson planning.

Students' standard of learning improves markedly as well at level two of lesson planning, because at this point they spend their time learning important content (not thrown together content,) learning important skills for a predictable final assessment (not generic skills that generally apply to the subject area,) and working towards a stated, obvious, short-term goal: Friday. Because teachers at level two have the week planned, both they, and their students know what to expect when Friday comes around, and learning requires an important and precarious balance between comfort and discomfort.

Take a look at my IBR capstone unit. You don't really see a predominance of lesson planning, but it is entirely student centered, uses entirely student-driven and student selected materials, and allows for a "skeleton" plan to reflect high-level teaching methodology, and yield high student output.

What’s incredibly important to note, though, is that even at level two of planning acumen, the hallowed daily lesson plan has become hazy in its level of importance. If the entire week is planned and there’s a clear, weekly goal, then the teacher might flex ahead or lag behind the planned learning based on student need, or fire drills. Checks for understanding, reteaching, and assessments are built into a weekly structure, and whether they happen in the beginning, middle, or end of Tuesday, they still occur in the same place in the chronological sequence of learning. ​

The higher the planning steps you climb, the less important the emphasis on the daily lesson plan becomes, because with each higher step, you continue to distill the essence of learning, which cannot be contained in a 42 minute period. Which is the last reason so many teachers live on planning step two their entire life: the calendar, and administrative expectation, and clock all reinforce that it’s the correct way to punctuate time. Flying in the face of convention requires innovation, which is inherently uncomfortable. We’ll examine the nature of that discomfort in our next post.

How do we blast out of that comfort zone to continue progressing down the path to planning greatness

Stop thinking about Friday, and start thinking about forever. Don’t think, “I need to teach the difficult vocabulary in this article,” think, “I need to have five incredibly effective, refined, universal, and research-based vocabulary lessons ready for any vocabulary list I’ll ever encounter.” Even a great teacher, if shackled with the constraints of level two planning, will still find themselves mired in level one, day-to-day busy work if they ask the former question, asking the latter will move you onwards and upwards.

Start to streamline. Kids hate busy work. You hate busy work. What is the end of unit assessment you’re working towards? At level two, you’ll definitely know. What parts of this week’s plan explicitly work towards that end of unit assessment? Which parts don’t? After answering those two questions, you’ll need to eliminate the “lesson fat” from this week’s lessons, or you’ll have to modify the assessment if this week’s lessons are genuinely important. You can’t jump to level four, but this practice of dispassionate self questioning will take you a long way towards reaching level three.

Mind Mapping is not just for students. It's for teachers, too. Thinking consciously about an entire unit will help you create cohesive strategies across multiple units, eventually landing in a cohesive and streamlined year of learning for students.

This is an actual picture of my actual Google Classroom Gradebook. Notice the three author's names on the right? Those were individually assigned passages for individual students working on answering their own self-written essential question. Then what did they do? Connection tools connecting the different texts. What next? Students wrote an essay publishing their connections, of course! Streamlined beauty reflected in a logical gradebook free of indulgence and excess.

Keep climbing the narrow, arduous path towards more efficient planning!

Brave the crucible of the gradebook. A gradebook is a great way to measure a teacher’s organization. In a marking period, are there 32 different grades for unique assignments that no one but you could ever interpret? Is there a predictable structure to the graded assignments: vocabulary homework, classwork activity, novelty engagement, discussion, assessment, repeat? 32 unique assignments FEELS like good teaching when you’re at level two, because you’re finding and modifying 32 different materials for 32 different days. It doesn’t work as well as you’d think, because it’s hard for you to remember how you graded each of 32 assignments, students aren’t sure how they were graded for each, and no one, teacher or student, can predict what will come next. Start small: have one, constant learning structure (and corresponding grade) per week, and move forward to level three from here.