Let's talk about...LESSON PLANNING!

 This post is brought to you by LESSON PLANNING.

The worthless busy work that makes teachers stress the eff out.

    A teacher's biggest responsibility (besides keeping children alive) is teaching a lesson. 

    How do you know what to teach?     What lesson is best matched to meet your children's needs?     Why do you have to lesson plan when you're given a teacher's manual?

    These are questions many people ask or should ask when it comes to teaching. We are taught from one of the first education classes in college how and why lesson planning is important.

    Then you become a teacher and realize very quickly that lesson planning isn't all it's cracked up to be, especially when you have a gazillion other things on your plate. So, this post is going to break down lesson planning. What it is, why it's somewhat important, and why admin needs to let up pressure when it comes to lesson planning.

What is lesson planning?

    Essentially, lesson planning is the roadmap or PLAN (see what I did there), that a teacher uses to help guide their lesson making sure they hit on all the important parts of a "good" lesson. Teachers get their first experience with this in college. I couldn't even tell you how many lesson plans I wrote at WVU (but I can tell you how many I used in my everyday teaching. I'll give you a hint it starts with z...).

    There are specific criteria that teachers need to think about when they make a lesson plan. The most important being, the standards that the lesson covers. Each grade has a set of standards that are vital for them to succeed in their current and next grades. Standards are suuuuuper important because that's what gives a teacher's lesson a purpose. 

    You don't want to waste a lesson on teaching twelfth-graders to skip count by 5. They should already know that since it's a 1st-grade standard.

   Somewhere along the road, someone decided it would be a good idea to make lesson planning extremely fleshed out. Current lesson plan formats contain extra requirements like, materials needed, teacher's script, scaffolding, assessment, areas where the students can struggle, etc. We'll talk more about this soon.....

Why is lesson planning important?

    In college, lesson planning is crucial when people are learning to become teachers. Lesson planning is vital for drafting lesson targets, familiarizing yourself with the grades' standards, and how you will deliver the lesson. It's a tool that all novice teachers use and should use so that you don't sound like a blithering idiot in front of a classroom of 20 students.

   

 They help you PLAN the scope of your day, your week, your month, and even your year...is this a song?

    

    Planning, in general, keeps students engaged, motivated, and behaved! If you ever find yourself in front of a classroom without a PLAN, you're up the crick without a paddle and they will drown you.

 

Why does admin need to ease up on the pressure?    

    Below is ONE example of a lesson plan template that I searched for in Google. There are a million templates from all grade levels and colleges. (School and colleges across the country have developed their own templates with the tiniest difference on each one--isn't this fun!)

    

    

    Now, I understand it might be hard to read...but that looks like many boxes to fill out. Most lesson plans are definitely longer than one page, too.

BUT... Can you picture filling out one of these for 5 lessons each day for 5 days? 

Don't worry, I'll do the math. THAT'S 25 LESSON PLANS PER WEEK!

    OK, OK, OK, you might be thinking, "Well, Steph. Lots of jobs have to do paperwork." And you're right. But, do those jobs also require you to look after the safety of 20 humans? Grade 20 pieces of work per lesson? Liaise between parents? Attend meetings during said planning time? Write report card comments? Peer observe? Plug bloody noses? Feed other humans? Do bulletin boards? Literally all the other jobs in the world? No? Then, shut it, Ronda.

    So, you now know what a lesson plan is and why it's important for some. Guess what? LESSON PLANNING SUCKS! There I said it. Every teacher knows it. Every administrator USED to know it. 

    Why is there so much pressure to KEEP having veteran or 2+ year teachers do lesson plans?? Honestly, I HAVE NO FREAKING CLUE! Most admins will tell you that you have to do lesson plans so they can make sure that you are following the scope and sequence of the year and reaching grade standards. 

    That's great, but do I have to SUBMIT my 25 lesson plans every week year after year when...THE EXACT SAME STUFF IN THE PLAN IS IN THE TEACHER'S MANUAL??

    This is the biggest issue I had with teaching. I wasted so much time, copying the vital information from the teacher's manual into the school-based lesson plan template by a certain date, then to get feedback on it. Really, Admin? You're giving me feedback on a lesson plan that I literally copied and pasted from the manual.

       

    Let's not forget that the plan RARELY ever goes the way it's planned anyway. A great teacher can teach by the seat of their pants, still hitting the learning target and the standards, coming out of the lesson where the students can complete the task independently.

    

    Ask any teacher you know--they hate WRITING out a lesson plan. Obviously, teachers plan. We plan what lessons we're teaching and write down the lesson number in our planners (you know cause we'll use the teacher's manual). But, as far as doing the time-waster lesson plan template--we hate it.

    So, I'm asking admin, please, please, please change this rhetoric. Teachers would be so much more effective without having to copy and paste material from the manual.