Planning Persistence

Taking time to schedule planning

Already a few weeks into the new school year and the pressures of teaching are steadily rising. Teachers are feeling overwhelmed as the day-to-day challenges continue to grow. As tasks increase, teachers find difficulties in meeting the abundance of needs and some areas are quickly unattended. One key teaching area that suffers early is planning.

Lesson planning priorities decrease as other teaching tasks increase. Admin task, emails, and many other areas often take precedence over teaching essentials that should maintain a dominant focus. As a lack of planning persists, effective instruction is impacted.

Planning is critical to effective instruction. Pedagogical practices are planned for in connection with course content to offer the most effective instructional practice possible. Pedagogy and content knowledge are interconnected, and effective methods of instruction decrease when planning is limited or non-existent.

While the plan and implementation are separate entities, they co-exist and offer more effective instructional experiences to students.

Military plans, housing plans, marketing plans, are all are crucial to the success of their respective fields. Plans in all areas of life are critical for achievement and there is no difference in teaching. When teachers have a detailed, well thought plan for instruction, their instructional practice is more likely to benefit students.

While there are some teachers that are complacent in their planning, many struggle to find the time in their day to engage in planning practices. Planning for scope and sequences, big picture, individual lessons, and specific instructional events are exhaustive, taking enormous amounts of time.

Planning a lesson is a difficult, cognitive task. Planning involves creativity and innovation, challenging the mind. The cognitive process planning demands, rests at the top of every cognition scale (e.g. Bloom’s level 6). Great amounts of mental power are exhausted in designing lessons that are thorough, detail, aligned to student learning, imbedded with assessments, differentiated, and interesting. Planning takes time and teachers have little to spare.

In the recent past, districts have afforded teachers multiple planning periods, professional planning days, and extra time to meet planning needs. Recently, teachers have experienced limited opportunities in their day to day plan, or in some cases, have disappeared altogether. For effective instruction to take place, teachers need imbedded moments in their schedule to plan. While these moments vary from district to district, consider the following points of thought regarding lesson planning…

Prioritize planning: Schedule time to plan lessons. Similar to exercise routines, you get in what you put out. Without engaging, your lessons will suffer.

Grind: Create foundations that will last you the rest of your career. Especially for new teachers, build a solid foundation of planning and all you have to do is tweak and tinker from here on out.

Find resources that fit you: Access your district’s resources, publishers your school uses, your neighbor/mentor teacher’s plans, teachtappy.com, and another planning resources that will make your planning that much more efficient and effective.