Planning

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Home : 2008 : April : 12

Planning
By mt

Mrs. G always gives good advice, so you should pay attention to what she said.

You need to know what's required of you. I teach lang. arts, so I needed to know which papers I was required to collect, which skills
to cover, etc. There should be some sort of scope and sequence the district can give you.

Next, decide how long each will take. Since this is your first year, you really don't know, but you have to try to gauge it. There are a few pages at the beginning of most plan books where you can roughly map out a year. And I say ROUGHLY because in teaching, life and every other stupid

thing interferes constantly. So there are a few pages at the beginning to map out the year, but I quit doing that because it's just too hard to see nine months down the road. There's testing (the dates of which you probably don't know yet), there's assemblies, late starts or early releases in some schools, staff development days, etc. Do not try to plan your entire year, day by day, activity by activity, assessment by assessment! I've have known new teachers who came in with their entire year planned. Sounds awesome, but all their plans had to be reworked, because of the things I mentioned above. Also, some units will take longer than you think, others will take less time than you think they will.

Once you know what units you'll be doing, decide what's first and plan it. I actually only plan a week at a time. Every weekend, I plan the week coming up. If I go any further ahead than that, I end up erasing all of it (always plan in pencil).

Does your district have common assessments they want you to use? If so, don't waste time writing your own. If you have to write your own, just do it unit by unit. If you plan your unit and your instruction with your assessment in mind, that's best practice. Also, it's easiest. I see that seems to be what you're planning to do, which is excellent. Make sure, though, that those assessments aren't already in place for you. But again, just one unit at a time. The entire year is just too big of a bite.

I always keep my plan book at the end of the year and use it to help myself remember, the next year, how long something took, any snags, etc. It helps with the next year's planning.