5 Tips to Help Build Lesson Plans in Minutes (EP2)

5 Tips to Help You Become Efficient with Lesson Plans

 Hey, everyone, and surprise, surprise! If you didn’t know already, well, you do now! I am releasing three episodes this week to celebrate the launch of the podcast. My hope is that in releasing three episodes this week that it will give you a better idea of what you can expect in the long run. This also means that you’re getting three Teaching Tips of the Week. So, be sure to listen until the very end. Todays is a really good one.

Today, we are going to discuss ways to cut down on the time you spend planning your lessons. Lesson plans are one of those tasks that if you’re not careful, they can become really time-consuming, and maybe even something you begin to dread. I think part of the reason teachers dread it is because they have to do it every single week, and I get that. But for me, it was important that I was able to make the lesson my own because then I felt like I taught it better.

I think in the end, that’s why I really enjoyed lesson planning. So, today I’m going to share five of my favorite lesson planning tips to help you become efficient to the point where you can build a lesson plan in minutes.

My first lesson planning tip is to use a simple lesson plan guide or a framework. Notice I said simple, not like the ones we had to do back in college. They were great practice, but they are just not practical for teachers to use for every lesson. We just don’t have the time for that. However, we don’t want to throw away what we learned in college completely. Let’s not forget about what makes up a good lesson plan.

The one thing I do remember learning in my master’s program was this planning strategy called the W.H.E.R.E.T.O strategy. It’s part of the Understanding by Design, you probably have heard of that, and I always kept this framework in mind when I was planning my lessons. Also, anytime I had an observation lesson plan I had to turn in, I used this W.H.E.R.E.T.O planning strategy, and it helped cover almost everything on the rubric. So, keep that in mind. It’s a good one to have.

W.H.E.R.E.T.O. is an acronym. So, I’ll go through each letter and explain what it stands for. 

W stands for where am I going and why, this is your I CAN statement or your lesson objective that you use to begin your lesson.

H stands for hook. How will you get their attention? This could be a math riddle or an engagement strategy like Quiz-Quiz-Trade, which I love by the way, or a BrainPOP video, you know, just something to get their attention.

E stands for explore and equip. This is the main part of your lesson when you’re exploring those main ideas and equipping students with the skills or the vocabulary terms that they will need.

R stands for rethink and revise. This is building in time for students to practice either in your whole group, partner practice, or even in small group time, and this will give them time to reflect on what they’ve learned. It can also be an independent map center that you assign as well.

The second E stands for evaluate. How will you assess their understanding? This could be any type of formative assessment like an exit ticket, or assigning a set of Boom Cards. It can also be done through assigning homework.

T stands for tailor. How will you tailor the lesson to meet the needs of different learning styles? You can do this through differentiation and scaffolding activities. You can also incorporate multiple intelligences into your lessons. Those are just a few examples.

And finally, O stands for organize. How will you organize your lesson? This is the flow of your lesson from the beginning to the middle to the end. I often used the CPA approach which is concrete pictorial and abstract. A lot of teachers also use the I do, we do, you do format. So, there are a lot of different ways you can organize your lesson.

This is a lot I know, and it can feel like a lot for a daily lesson plan. So, I made a similar but simplified framework that is linked in the show notes for you to grab. And just so you know, I did not fill this template out for every lesson plan. I kept mine very simple and I use bullet points instead. That’s just how my brain works, but having it visible helped me make sure I had everything in my lesson plan that I needed. So, make sure you have some sort of guide or some sort of framework to help your lessons flow from start to finish.

My second lesson planning tip is to keep a running list of resources. It’s easy to get into a routine of doing the same thing for a warmup, or the same thing for a math center, or even the same thing for an exit ticket every day. While I do think consistency is good for students, it’s really important to mix things up, I think for your sake as well. I know if I was sick of an activity, my students were probably sick of it too.

So, think about what websites are good for video clips. What activities work well for your warmups or your bell ringers? What do students enjoy doing on choice boards? What are some no prep digital activities that you can assign students? Make a list of these preferably on Google Docs, so then you can share it with your teammates, and you can also access it from your phone. And that way, if an idea comes to you, and you’re out and about, you can add it to the list.

You can also add hyperlinks to your videos and any online activities you have listed. That way, they’re much easier to find in the future. So over time, you’ll have a lot of activities to choose from, and it’ll help you when you feel like you need to mix things up.

Alright, moving on to tip number three. My third lesson planning tip is to take pictures and put links in your lesson plans. This one probably cut down on my prep time the most. In fact, if I showed you my lesson plans from the last few years, you would see a lot of photos and a lot of hyperlinks. I started doing this because I would often be very general in my lesson plans, like I would put multiplication matching activity or long division video. And the problem was the next year when I came back to it, I had no clue what I was talking about.

So, I started taking pictures of these activities and hyperlinking the videos and online activities, and then I knew exactly what it was and exactly where to find it. So, trust me on that one, it’s going to save you a lot of time.

Another thing you can do is to hyperlink your videos within your PowerPoint, or Smart Notebook slides, whatever you use to teach with. That way you can pull those up really quickly when you’re in your lesson. But linking them also in your lesson plan allows everyone on your team to see where they came from. So, I recommend doing both.

Here’s an extra tip. If there’s an activity that is saved on your computer, you can even link to the location. For example, I used engaged New York quite often for my RTI groups. So, in my lesson plans, I would write the title of the lesson like, Convert Measurements Module 2 Lesson 3, and then I would either hyperlink it to the Engage New York website, or to the actual file I had saved on my computer. And that way, I didn’t have to keep a hard copy. I really tried to cut down on my hard copies over the years because my files at one point were exploding, like I could barely open my drawer. So. linking them in my lesson plans meant I could send it right to the copier. I didn’t have to print it, and I didn’t have to worry about keeping a paper copy.

For the pictures, I would suggest taking pictures of your math centers, so then you can see how it was set up the following year. That way you don’t have to list the materials needed or the directions. The picture should be able to speak for itself. And one more thing, if you write math problems on the board for students to solve at your teacher center, snap a quick photo before you erase them and put that in your lesson plans. Then the following year, you don’t have to start from scratch, and you will know exactly what problems to write on the board.

Moving on to tip number four. My fourth lesson planning tip may seem like an obvious one. Planning with your team is a must. I can think back to my early years when the other math teachers and I did not even have the same planning time. So, we couldn’t plan together during the day, we would just check in with each other from time to time and chat after school. But there was no consistent planning session each week.

Not only did I feel unsure about what I was doing, you know, am I going too fast? Or am I going too slow? I don’t even know if we had curriculum guides at that point in my career. But it was so much more work to be doing it all on my own. So, make sure you are scheduling that time with your team to sit down and plan.

Thankfully, the majority of my years I actually had a common planning time with my teammates, and this is how I learned to become really efficient in planning and enjoy the process. 

I think what helped us really become efficient was we divided and conquered. One of us would pull up the previous year’s lesson plans and make any necessary changes as we talk through them. Someone else would be looking through the slides that we used to teach and that would help us visually remember what we did, which was really helpful because sometimes lesson plans are kind of vague.

Another person was either looking through our list of resources or TPT, if necessary, or they were starting to make the Google Forms or Schoology assessments if that’s what we were going to give. Because we all have these different roles, and we were able to divide and conquer these tasks, we became really efficient at planning out the week. Rarely did we ever need more than one planning time to get everything done.

And that takes us to my final lesson planning tip, and that is don’t start from scratch. I know the thought of putting together a list of activities and resources from scratch can be a very overwhelming feeling. But do not worry because you can download my list of over 60 lesson plan ideas to get you started. This is totally free, and it will be linked in the show notes for you. So, make sure you grab a copy, and there’s also room for you to add your own ideas. Because once you get going, you’ll find the ideas will keep coming, and you can add to the list that I’ve already started for you. 

Before I get to today’s teaching tip of the week, I want to go back and review all five tips to help you become a lesson planning expert.

-Tip number one is to use a lesson plan guide or framework.

-Tip number two, create a running list of resources to pull from.

-Tip number three, take pictures and add hyperlinks to your plans.

-Tip number four plan with your team.

-Tip number five, don’t start from scratch. Use my list of more than 60 lesson plan ideas to get you started. 

Before you know it you will have a massive list of resources to pull from, and that will help you build a lesson plan in minutes.

All right, well, let’s wrap up with today’s teaching tip of the week. Today’s tip will help you extend the life of your dry erase markers, and there are two parts to this tip. 

Dry erase markers are one of the first supplies to run out if you’re not careful, and they are expensive. So, I kept a class set of markers in a tub that students could not access unless I passed them out. I would either keep them behind my desk or in a storage cabinet, so out of their reach. If we needed markers for the lesson, then they had to use one of my markers. I would have a student pass them out, and then a student would also collect them when the lesson was finished. Because I knew that every student used one of my markers, I knew that every student needed to return one. If they needed to use one during math centers, then they just had to use one of their own.

Because I was controlling the passing out and collecting of the markers, my class set that I kept with me lasted at least a month I would say, and never before would a dry erase marker last that long. So, this worked pretty well, and it’s worth trying if you’re feeling like you’re always running out of dry erase markers.

Now another reason they run out is because students take the cap off, and they leave it off, and then they can’t find it when it’s time to put it back on. I mean, just look at a classroom floor on any given day, and you will find these caps everywhere, especially after school. So, rather than throwing them away, I would pick them up and put them in my drawer. I did this for glue sticks as well.

Then if we ever found a marker that didn’t have a cap, there was no need to panic. I just went over to my drawer, I grabbed a cap, and I put it on the marker. Well, that is all for today’s episode, but don’t go anywhere because the next episode is live and ready for you to enjoy. This one is all about Meet the Teacher Night and how to make the most of that important day.