Planning for instruction can be done in several different ways. Only the most experienced teachers have a down-pat system. It takes years of experience to perfect and tweak lesson plans and organization.
If you’re new to teaching or have only been teaching for a few years, then you’re still in the process of perfecting your own lesson planning and organizing style. How do you write an instructional plan?
How do you organize your lessons and lesson plans? Each teacher has his or her own way of doing so. You’ll need to find the way that works best for you and your students.
To start your journey towards planning and organizing, continue reading below. Here are a few tips and tricks on how to organize your instructional plan.
1. Know Your Resources
The first thing you’ll want to do is have a solid understanding of the resources available to you. Where can you turn for help? If you work amongst other teachers, then you can ask them for some advice.
See how your neighboring teachers organize their own plans. When everyone can come together and share ideas, everyone benefits from it, especially the students.
If you don’t have a few friendly teacher peers, you can always join the Teacher’s Lounge. This lounge is a social media platform made just for teachers! Teachers from around the country come together to join hands and help one another.
You can use the lounge to ask experienced teachers for their advice and to access plenty of tools to help you with your lesson planning.
2. Give Yourself a Schedule
Once you start teaching and creating your own lesson plans, you’ll begin to learn what works for you and what doesn’t work for you regarding your scheduling. You’ll need to give yourself a lesson planning schedule to stick to.
Each school week requires new lessons for each day. When will you create these lessons? When do you need them by?
Trying to create a lesson the day before you’ll teach it could place you under a lot of anxiety and stress. Instead, be sure to have all your lessons for the next week completed by Friday. Use the time between classes or your lunch break to work on them.
Once you’ve been teaching for a good amount of years, you’ll no longer need to create entire lesson plans the week before teaching. You can reuse your lessons that worked well for your students in the past. Other than a few tweaks here and there, you’ll already have them completed.
3. Know the Learning Objective
When writing your actual lesson plans, you need to know what the learning objective is. The learning objective is the foundation of your lesson plan. What do you want your students to learn or know how to do after the lesson?
Write your lesson’s objective in a way that your students can easily read and understand. Be sure your learning objectives are measurable and can be demonstrated.
If you can’t measure the objective, then you’ll have no way to know if the students understood the lesson or not.
4. Write the Activities and Assessment Measures
Your next step should be to write out the activities you’ll have your students do and the ways you’ll assess and measure them. You should have a way of opening the lesson.
How will you introduce the lesson to your students? Will you start a small discussion about the topic at hand? Find a way to get their young minds going and then send them off to complete their activity.
While completing the activity, ask them questions, observe their progress, and find other ways to assess them while they’re working. Each lesson should also include some type of closure where the students are able to reflect on and show you what they learned.
A quick quiz and a brief discussion to allow your students to summarize what they learned are two great options.
5. Create a Lesson Plan Crate or Bin
After writing out your lesson plans, you’ll want to find a way to keep them organized. As a teacher, you’re going to have so many pieces of loose paper, you won’t be able to keep count. This can become overwhelming if you don’t know how to keep everything organized.
A great way to organize your lesson plans is to place them either in a crate or a bin. A crate is an opened box with folders that hang inside it. Each folder can be labeled with the day of the week.
You can then place the lesson plan and lesson materials for Monday in Monday’s folder and so on.
You can also consider using bins for your lesson plans. Each bin should have a drawer. You can place your labels on the front of the drawers.
Rather than labeling them with days of the week, consider labeling them with the theme, lesson, or story being taught. Then, you can place all of the materials for that particular lesson in the bin. This works well when you’re teaching multiple subjects and have multiple lesson plans.
When you open your bins, you should keep folders inside the bins to keep organized.
How Will You Organize Your Instructional Plan?
The organization of your instructional plan might not look the same as your neighboring teachers. Each teacher will have his or her own way of keeping things organized and teaching their lessons. The goal is to work with one another by sharing ideas and learning what works best for each teacher and their students.
Looking for more ways to collaborate with other teachers?
Join the Teacher’s Hideaway today to start sharing materials, advice, and ideas!