I’m trying to design something that might be helpful for teachers planning lessons.  I have drafted two tools, one a structured reflection sheet for thinking through what is needed for a detailed unit of work; the other a very simple short-hand version for scoping out a series of lessons.

In both cases, the idea is to plan a series of lessons, not just one at a time.  The idea is that knowledge content will be referenced here but specified in detail in separate sources – because it’s too inefficient to reproduce the knowledge content again and again.

Also, these planning tools do not attend to specific student needs.  Again, I feel that, over time, teachers will know their classes and will make annotations for individuals as needed in any case; they don’t need a special box.

The Planning Tool:

Here is a pdf version: The Planning Tool Notes

Here is a blank editable Word version: The Planning Tool

I imagine this is could be typed into/edited when writing shared schemes of work especially for a topic a teacher has not taught before.

Here is a blank pdf of the Planning Tool: The Planning Tool

I would use this to sketch on in pen, jotting down ideas and just using it as a checklist for my thinking.

The Quick Version

As a teacher, I was always making these sort of grids – mapping out a series of lessons that cover the same knowledge content.  A broad scope might be 12 lessons over four weeks – or it might be more use to focus on the three lessons for the week ahead, in more detail.

The editable word version is here: The Planning Tool Quick Version.  You can format it to make the pattern of lessons you need more obvious as I have illustrated.

A pdf version is here: The Planning Tool Quick Version

In this quick version, I am mentally attending to the prompts in the detailed planning tool but I’m not investing time in writing it all out.  For my own planning purposes, I would be looking to scope out the flow of ideas, the key resources or sources of information, the key question sets and the students’ practice or practical tasks.  Implicitly, this is always referencing detailed documents elsewhere – textbooks, worksheets, student guides – anything where the exact knowledge content can be referenced and checked by the students themselves.

Let me know what you think in the comments below.  If you actually use them, let me know.