I write and submit daily lesson plans. Lesson plans nowadays include content objectives, Common Core standards, state standards, student goals and even the actual material in the lesson, not to mention any and all materials and technology to be used in the lesson. We are breaking this down into different blocks of time. Activity 1 gets 10 minutes, activity 2 gets 20 minutes, activity 3 gets 15 minutes, etc. depending on the school’s schedule. Within the time blocks, we break down whether I am teaching the whole class, I am teaching groups within a class that is broken into groups, or I am helping students do guided practice, monitoring students working alone or some combination of the above.

Eduhonesty: I understand that administration wants to be clear that I am not relaxing and reading People magazine while everybody circles words in a puzzle. But all uses of time have opportunity costs. For the next hour, I will not be planning instruction. I will be writing about planning instruction. I guarantee that tomorrow’s PowerPoint will not be quite as clever and entertaining as it might have been.

The old weekly lesson plans which provided a framework rather than blow-by-blow details served students better that the obsessive-compulsive plans that are becoming the norm in many places today. For one thing, students hardly ever stay with the program anyway. They have a bad habit of refusing to fit Activity 1 into 10 minutes, interrupting with all sorts of questions that destroy the schedule almost immediately. I would be a better teacher if I could use this next hour to plan my lessons, rather than plan the plan of my lessons.

But that daily lesson plan needs to be done. Time to get started, I guess.