A Guide for Creating Great Lesson Plans Quickly and Efficiently

After a few years of teaching, most educators will have developed a lesson plan system mapping out what they would like to do in their classroom in the near future. For college students that are interested in becoming professional educators in the very near future, you have probably covered how to create lesson plans for your elementary or high school classroom in a few of your college courses. However, the way your college professors instruct you how to create lesson plans can be a bit overwhelming.

I remember having professors that would ask for my student teaching lesson plans and they expected them each to be three or four pages long for every lesson. In the real world, no teacher writes lesson plans that are this long. It just isn’t practical. You would have to go home immediately from teaching every day and then start creating your lesson plans for the very next day and this would take hours to do.

There are much simpler ways to create your lesson plans for each subject so you don’t feel so overwhelmed. While each school or administrator might have something specific they want to see in each of the lesson plans, I have had about ten administrators over the years and never once have I had someone say they needed work. Usually, it is quite the opposite and I am recognized for simplifying the process. Hopefully, my experience as an educator with more than a decade of teaching under my belt and a Masters in Education will help you figure out your way in creating simple and efficient plans for your lessons.

Backward Planning

It all begins with what goal you have in mind. What do you want your students to learn? For instance, do you want them to learn how to summarize the latest book that was read in class or figure out how to calculate area in math? Start with your goal or objective and then continue from there with some backward planning. By knowing what is on your school curriculum map, you should have an idea about the specific goals your students need to meet.

Write Down the Standard that Goes with the Lesson

The biggest change in creating lesson plans during the last decade is how the administration would like their teachers to write down the standard that goes with each lesson that is being taught. It seems every state or every country has a set of teaching standards now that must be represented in your classroom lesson plans. It is simple to find standards that go with what you are trying to teach. It is more time consuming than anything. However, I always make sure to write down the standard by abbreviating the number or letter that corresponds with that specific standard. This usually takes only a few seconds.

How Are You Going to Ensure that the Goal Is Accomplished?

This is the final step to your lesson plan. This is where you write down what you are going to teach in the class and the assignment you are going to issue to your students afterward. For an example, you may write down you are going to teach the students in class about the names and locations of all the countries in Europe by using the map on the overhead projector. Then as a way to further the lesson, the students are to create their own map of Europe while labeling all the countries and even the approximate populations of each. It doesn’t have to always be overly complicated.

Plan for the Entire Week at Once

By using my example that I included below of my own lesson plan formatting, you can create your whole week’s worth of lesson plans on one subject in a matter of minutes. I like to have each main topic covered last anywhere from one to two weeks. If it goes much further than that, you are going to risk losing the students’ interest and their attention spans just won’t be able to last long enough. Remember that these lesson plans are more or less for you as a way to lay out your planning for the entire week in a quick manner. Plus, having something that is as simple to follow as this will make it easy for your sub if you need one.

If you need more assistance with lesson planning, iAchieve can definitely help! We offer workshops that deal with planning in the classroom on a variety of subjects. If there is one particular area that you need help with, we have the professional development created to assist you.

Written by: Ryan Crawley

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