Quick Tips for Lesson Planning

planning lessons can be one of the most overwhelming components of becoming an educator and especially when you're just starting out you don't have that toolbox of tips and tricks to pull from it can be even more taxing so today want to share with you three quick ideas that are going to make your lesson plans better and take less time to do here we go the first idea here is to start with the end in mind too many times we start lesson planning with the beginning in mind of what are the Core Curriculum standards or what is my bell ringer going to be or my pre-class or something like that instead start with the ending in mind so if you take out your curriculum want you to look at it from beginning to end for the particular unit that you're on and then ask the following questions as you look through that curriculum what are you expected to cover what do you want your students to learn and what skill or skills do you want them to gain still engaging with the curriculum thinking about where are my students levels now and then where do want them to get to because your curriculum is often times tied to where students should be or where neurotypical students are and what you want is really real sense of this is where we're at this is where we need to get to and then want you to think about how are the 504s in your class and the ipps in your class going to affect the answer to some of these questions this is probably for longer video but feel like students with learning disabilities and learning differences are often thought of as after the fact we build the model and then we try and figure out how we're going to fit them in it's so much easier and it serves the students so much better when we build the lesson with them in mind as well another question to ask ask yourself what if this was easy too often we create lessons to fill class period we create lessons to fill the time that we have given so we have to teach inferences or fractions or the Battle of water blue whatever you're teaching in your 50-minute period or your hour and 30 minute period whatever it is we take the lesson and stretch it to fill the time and I'm asking if we made this as simple as possible if you really broke this down could you explain it to students in very easy and simple way and then figure out something else to fill the period sometimes we as Educators make things harder than they need to be more complicated than they need to be just so it looks like we're doing our job when we forget that our job is to educate young people and to help them understand don't put barriers in the way of helping kids get from where they are to where they need to be and the quickest way to do that is to ask yourself what if this was easy my third tip here is to remember look don't recreate the wheel you don't get extra credit for coming up with original lesson plans and if you're just beginning as an educator it's so much easier to pull from other people's ideas and then turn them into your own no one ever started band and started writing original think I've said that somewhere before everyone starts with cover songs this is no different and so this is actually something go into great detail in in our classroom management Workshop where talk about how to create engaging lessons and the link for that is in the description below but if you take what someone else has it at least gives you jumping off point cuz you already know where you want to go you already have decided what if this was easy you are now looking for ideas to help Implement that so the study guide questions I'm going to come up with on my own are probably similar to something someone else has already created so few places that love to look are the New York Times lesson playing page is treasure Trove of great stuff I've used Scholastic for lot of stuff in my class think often lot of textbooks have good stuff they're just too full of nonsensical nonsense and so stripping some of that away and taking what's at the core and then sprinkling my own Magic on that works and look take what your students are interested in and this is whole another video but take what your students are interested in and then look that term up with lesson planning so many of you might not know that Minecraft has lesson plan for just about every conceivable thing you could teach in school and what's even weirder than that is fortnite has lesson plans the number one game in the world has lesson plans where they teach things like physics and other things I'll put links to all these things in the in the description below so you can check them out but if you just take these three tips it's going to take lot of time and energy off your lesson planning the question then becomes how do make this little bit more interesting how do begin to sprinkle Magic on some of my lessons have video on this called five simple and easy ways to make your lessons awesome but find that link up here and popping up on the screen here in any second now that's it for this time gang please like And subscribe and we'll talk to you later peace