Speaker 1: Today we're talking lesson planning. I know a lot of you are new teachers and you're new to lesson plans and you have some difficulty organizing your classroom and trying to figure out how to organize your lesson plans. Well, I have some tips today for you that will make it easier. Let's get started. Okay, so no matter what grade level you're teaching and no matter what school district or state that you teach in, lesson planning is a big part of your job and it can be really difficult to figure out how to break up your lesson plans and make sure that you're covering the proper content. Now, let's just be clear. The reason for lesson plans is not just to check a box so that during your teacher evaluation or during your walkthrough, you get that credit. Lesson planning is really important so you know what you're responsible for and your students know what they are responsible for. It helps to keep you focused and helps to keep you on a plan just like we would plan for anything else. So you wanna keep your lesson plans simple so that they're easy to follow and so that you kind of have an understanding of what's going on, but also so that you can modify them if you need to. We know as teachers and as human beings, nothing goes according to plan. There's a fire drill or there's an incident in the classroom or some of your students may not get a concept like you thought they would and you have to go back and reteach. So lesson plans really do need to be dynamic and you need to kind of build in some areas where you can modify and change things up if you need to. So they're not static. They are living, breathing documents that you're going to adapt throughout the school year, quarter, week, unit, whatever it is you're working on. Now one of the biggest components of lesson plans are the standards. Now we always wanna use the standards to drive instruction and I always kind of make fun of myself about standards. When I first started teaching, I didn't even know what standards were and I was in the middle of a lesson and my assistant principal came in, she observed, and as she left, she asked to see me in the hallway and she asked me, you're using the standards, right, to guide your instruction? And I was like, oh yeah, totally using the standards. I didn't even know what standards were. It was like my first week of teaching. I was just trying to survive. So it's really important that you access the standards. Now your state has its own standards. Some states have their own, like Florida, where I'm from, has its own standards, but also a lot of states use the common core standards. So make sure you are aware of what standards your state is using. Now if you're a science teacher, there are national science standards. There are also national social studies standards, but you may also have specific state standards that you need to meet. So it's really important that you access that information on your district's website. So most districts, I hope all districts, but I'll just say most districts, have standards on their websites so that you understand exactly what's going on. And I'm gonna show you how to access those so that you can use them with your lesson plans. Now the problem with that is you have a whole list of standards and how do you organize them and how do you put them into a lesson plan so that your students can learn at the correct rate and that you are teaching at the correct rate. And that can be very, very complicated. So that's why I really want you to use the district resources that you have available to you. There are personnel down in the district office who write curriculum maps and who write sample lesson plans for you. And that was actually my job for a long time was to write curriculum maps for the science department. And we went through all of this stuff where we came up with resources and scope and sequence and all of these different things. And there were a handful of teachers using it, but not as many teachers were using it as they should. A lot of this work is done for you already and all you have to do is access it. So I'm going to bring you over here to my computer really quickly and I'm gonna show you how to access this. Now I'm gonna be accessing my district's website. So I live in Lee County, Florida. And so I am gonna pull up the school district of Lee County's curriculum plans and scope and sequence. You may be from a different state and you need to find your district's curriculum plans. But the easiest thing to do is just go to the district school's website and go to the search bar. Almost every single school district has a search bar and just click curriculum plans or curriculum map or curriculum. And when you do, it'll pull up something like this. Now, it's not always super user-friendly. Some district websites are very antiquated and really hard to navigate, but you can also pick up the phone and call the curriculum department and just ask, hey, where do I access the curriculum map? And hopefully your district has one. And you can see right here that we have curriculum maps for elementary, curriculum maps for high and curriculum maps for middle. I'm just gonna click middle and you can see that it's broken up by subject area. And if you click ELA, you can see sixth, seventh and eighth grade, right? Now I've already pulled one up here and this is what a curriculum map looks like. Now, this can be kind of confusing to you as a new teacher, but once you understand what's going on here, it can really help you to plan your lessons. Now you can see for the school district of Lee County, they do a really good job on their curriculum maps. They really break it down for you and they even have links on here for resources for you to use that match up this particular quarter or unit or whatever it is. So like I said before, there are people in the downtown office creating this for you, that's their job. And all you really need to do is access this and use it in your own way in the way you would in your classroom to kind of organize your lessons and administer your lessons. So use the resources that the district has for you. A lot of times these go unused and that's just a shame. So you can see here that we have our first quarter here. Now these are linked up and I don't have access to the links anymore because I'm not employed by the school district anymore. But when you do click on here, like if you were to click on a sample reading list here, it goes to a Google Doc here. But if you were a teacher in the school district, you would have access because you would have a login for that, okay? So you can see they have sample reading lists and everything like that. So here we have the first quarter and here are all of the instructional guides right here for that quarter. And then over here, we have the standards. LAFS6, this is sixth grade reading and language 1.1 and these are all the standards here. All you have to do for your lesson plans is take this information and put it in your lesson plans and then use it. Now notice we have collection launch, synthesizing text for reading and writing, writer's workshop. These are all the little steps in the first quarter that you're gonna do on this particular curriculum app. But when I scroll down, you can see it's broken up even into more blocks so that I can use this in my lesson plans. Now, let's take a look. Let's go back up here. We have collection launch right here. This is under first quarter. This unit is facing fear and it's 60% informational text and 40% literary text, okay? So they've mapped that out for me already. I don't even have to go and search for text and try to figure out how I'm gonna do that. A curriculum specialist downtown did this for me and if I'm a first, second or third year teacher or a 10 year teacher, this takes away all this extra work that I do not have time to do, okay? So I have this collection launch here and it's under guide one and if I scroll down, you can see collection launch right here. Here are the standards it meets right there and then here are the objectives. Look at this, students do. These are your objectives, participate and collaborate in discussion, interpret information from a video presentation and it goes on and on down with the skills. The next part for quarter one, synthesizing text for reading and writing. Here are the standards that it covers and even tells you how many blocks, one to two blocks, two to three blocks and then it's got your objectives. Draw evidence from informational text, determine the central ideas. That's what goes on your board. Students will draw evidence from informational text, students will determine the central idea. It's all here for you on your curriculum map and then once you're through with this, you can see they even have an assignment for you here and there's all different kinds of activities here for you to use. This essentially is a giant lesson plan. Now, you are going to need to modify these little pieces of information here and put yourself into them, your own teaching, your own way of doing things but it's all organized here in the curriculum map and that's very, very helpful. Let's take a look at the scope and sequence for science. So this is middle school earth space science. You can see I have first quarter, second quarter, third quarter and fourth quarter. Then I have over here the standards that I'm going to be assessing or working on here and the topics name. Then when I go down to the second part here, I have all of my objectives. Identify safe scientific laboratory practices. You can tell that this is quarter one in a science classroom because that's what we do in the first quarter as we go through safety and procedures. Remember my last video about procedures, procedures, procedures and so quarter one is gonna be all about lab safety and things like that but then you get into identify interactions on earth, the five earth spheres and it goes down into the objectives there and then it even has some sample assignments here that you can use. Again, you can modify this, you can add assignments, you can add labs and activities and things like that but it's all mapped out for you right here and you don't have to like start from scratch which is totally overwhelming when it comes to being a first or second year teacher. You don't wanna have to reinvent the wheel when it's already here for you. Now one thing I do like about this particular curriculum map is that it also has some ELL language objectives for your English language learners. You're always going to want to make sure you're including English language learners and special ed students or exceptional student education students into your lesson plans and this will help you do that here and again, everything's linked and I don't have access unfortunately because I'm not employed by the school district but everything's linked up. If you see something hyperlinked, click it because it'll probably take you to an activity or something that will help you or some sort of resource that you can use in your classroom so this is a tremendous resource. Not only that, they have the objectives but it has the specific standards that you are going to be using in your instruction and on your assignments and in your activities and then finally in your assessments. Now the other thing about these curriculum maps that are really important, somebody in the downtown office aligned this to the state standardized test. Now it's very important that what we do is align to the standards because the standards are aligned to the assessment at the end of the year that students need to take so if you're just teaching whatever you want in your classroom and you're not going by any kind of curriculum map and you're not going by any state standards, you run the risk of your students not being able to do well on that end of year exam so if you can find the curriculum map and find the curriculum guide from your district and you follow it, it is going to be aligned to the state standardized test which gives your students an advantage because then everything you're doing is aligned to that particular exam. Now let me be clear, we don't just want to be a bunch of test prep drones where we're testing students all the time, right, but we do want to make sure our instruction is aligned so that they have an opportunity for success so basically what you're doing here is you're working backwards and we talk about working backwards all the time. You can see that this is the benchmark here. Let's just take a look. We're in the first quarter here and it's science, sixth grade, E for earth space, and then 7.4 is the benchmark and when you do, let's see if I can click that, let's see, okay, it takes me to the standard, very good. When it takes me to the standards, it's all about earth systems and you can see that these are all the different specifications here and these become the basis of your activities, okay? So the best way is to work backwards so let's go back one more time. So we are here and let me zoom in a bit. So we are here, this is the benchmark. So this is earth spheres, this is under the first quarter. Let's just focus on quarter one right now. I know right now I think we're in third quarter but let's just focus on quarter one. You can see that this is the benchmark for this particular activity here. Now we're gonna work backwards. My main goal is to have them achieve that standard but in order to do that, you're gonna have to do some activities, you're gonna have to do some group work, you're gonna have to do some labs, you're gonna have to do some formative assessments and things like that but that is the end all be all and when you click that, that takes me out to CPALMS which is the Florida standards here and then it breaks it down even more and there are, look it, 32 lesson plans related to this. There's a little bit of professional development here related to this. Now sometimes you can get overloaded with too many things that you can choose from so what you wanna stick to is what is the standard I'm responsible for teaching, how am I gonna know that my students got it? So that's kind of what we talk about when we talk about backwards design. Here's the standard, that's what they're responsible for. How will I know that they got that standard? Am I going to just ask them a quick question to see if they got it? Am I gonna give them a test? Am I gonna have them write an essay? Are we gonna do some group work? Am I gonna observe them? Whatever it is, you come up with the way in which you're gonna be able to see that they got it and then you plan the activities. And in this case, the curriculum maps will help you do that because they have all that. If you scroll down here, you can see that. Let me zoom in again. It's all right here and like here, the assignment build models of the interactions of the earth spheres. You could do that, you could Google that, you could figure out an assignment, you can go on Pinterest. I'm sure there's a million things on Pinterest about the earth spheres and all different kinds of things that you can do there. This is just a way to keep you focused and to help you plan your lessons. This will help you. So rule number one in lesson planning, use the district resources. There is somebody downtown who has worked tirelessly to organize this curriculum map for you so that you can spend your time teaching and working with your students rather than trying to piece together all of these standards and figure out how they work in a curriculum map. Somebody downtown has done this for you. Find it on your district website, use it, and then organize it and put yourself into it. Don't just be a robot. You know, you can modify it, but at least here, you're on track to be working towards those standards and you're not like me, my first year teaching where I didn't even know what a standard was, okay? So this will help you out. Hopefully that clears things up for you. Definitely use your district resources and let us know in the comments if you have any more questions and I'll be happy to film about that. Thank you so much for watching today. Don't forget to like and subscribe and hit the notifications button so you get notified when we upload new content. Have an awesome day.