Unit Planning
The heart of planning, at least for me.
I've found that the heart of planning is much more about the unit than the lesson. I do plan lessons, sure. But the most valuable time I spend planning is when I sit down to plan a unit, a stretch of instruction anywhere from three to seven weeks long.
Here are three big goals I have when I unit plan:
Coherence
Coherence is hard. It's all the ways that lessons work together toward a larger goal. One lesson fits into the next, or anticipates a future challenge and previews it, or introduces a representation early to set up a future encounter. I think this is the one that is hardest things to do for individual teachers. I rely on the Illustrative Math curriculum for coherence. The structure and sequencing of the units, the thoughtful use of representations, the variety of contexts and word problems, and the level of rigor save me tons of work trying to do all that myself. Any changes I make, I try to retain the spirit of the sequence that IM put together.
Practice
Practice is important, and that's the piece that I think is hardest for any packaged curriculum. I know my students and I can respond when I see they need more practice or they are ready to move on. I anticipate ahead of time a bunch of places where practice might be important, and leave a little slack to add practice as needed. Sometimes it's a bit of practice before a lesson with a prerequisite skill, sometimes it's a bit of practice after a lesson to get confident with a key idea, sometimes it's extra practice with that hard topic from last week, sometimes it's mixed practice with a bunch of topics from the unit.
Engagement
While the IM curriculum has a bunch of great, engaging tasks, it also starts to feel stale like any packaged resource if it's all I'm using. I always substitute in a few of my own activities, or a few other resources that are either more engaging or just a pleasant change of pace. Adapting curriculum to my strengths and my goals helps it to feel authentic, and not something I'm marching through because I have to. The more I teach the same curriculum, the more I understand which lessons that are great and worth leaving as is and which ones I want to modify.
Planning
Here's what this planning looks like for me:
I start by looking through all of the IM lessons in the unit. I write them down on slips of paper with notes describing what the goal is, and a bit of commentary on how short or long the lesson is or how much I like it. Then I make slips for all the extra activities I could include — Desmos lessons, random other stuff I've used before, stuff I've created. Then I think about DeltaMath skills. DeltaMath is the best tool I've found for practice but it's far from perfect. I list all the relevant skills, think about where they fit in the unit, and think about what pieces are missing. Finally I think about other practice — activities I've created in the past, activities I want to create to fill a gap, places I want to do a bit of quick mini whiteboard practice, places that could benefit from some prerequisite skill work. Finally, if there's anything else I want to add to the unit I toss it in. Then I start to fit all that stuff together by creating a big flow with the slips of paper. This way of visualizing things is really helpful to see how one lesson fits into the next and how I fit pieces into places where something is missing. I end up with a giant list of everything I could possible include, and then pare it down to what is manageable and focused on my biggest priorities. I try hard to keep the coherence of the original curriculum while also adapting it to fit my needs. I end up with something where the core throughline is what IM put together. That throughline helps me to create a coherent whole. My adjustments maximize thoughtful practice and engagement to build off of what IM has put together.
I tinker with it for a bit, put it into a spreadsheet, and keep the cards in case I need to reimagine the unit. The whole process takes me about an hour, 8 times a year. It's not a substitute for the day-to-day lesson planning I do to make sure I understand the goals of each lesson and have everything ready to facilitate those lessons effectively. But minute for minute, those minutes I spend unit planning are the most valuable of the year. It's not easy to carve out an uninterrupted hour but it's worth the effort.
I’m lucky that I work at a school with a high-quality curriculum, and also the freedom to adapt as I see fit. I think this is a good model for what teaching should look like. Plenty of teachers can teach well without any curriculum, but it’s not sustainable for new teachers and inventing your own curriculum takes valuable time away from all the other things teachers need to do. On the other side of the spectrum, forcing teachers to march through a curriculum with perfect fidelity encourages us to ignore the students in front of us and whether they’re actually learning anything.
One final note. I sometimes hear people talk about how trying to lesson plan more than a day or two in advance is silly or impossible because they need to respond and adjust after each lesson. There's a ton of value in responding and adjusting based on how lessons go. I also think going into a unit without at least a rough plan is irresponsible. When I make a plan for a unit I put an extra day or two in to adjust if I need to, and I leave some lessons with extra time to make smaller adjustments if I need. I start the year with a very rough schedule using estimates for each unit that leave 2-3 weeks of extra time — for units where I realize I need extra time, and also for random lockdowns and weather and harebrained ideas from admin and whatever else throws off my schedule. My plan will never be perfect and I try to design it so I have the flexibility to adjust. But I also don't want to spend an extra two weeks on my second unit because it didn't go well, and then spend an extra week on my third unit, and then another on my fourth, and end up surprised when I run out of time at the end of the year.