Lesson Plan 5: Fill & Download for Free

When I first started teaching, there was a 1:1 ratio between planning time and teaching time. That was because I was still learning how to use the resources I had, and I was still writing detailed lesson plans like I learned to do in college.By Christmas break of my first year as a teacher, I had that down to a 1:2 planning/teaching time ratio. I became familiar with how to use the resources I had, I learned my students’ personalities, and, most importantly, I quit making such detailed lesson plans.Now, in my 8th year as a teacher, my planning/teaching time ratio is probably about 1:50. That’s not an exaggeration. I spend very little time planning, because I’ve literally done all of this before. My plans are just a few scribbled notes to remind me what I wanted to cover during that lesson. The rest is in my head.I don’t have to write an entire page describing a single lesson plan for, say, a lesson in transitive verbs. I literally just write that in my plan book: transitive verbs. That’s it. I know what to do from there.

On any given school day, a teacher may teach 5–6 hours of classes. A good teacher can plan for all of those classes in less than 15 minutes. Even quicker if your principal doesn’t require overly-detailed lesson plans from you.Sometimes, my lesson plan for an hour-long class is nothing more than a few words: “the writing process” or “gerunds” or something like that. That’s it. The entire plan. I know what to do from there. I’ve done it plenty of times before.But substitutes don’t know those things. They can’t read your mind. It can take hours to write detailed plans for a substitute for an entire day’s worth of classes. It’s usually easier to just suffer through the sickness and come in to work, if it’s a sickness that’s making you think of getting a sub in the first place. Five to six hours of being miserable while teaching, in exchange for not spending one or two hours writing out really detailed lesson plans that may or may not be followed.Some teachers just avoid the whole problem by having sub-only lesson plans. Those are one-day lessons that are unrelated to whatever the class has been learning before and after. Those are convenient, but they also mean you’ve lost a whole day’s worth of better instruction time, AND you’ve interrupted the flow of a larger unit plan.Plus, students are usually pretty good about figuring out when they’re just being given busy work.I work at private schools, where student discipline isn’t that big of a problem compared to public schools. My public school colleagues have the added problem of locking up/taking home anything they don’t want stolen in their classroom. One of my in-laws, who used to teach in a Chicago public school, always lamented how he couldn’t really personalize his classroom the way I personalized mine, because his students would steal things just for spite. His classroom was very Spartan. Just desks and whiteboards. Everything else, like the projector and even whiteboard markers, he took home with him every night.

It depends on what you mean by “wing it.”If you mean “have absolutely zero idea what to do once the class begins,” that’s only happened to me a few times, all of which were emergencies. I had to cover for another teacher who couldn’t take a class for whatever reason, and I walked into the class with zero plans. Fortunately for me, as an English teacher, I can always pull out old faithful in those situations: creative writing.My favorite go-to creative writing prompt is to show the class a picture, and ask them to make that the end of their story. What leads up to the picture is up to them. Ten minutes of writing and twenty minutes of sharing… and just like that, I’ve killed a half hour of class time.If by “winging it” you mean “have really vague lesson plans… sometimes just a few words…” then the answer is “several times per week.” For example, my lesson plan for one class tomorrow is simply “discuss section 14.” That’s it. The whole lesson plan for a 30-minute class. But I get away with such vague plans because:I’ve done this before. This is where experience REALLY helps.I know exactly what “section 14” is. It’s a 25-page section in a novel that we’re reading that the students were supposed to read over the weekend.I know that I have chatty students who love discussing this novel with me.I just read that section today (I’ve read it in previous years when I taught this same novel, though), and I marked several discussion points on the pages in question.So tomorrow’s class will likely go something like this:Me: On page 142, why do you think the author spent so much time describing the landscape?Students: [Five minutes of talking about possible reasons why…].Me: You all bring up some valid points. How about page 144, when the main character starts to cry? Am I supposed to feel bad for this character? Or did they kind of deserve it?Students: [Five minutes of trying to convince me how I should feel about this character…].And so on. I have to rope some stragglers into the conversation, or prod the conversation along sometimes, but most of my job just involves getting the students to think about something they otherwise would have just glanced over.I also have the added benefit of having not one, not two, but three different online learning programs that my students use. They’re all really useful, and some days that’s all we do… the online programs… but other days, I use them as “filler.” I put stuff on them for students to do when they’re done with other work. If my “winging it” discussions fall short, because the students aren’t as chatty as I’d anticipated, I just quickly put some work on one of those programs for them.It wasn’t always this way. My first year as a teacher, I had page-long, detailed lesson plans for every single class I taught. I’d spend 2–3 hours per day just planning for the 5–6 hours of teaching I did every day.But over the years, thanks to experience and the realization that a lot of that planning time was wasted fretting over details that no one really paid attention to anyway, I narrowed them down quite a bit. Now, my lessons plans for an entire week… six classes per day, five days per week… so 30 total lesson plans… fit on two pages, total. They’re mostly page numbers or short descriptions/reminders of things I want to cover that day.