Teacher planning is an essential piece of the education puzzle, but why does it remain such an enigma?
Planning is an important executive function for every profession, but for teachers, it remains essential. Benjamin Franklin is credited with stating that "Failure to plan is planning for failure," and seasoned administrators will almost universally agree that teachers who enter a classroom with a plan recognize success. to take these sentiments a bit further, teachers who plan for deep learning recognize deep learning as an outcome.
But what is deep planning? We've all experienced the traditional Madeline Hunter lesson plans, and while these are great for providing those connections between learning and teacher/student behavior that are necessary for all teachers, their depth and focus may become restrictive as the lens of a complete course plan fits together.
So what should a plan do and how can it inform daily, weekly, monthly -- even semester and year-long pursuits? Stephen Covey, arguably one of the world's great leaders in coaching executive function, said to "...begin with the end in mind." For teachers, this means identifying standards, objectives, and learning outcomes. Wiggins and McTighe(1998) identified this as key to the craft in their discussion about course purpose and planning, Education by Design. As with many pedagogical supports, their big ideas really aren't new, though they do offer refinement to already solid educational theory. Teachers must identify standards and outcomes for courses, and locating those big idea standards early in the planning process can help direct activities and define necessary skills and knowledge. This also helps identify the kinds of activities and the sequences that are necessary to meet these demands.
As we mature as teachers, we find lessons that overwhelmingly support those desired end results. Being able to reach back to those historical successes allows us to build new successes, and the beauty of it isn't really in the connections to standards (which is great in the big picture), isn't in the thoroughly thought-out teacher and corresponding student actions (which is also huge in terms of intentionality), but in the fact that all of the materials necessary to accomplish the task are there.
One of the things I encourage teachers to do is to use the tools and skills that are already at their disposal. Canvas LMS provides a great place for teachers to collect materials and organize them into sequential groupings. Canvas provides a calendar interface that can help teachers organize by day, week, and month. Teachers can join micro and macro pieces of their educational puzzle with this simple tool.
Here are some suggestions that will help teachers use Canvas as a supplement to their planning process:
- Organize modules by week. Something that can help students locate information is to title each module with the week number and the date(s) associated with that week. A quick way of updating these labels is to use a spreadsheet to produce the text, being sure to use formulas that will change the variables.
- Make sure that ALL assignment materials and supplementary resources appear in each module.
- Break each weekly module into days of the week using text labels, but to limit the work associated with updating for new iterations of the course, use generic day labels like Monday, Tuesday, etc.
- To satisfy those directional, macro-driven course needs, provide students with a weekly list of objectives, including standards. This keeps teachers on track with the activities that they set up for each week, and it also informs students of the big concepts skills they should be able to exhibit or contribute to by the end of the week.
While it is not always possible, avoid hiding materials behind links and other variables that could break or become programmatically inactive. Computers are great, but complicating navigation can cause multiple problems. If it CAN go directly in the module without violating copyrights or other considerations, it SHOULD go directly in the module.
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