Long Range Planning

Hello everyone,

Don't forget to plan!

You can't really get to anywhere unless you know where you're going, so make sure that you have at least an outline of the entire year. Start backwards and work to now. Don't panic if your plans change and you need to adapt things over the course of the year; just make sure that you have some plans in place at the beginning.

Give a week at the end of the semester for finals, and a week at the beginning for rituals and routines; plan five days in May for the CSTs; plan around the content assessments; try to make sure that you will finish your last unit in time for the students to have a day of review before the final, and some review before the CSTs.

Consider planning units to fit the mood of different times of the year. Your driest material can happen at the first when students are more willing to do it (I always taught grammar first). From Halloween to Christmas, even high school students are easily distracted; plan real attention grabbers during that time. In February, everyone is depressed (A track delays the depression until April), so keep it happy then. The end of the year should probably be culminating previous knowledge, hardly introducing important new material. (It's also field trip season, so be wary of introducing necessary content at that time of year.)

Plan all the major events that you know: holidays, days off, shortened days, minimum days. I always marked mine in red in my planner.

Allow for extra time to stretch the year if necessary. You may find that your students need an extra day or two on a given concept. Don't be so bound to the schedule that you can't take some time to reiterate something.

AFTER you plan the entire year, so back and begin your daily or weekly lesson plans. Don't try to do one without the other; don't try to do them out of order. Don't get frustrated if you have to rearrange.

And don't wing it. The old cliché, "The fail to plan is to plan to fail," is applicable.

Jeff Combe

Once you have planned the year, work on individual lessons.