Hierarchy of Lesson Planning

As a teacher, you teach hours of lessons every day, and all those lessons have to be planned out beforehand. This can be time consuming, but it doesn’t have to be. Let’s start with covering the basics, and then we’ll talk the practical tips for speeding up the process in later posts.

There is a hierarchy to lesson planning. Before you start writing individual lesson plans, you need to have some foundational planning in place:

1. Scope & Sequence: This is your foundation and roadmap for the whole school year. It lays out when you will teach each standard for all the subjects you teach. Ideally, it should be scheduled by week. This is something that should be planned as a grade level team so that you are all teaching the same core content at the same time.
2. Unit: Larger topics and standards need to be planned out in units. Units breaks down a larger standard into the objectives that need to be covered in order for students to become proficient in the larger standard. This should also be planned as a grade level team, especially for your core subjects.
3. Individual Lesson Plan: This is the detailed plan of how you will teach a single objective.

To plan the most effectively, you should plan in the above order. While you can plan individual lessons without having a scope and sequence or a unit, you are setting yourself up for a disorganized school year, and you might let standards slip through the cracks. Although it takes some time at the beginning to set up a scope and sequence and units, I promise it will save you time overall.