Planning for instruction is the heart of effective teaching. Teachers must deliberately design instruction that supports every student in meeting rigorous academic standards to ensure that every student succeeds. Planning that respects learners, their diversity, and the essential nature of the discipline is the key to successful teaching.
To teach the Lord of the Flies, I created a comprehensive novel study unit plan to guide my instruction and ensure that students achieved the learning goals I intended. The unit plan is here: Unit Plan for Lord of the Flies. The unit incorporates summative and formative assessment strategies and lays out a plan for intended learning experiences for the nine week duration of the novel unit.
To supplement the over-arching unit goal, I used daily lesson plans (some lessons were more than a day) to shape daily instruction. These comprehensive lesson plans kept me focused on the learning objectives and reminded me to follow the widely approved strategy of direct teaching, guided practice, and independent practice to make sure all students were supported as they learned new skills and assayed new content. Here is a copy of one of my daily lesson plans from the Lord of the Flies unit: LOTF Intro Unit Lesson 4 – Symbolism.
To keep planning on track, I constantly reviewed my instructional plans in relation to what happened in class. I maintained a running spreadsheet with topical headings of the plans for the next week or more, and adjusted the sheet daily to reflect events in the school, identifying some activities or lessons as candidates to cut if we ran long exploring another topic. This meant I was always over-planned and kept a running record of the topics and lessons we had covered to ensure alignment between instruction and assessment. Here is a copy of a representative week’s sheet: Student Schedule March 9 – English 10
