I’ve mapped out this week’s schedule and a kind of lesson plan outline, because that’s all there’s really room for in my notebook. More detailed lesson plans must go on separate sheets of paper.

Yeah, it’s interesting how the expectations for lesson plans change over time and circumstance. For example, in college, you’re given one or several different lengthy templates, depending on the class, but they all contain pretty much the same criteria:

• Lesson title
• Summary
• Learning Objective(s)
• State Standards addressed
• Review Concepts
• Introduction
• Procedure
• Conclusion
• Reflection

Such lesson plans, for which, in college, they grade you, can run to 3 or even 4 pages. A unit plan, consisting of five, ten, however many related lessons, can go on for the length of a thesis.

Sometimes administrators ask for a similar format for a classroom observation.

I have to respect the full lesson plan. It makes the lesson comprehensible: understandable to anyone who might come in and see it happening. It is a lot of work, but it familiarizes you with the standards and forces you to think about how this lesson connects to the one before it, and the one following it.

In reality, though, here is what a typical teacher planner looks like:

I might be mistaken, but I think most experienced teachers don’t at least document their planning anymore than what’s written in the box. You reach a certain level of expertise, and most of your planning stays in your head. At least that is what I’ve heard. And I guess kind of what I’ve experienced.

Generally, the more comfortable I am teaching a program, the less I write down, because I already know it: it’s up there.

I can’t imagine writing a 4-page plan for every lesson everyday. That would be something like 16-20 pages a day! Who has the time?

I’ve heard of some districts who require their teachers to submit their lesson plans to their principal every week. How does the principal even have time to read through that much work?

Writing things down does help me commit them to memory, though, so if a program is new to me, I may be more likely to follow a template and spend more time planning on paper. It’s kind of like I’m downloading the information to my brain, in a weird, reverse way.

So that’s my take on lesson planning. You write it all down…until you don’t. After a while you rely less on what’s in the document and more on what you already know.