New Teachers: Lesson and Curriculum Planning

Curriculum-Planning Tips and Strategies

• Countdown to Your First Year: Making Planning Manageable: Need help figuring out where to start when planning for your first year of teaching? Discover answers to general questions, and find a few go-to resources. (Teaching Channel, 2014)
• Backwards Planning Takes Thinking Ahead: Review five steps to backwards-plan your lessons—it’s like preparing for a vacation. (Edutopia, 2012)
• Understanding by Design Overview: Bookmark this step-by-step overview of the book Understanding by Design to better understand this approach to designing courses. (Vanderbilt University)
• 3 Ways to Plan for Diverse Learners: What Teachers Do: Focus on content, process, and product during lesson planning to give students opportunities to grow and shine as individuals. For more on differentiating instruction, the other posts in this series are great resources—also visit Edutopia’s Differentiated Instruction page. (Edutopia, 2014)
• Designing Learning That Matters: Explore four ideas for bringing the characteristics of deep learning to classrooms and school learning. (Edutopia, 2015)
• To Teach Students First: Meet diverse learners’ needs through a range of classroom strategies: lecture, discussion, experiential learning, games, student presentations, technology integration, and free response writing. (Edutopia, 2015)

Crafting Unit and Lesson Plans

• Planning the Best Curriculum Unit Ever: Focus on the granular aspects of planning ahead for the new school year. Be sure to download the printable checklist associated with this post. (Edutopia, 2014)
• 9 Ways to Plan Transformational Lessons: Craft transformational lessons through planning, mindfulness, and a commitment to shift away from educational approaches of the past. Includes a printable tip list for easy reference. (Edutopia, 2014)

Aligning Instruction to Standards

• Common Core and Planning: Organizing a Unit of Instruction: Discover several strategies to help you exercise creativity while planning units that align to the standards. (Edutopia, 2014)
• Lesson Planning and Common Core: A Unit Based on TED.com: Learn from one teacher’s experience planning a Common Core–aligned blended genre unit where students researched and wrote their own persuasive speeches in the TED format. (Edutopia, 2011)
• Resources for Understanding the Common Core State Standards: Looking for resources to help you navigate the Common Core State Standards? Explore Edutopia’s educators’ guide to websites, organizations, articles, and other resources looking at this system of standards and how they’re assessed. (Edutopia, 2013)

Finding Open Resources

• Free Is Good: An argument for why you should use open educational resources (OER) and information on where to find them. Includes a link to a Google Sheets compilation put together by the writer that lists more than 100 repositories of OER (Edutopia, 2017)

• Academic Sponge Activities: Find examples of activities to soak up precious time that would otherwise be lost. Hint: They should be fun as well as educational. (Edutopia, 2014)

Implementing Project-Based Learning

• Getting Started With Project-Based Learning: Hoping to pilot project-based learning (PBL) this year? Explore Edutopia’s curated compilation of online resources for understanding and beginning to implement PBL. (Edutopia, updated 2016)

For more curriculum-planning resources, visit Edutopia’s Curriculum Planning page. Looking for additional resources for new teachers? Visit the Resources Toolkit for New Teachers page for other curated guides and check out all of Edutopia’s content on the New Teachers page.