When you accept a teaching position in a new school, the first thing you should do is meet your team. The other teachers who teach the same grade as you in the school will be a huge help with all sorts of questions and issues that may come up. If you can find one of those teachers that you trust, you can share the planning for your curriculum. Or, you can split the planning between the entire team.
Traditional Lesson Planning
The traditional method of planning lessons as a teacher is to sit at a desk, perhaps at a computer, and write lesson plans. This involves thinking through what you want the students to learn, how you want to introduce the lesson, and what activities will help reinforce the new knowledge. This method of lesson planning can be very time consuming. Over several years of teaching, you will be able to reuse your lessons with minimal additional planning, which should hopefully reduce your planning time dramatically.
Team Lesson Planning
Planning your lessons with a team is not a new concept. Many teams will sit together and plan out a unit or collaborate on spelling lists or other ideas. Take this idea a step further with your team. Instead of sitting together, deciding on a theme and then individually writing out your plans and teaching, consider dividing up the lesson planning. If you have five subjects to teach and five teachers on your team, have each teacher plan one subject and make copies of the lessons to pass out to the other teachers.
Talk together as a team to decide who should take each subject. One teacher may really enjoy teaching math, and thus write excellent lesson plans for math, while another teacher may really enjoy coming up with great lessons for social studies. Allowing each teacher to plan the subject she is strongest in, will strengthen each teacher’s lessons.
Splitting up the Lesson Planning
If your team does not like the idea of dividing up the lesson planning, but there is one other teacher who is willing to split the planning, consider splitting the planning in half. However many teachers are willing to split the planning will help reduce the amount of time you spend writing lesson plans. Once you receive the lesson plans from the other teachers, read through the plans to make sure you understand everything and know what all you need to prepare for the lesson.
Splitting up the lesson planning with other teachers can help reduce the amount of time you spend at school. This idea may not be popular with every teacher, but work together with those who are interested in order to help take advantage of the talents of the other teachers on your team.
Learn more tips about lesson planning including tips for writing a great lesson plan and creating an effective assessment.
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