Help Teachers Plan with the End in Mind
At one of the schools where I coach, a ninth-grade teacher (who requested not to be named) felt overwhelmed and frustrated. With 125 students and a new curriculum, he was drowning in a sea of student work and lesson plans. Our coaching time focused on developing a strategy for the spring semester.
The teacher expressed anxiety about curriculum mapping, noting aloud that it was not how he typically thought or planned. Rather than reject his adapted style, I tried to build off of it. We sat before a whiteboard in his room, pondering the visual cluster of ideas he had drawn with a dry-erase marker. Using this brainstorm as a rich starting point, I helped him to map these ideas into a tight, disciplined curriculum map, which included big ideas, specific learning outcomes, and assessments to measure student understanding.
After a couple of meetings, he had articulated a powerful set of goals for his students and knew how he would measure them. More importantly, he expressed a renewed sense of self-confidence in his ability to plan.