Saving Time: Top 5 Lesson Planning Tips for Teachers

Do you find that your weekends are swamped with lesson planning at all? Or maybe you’ve spent all of your free planning time, and now you have 60 books to review!

Whether you’re searching the internet for the right presentation to show a certain topic to your class or you want the right worksheet to use for a lesson, for many teachers, weekends are full of lesson planning and locating the resources that you can’t find.

To help save you some time and make your weekends that bit longer, we’ve put together a few tips to make lesson planning that little bit quicker and a little less strenuous.

1. Find the right solution and keep to it

Find a planning style that works for you and use it all year. Although online searches may offer a wealth of ideas and resources, sometimes, too much searching can leave you feeling overwhelmed. Your school may have a particular plan you have to use or you may be able to develop your own, but do your research early and find a planning style that works for you – it will help in the long run!

2. Magpie!

Sometimes, copying someone is actually a compliment! Why should you spend loads of time creating something that already exists, and when someone else may have just been kind enough to give it to you online? By finding a website such as OER Commons, which is a dynamic digital library of teacher-created curriculum, you can see what suits you, and you can use it as your base when lesson planning, or put your ideas into the existing format – just pick out the best bits!

3. Think of the end first

This is sometimes also known as ‘backwards planning’ but essentially, it starts with setting a specific objective for your lesson and then bringing elements together to make up the lesson from that overarching goal. Although it may seem simple, even the most experienced teachers sometimes need a little reminder, and a clearly defined objective helps bring all lessons back on track. By centring all your lesson planning around one clear objective, you will help make sure your learners are at the center of instruction, and it will mean you have valuable actionable data to use for future planning and progress monitoring.

4. Work smarter, not harder

It may be an exhausted saying but it really does apply and it’s worth reiterating! It involves you making sure you’re researching resources that align to learning objectives and students’ needs at the start, and then using what you’ve found throughout the school year. By re-using resources you’ve found, you can give yourself back some time where it really matters – working one-on-one with your students or tracking progress to help inform future decisions.

5. Consider different learning styles

Are they visual, auditory or kinaesthetic learners? Are they a combination? Try to consider your students’ different learning styles and evaluate them at the start of the year. All students are individuals and all classes have different personalities, and it’s an idea to work these out to align your lessons to their preferences and needs. Take a look at this article from Edutopia which offers an interesting insight into multiple intelligences.

Edmentum International has a number of solutions that help teachers with improving student outcomes, instruction and saving them valuable time. We want to work with teachers to help them! See all of our solutions and discover how they can support you.