Getting the most out of Lesson Plan Manager

Lesson Plan Manager is included in School Site Manager. Here's how students, teachers and principals get the most benefit from it.

Start Simple

Keep the goal in mind from the beginning: to communicate what's covered and what's expected to students, parents and administrators while helping the teacher to be better prepared.

We recommend that you always allow your lesson plans to appear on your section calendar automatically for the benefit of parents and students. Note that only the public portions of your lesson plans will appear on the section calendar. The "backstage" parts, concerned with how you will teach the material, is kept private.

Lesson Plan Manager can accommodate detailed lesson plans, with each day's plans linked to specific state learning objectives. But that's not typically how teachers start using it.

Simple Start Method 1: Start accumulating simple daily lesson plans using the My Sections This Week page. My Sections This Week is similar to a paper lesson planner. It's useful for the basics: the name of the lesson, the material that will be covered and any homework assignments. After you've accumulated a semester or year of lesson plans, you can reuse them the next year and improve upon them.

Simple Start Method 2: Many teachers have a set of simple lesson plans in a spreadsheet or text document. School Site Manager has a loader to import the lesson plans into our Lesson Plan Manager.

Improve

Once you have a set of simple lesson plans, improve them. Here are some ways that lesson plan sets can be improved.

• Tie lesson plans to curriculum plans through unit lesson plans. Lesson Plan Manager allows you to create unit lesson plans in addition to daily lesson plans. Unit lesson plans are essentially the output of your curriculum planning process. By creating unit lesson plans and linking them to daily lesson plans, you integrate the curriculum plans into the day-to-day classroom activity.
  Some schools start with unit lesson plans. That way, students and parents get an overall view of what the entire course will cover. Then, the teacher adds daily lesson plans as the course proceeds, linking them to the unit lesson plans.
• Add more detail. While the My Sections This Week page is a simple lesson plan format covering only what will be covered and homework assignments, the Detailed Lesson Plan page implements an expanded version of the Madeline Hunter lesson plan format. The Madeline Hunter format includes fields concerning how you'll capture students' attention, how you will present the material, how you will test for understanding and so on. We've expanded the Madeline Hunter format by adding fields for technology use, relevant links and relevant downloadable files.

Track learning standards

Lesson Plan Manager allows teachers to specify which learning standard objectives are addressed by a day's lesson. Teachers need only check off the relevant learning standard objectives from a list.

If assessments indicate problems with particular learning standard objective, one can see immediately all the lesson plans in which objective was taught. It's clear where improvement is needed.

Track lesson plan policy adherence

If your school has a policy that lesson plans must be written or must be written prior to the week in which they are taught, use School Site Manager to help. The Site To Do List can make a variety of queries into the database including immediately identifying classes for which lesson plan preparation is behind schedule. Rather than shuffling through a stack of paper lesson plans, administrators can check for adherence to policy in seconds.

Benefits of using Lesson Plan Manager

Using Lesson Plan Manager helps you in the following ways.

• You will improve communication with parents about what is happening in your classroom. That helps them become involved which is likely to improve student achievement.
• You will close the feedback loop between learning standards - instruction - assessment - improvement of instruction. By keeping track of when objectives are taught you'll know where to improve.
• By linking unit lesson plans to daily lesson plans, the curriculum planning work that typically occurs in the summer (and is then often ignored) remains an integral part of instruction throughout the school year.
• Teachers can reuse and improve their plans year-to-year and share them with others and with new faculty members.