Save Everyone's Time — Stop Collecting Lesson Plans
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder argues that requiring teachers to submit lesson plans is a waste of time for both teachers and administrators.
Key Takeaways
- Nobody reads them - Most collected lesson plans are filed and never reviewed
- The time is better spent elsewhere - Teachers should use planning time to actually plan, not to format documents for administrators
- Classroom visits are more informative - Brief, frequent visits tell you far more about instruction than any written plan
Transcript
A major time-saving tip for principals and for teachers, stop asking for lesson plans.
Stop having teachers turn in lesson plans, and you'll save yourself an enormous amount of time, and you will save everyone on your staff an enormous amount of time.
You might be surprised to hear that despite how widespread this practice is of making teachers turn in lesson plans, there's no research behind it.
I've interviewed over 400 authors and researchers for my podcast, Principal Center Radio, and not a single person has ever said, yes, there's credible evidence that making teachers turn in lesson plans is a good practice, that it really helps with anything.
So this is just an enormous opportunity to save time and to eliminate unnecessary work that's happening in your district and may have been happening for years and years.
And the reason I feel so strongly about this is that there is no possible way as a principal that you can review that many lesson plans meaningfully in a week.
You have to either give them a really quick look or you have to spend a huge amount of time on it that is just not justified by the benefit.
And teachers know this, right?
In some cases, people say, oh, I turn in the same plans every week and just change the date, or the plans are really already provided in the curriculum, and just turning them in is an extra step.
There are so many better ways to make sure that everybody is prepared for class, to make sure that everybody is teaching what they're supposed to.
one of which is just to get into classrooms and talk with people about their practice and kind of see where where things are in the curriculum if you if you really want to know but i think this idea that we can't trust teachers to plan or we can't trust teachers to teach what they're supposed to teach and therefore we need to make them turn in a whole bunch of documentation to that effect without actually going into classrooms ourselves like this just doesn't make a lot of sense to me so My recommendation is eliminate the requirement that you turn in lesson plans and recognize where stuff like this comes from.
You know, if something has no research behind it, no evidence behind it, chances are good that it was just made up by district administrators.
And I'm going to be a little bit hard on district administrators in the coming weeks and months because every time I look into a requirement or a practice or a process that has no research behind it, every single time it has come from district administrators.
So if you are a district administrator, please don't take this personally.
but please recognize just how widespread a problem this is of just making things up and saying this is a good practice we're going to require that everyone do it this is a huge problem in the education profession that people without evidence make up these hugely time-consuming requirements and say that this is how we're going to improve student learning.
Like, that's just not true.
That's just not backed by any evidence, and I think we've got to stop doing that.
So if you want to make better decisions as a district administrator, of course look at research, but also listen to teachers.
I mean, teachers are very clear that it is not worth the time that it takes for them to put together lesson plans to turn in.
It is absolutely important to be prepared for class and to plan your lessons, but turning in lesson plans is a whole other ball of wax.
So let me know what you think.