Stop Asking Teachers to Turn in Lesson Plans — Visit Classrooms Instead
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder argues that collecting lesson plans is an ineffective substitute for actually being in classrooms.
Key Takeaways
- Lesson plans on paper don't equal good instruction - A beautifully written plan doesn't guarantee effective teaching
- Classroom visits are more informative - Five minutes in a classroom tells you more than any document
- Save everyone's time - Eliminating plan collection frees teachers to plan and administrators to visit
Transcript
If you're a principal, what should you have teachers turn into on a regular basis?
My recommendation is nothing but grades.
You don't need lesson plans.
You don't need data.
You don't really need teachers to turn in anything to have a good sense of what's going on in classrooms.
All you have to do if you ever want to know what's going on in classrooms is stop by, stay for a few minutes, chat with the teacher, and get a sense of it yourself through just a firsthand visit.
I think so much time goes into making lesson plans that didn't really need to be written out in any particular way because the teacher was clear already what they were going to do in the lesson, in the unit, and in a lot of cases, it's already written out in the curriculum.
so we're doing an enormous amount of work we're doing millions of dollars worth of labor mostly kind of extra time unpaid just to turn in lesson plans that nobody is actually going to read and that to me is the the real kicker that when teachers turn in lesson plans usually there's not time to read them if you have 30 or 50 or 100 teachers there's no way you're reading all of those lesson plans and getting anything super valuable out of them but you will get something valuable out of visiting the classroom yourself if you want to see what's going on so I highly recommend getting into classrooms.
I have a book called Now We're Talking, 21 Days to High Performance Instructional Leadership that is all about classroom walkthroughs and talking with teachers about their practice.
And I have 10 questions that you can ask.
If you go to principalcenter.com slash feedback, you can download those 10 questions to ask when you visit classrooms that won't put people on the spot, but that will.
give you a sense of what's taking place and how the teacher is thinking about the learning.
But I think we've got to stop asking for lesson plans.
I think we've got to stop asking for data that we're not going to look at anyway, because it's not helping anything.
And what it is doing is breaking the camel's back.
It's the straw that breaks the camel's back.
It's one more thing that people do not really have time for that we don't really need as leaders.
So there are probably lots of other things that we could stop asking for.
If you have ideas, leave a comment.
Let me know what could principals stop asking for that would take something off of teachers' plates, free up time for the far too great amount of work they already have to do, and not really be missed, right?
We're not really going to miss lesson plans because we don't really look at them anyway.
I think that's kind of the reality.
So if you are a teacher, let me know.
What would make your job easier?
What would disappear from your plate and leave you better off if your principal said, hey, you can stop turning this in.
I don't need it.
I don't need to look at it.
Let me know.