8 Lesson Planning Hacks for Teachers: Tips And Tools that really helps

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A teacher's job is not all about teaching and grading. But we can all agree that teachers do spend most of the time doing only that.

Fortunately for us busy teachers, there are many ways to save time when planning lessons.

Here are 8 hacks — and I’m sure you will recognize some from your own lessons!

Create an outline

Use templates

Organize & Manage

Sync Calendar

Be Realistic

Plan a week ahead

Use Youtube/video resources

Include Games

Create an outline

As the first step, let us create a vague outline of the classes and topics that we would like to cover. This is simply what you would like your students to learn towards the end of the class.

To help you make it simple, here are a few questions that you can get answers to,

What is the topic of the chapter?

What do I want my students to learn at the end of this class?

What is the one objective that I would like my children to take away at the end of this class?

Now that we have listed down the most important key topics, let us break them down to answer the next important following questions.

What are the most important concepts in this particular lesson?

If I run out of time, which topics should I omit and can’t omit?

Use lesson plan templates

There are thousands of lesson planning templates available online now that we know the importance of them. Even though authentic lesson plans bring the teachers learning goals and creativity to life, we could use the lesson plan templates available online to our advantage.

Depending upon the type of lesson plan the school or the teacher requires, here are a few free resources listed for your reference.

class-templates — Organize class content and identify goals and objectives for students with free downloadable lesson plan templates.

Canva — Design customized lesson plans for any course or curriculum with canvas professionally designed lesson plan templates.

teacher planet — Ready-to-use lesson plan templates by grade level, subject area, or common core. You can choose daily, weekly, or even monthly-wise templates.

Adobe — Choose from thousands of beautiful templates to design your own lesson plan in minutes.

Organize & Manage your lesson plan

Will you believe me if I tell you that there are teachers who create lesson plans on-the-go daily. It might be scary, but true. But anyhow, organizing your lesson plans can be a very big game-changer. Whether you create your lesson plans online or offline, I have hacks for you.

Offline

If you are a fan of pen and paper method, you are going to love this.

Simply buy a Lesson Planner Dairy from Amazon and start planning your lessons on them. But it's important to keep them safe.

Find a few best selling Lesson Planners from Amazon listed below

6-Period Teacher Lesson plan

Beautiful Weekly & Monthly Lesson Planner

Affordable Academic Planner

Online

If you are a person who prefers maintaining your documents online to avoid losing them, then there are many ways you can create lesson planning online even using just your mobile phone. Checkout how to simply create and manage your lessons plans in 2 simple steps.

Step 1: Create free Lesson plans online using tools listed below.

Chalk

Nearpod

Blendspace

Peardeck

Step 2: Save the document in google drive for easy reference anytime, anywhere and also don't forget that the data stored online cannot be lost like offline.

Sync Calendar

If it's not on the calendar, It is simply not even there. I cannot stress enough how important it is to sync your lesson plans to your calendar.

A calendar not only helps you stay organized but also allows you to share lesson schedules with students if needed to help them prepare better.

Be Realistic

It is very easy to say that we can finish 2 complete lessons in under 2 weeks but we all know that it is a whole different story to adhere to it.

It's always wise to be realistic when it comes to deciding how much time we need to invest in a lesson plan. Don't forget to include the fun activities, video lessons, and assessments that you will conclude related to the chapter.

Plan a week ahead

Creating a lesson plan takes time, effort, and creativity. Thus, it's always best to be at least a week or even a month ahead when creating a lesson plan for your classes.

Use Youtube/video resources

Don't make your lessons very monotonous. Instead, add a few sessions of video lessons to make students more engaged in the classroom. It will boost their memory and understanding skills like never before.

Include Games

Your lesson plan should never be all about lessons, concepts, and topics. Instead, make it interesting with games and activities at least 2–4 times a week. This will help boost student engagement by at least up to 50%.

Don't trust me? Try it.

In a nutshell!

Now that we have seen all about creating effective lesson plans, do remember that it should help you with a clear outline of your teaching, learning objectives and how much you want to implement them. There will be times when it might not go as planned or overlap. Be Ready for it.