When you’re a teacher, we know that lesson planning is a big part of your life. Almost at any given moment, if you’re not building and writing lesson plans, you’re living them. Lesson plans are often considered the essential unseen piece of your teaching. For your eyes only, so to speak. But do they have to remain unseen? At Curriculum Trak, we don’t think so. We see value in using your lesson plans as a means to collaborate with other teachers on your team. Consider the value of using the CT Lesson Planner as a collaborative tool.
Here’s one example of how this lesson plan collaboration could be beneficial to you: standards alignment. You’ve been using standards as a means of tracking the viability and thoroughness of your curriculum maps. In the Lesson Planner, you can dive in deeper with those standards by selecting specific standards from the unit to attach to each individual lesson. When attaching standards to lesson plans becomes a regular practice, you’ll find the Benchmarks by Unit report especially helpful (find this report on the Lessons menu). Here you can analyze how well your lessons have incorporated the standards you’ve attached to your map. Not only that, you can take a look at how other teachers have aligned their lesson plans with standards, giving you a better idea of where the gaps are in your daily instruction or where you might be overlapping with other grade levels or courses.
Or consider this benefit of collaboration with your lesson plans: available search functionality. You can Search by Keyword (choose this function from the Lessons menu) for a topic to see which classes will be instructing students in that particular area. This allows you to easily connect with other teachers and recognize the strengths and weaknesses of instruction on that topic. Also, you can look for plans and ideas by choosing View Content By Field in the lesson planner. For example, maybe you want to look at other teachers’ assessments to determine the placement of your own assessments.
With these search and report tools, it’s easy to see how using the CT Lesson Planner promotes strong unity of curriculum and effective collaboration among your staff team. We would be glad to provide you with a free demo to show you how the Lesson Planner could support your school, and we offer complimentary training for a pilot group of teachers to help them begin exploring the Lesson Planner. Feel free to reach out to us with any questions you have by contacting support@dis-solutions.com.
