Sharing Lessons Just Got Easier

Curriculum Trak’s Lesson Planner is designed to do three big things:

1. Help teachers tie their lesson plans back to school-wide curriculum as they build their own database of instructional practices.
2. Help administrators get a clearer picture of how daily instruction is connected to school-wide curriculum.
3. Help teachers share instructional practices and details in an easy way.

The third aspect of the lesson planner just got better with a new copy feature. Multiple lessons can now be copied at once from a co-teacher’s lessons database. This is slightly different than our team teacher option (find out more about that here). This update allows for more efficiency within the lessons database of other teachers who have ever created lessons for the class you currently teach.

By default, any current teacher, will automatically have access to the lessons database of other teachers, past or present, who have created lessons for the courses the current teacher now teaches. The current teacher simply needs to enter the “My Lessons Database” area and change their name to the name of the teacher whose lessons database they would like to review. From there, they will have the option to preview the lesson or print the lesson, or, if they know the lesson is something they would like to add to their own database, they can check the copy button. After they submit their selections, those lessons will be copied into the current teacher’s lessons database with “Copy of…” added to the original lesson title.

While this is a minor change, it can have major implications on best practices for sharing lessons. Here are a few:

1. If a master teacher leaves your school, we would recommend simply setting their user account to inactive. This will leave their lesson content available to other teachers who may pick up their courses into the future. This, in our opinion, is a better approach than updating the leaving teacher’s information for the new teacher’s information because it preserves the database, allows the new teacher to pick and choose what might be helpful, and prevents other technical concerns that come with updating user accounts.
2. Co-teachers who would like to copy from each others work can now do so with an automatic “Copy of…” label added to the lessons. We would recommend that this tag be preserved for the sake of reporting purposes, specifically the “Benchmarks by Unit” report. The additional tag will add extra clarity about how many times a specific benchmark is referenced in instruction. As you drill down to the lessons created for the benchmark, the “Copy of…” tag will help indicate multiple uses of the same lesson plan.
3. Since copying just got easier, it is important to keep your lesson databases as clean as possible. Delete unwanted lesson plans on a regular basis. Every lesson plan will feed into a report for various purposes. As others review your lessons or how those lessons are used, you will want to make sure they have a clear picture of the most relevant and important information. Keeping your own database as clean as possible will add to the level of transparency and efficiency in school-wide lesson planning by omitting extraneous material. Setting a lesson as inactive will have the same effect.

Let us know if you have any questions about this new feature or the use of the lesson planner in general.