Teacher Lesson Planner: Top Factors To Consider

A well-developed teacher lesson plan can help educators begin their classes with a detailed strategy for delivering the curriculum to students.  In the past, many educators depended on pen and paper planners to keep track of their upcoming lessons. Today, digital tools make it easy for teachers to manage their classrooms using cloud-based platforms. When teachers choose a cloud-based lesson planner, they can streamline their workflow to deliver higher-quality education to their students.

Teacher Lesson Planner: A Brief Overview

A well-designed teacher lesson plan helps teachers foster student learning, engagement, and retention. The best teacher lesson planners help instructors coordinate everything about their day at school including meetings, homework assignments, student obligations, and much more.

Tips to Create an Effective Teacher Lesson Plan for an Online Classroom

1. Set an Explicit Objective for the Lesson

Specific learning objectives provide both the instructor and students with an achievable target which helps maintain focus on content standards.  As the teacher establishes learning objectives for a lesson, they should be explicit about what the students can achieve at the end of every lesson.

For instance, if your lesson objective is to help the students acquire a new skill or concept, begin entering this objective in your lesson planner like,  “Students should be able to perform XX skills.”  This will help you streamline the procedure of defining the learning content and ultimately assist the students in accomplishing their specified objectives.  

2.  Add Visuals to your Lesson Plan

Students typically tend to remember what they see, what they read, and what they hear. Including visuals in the lesson plans helps teachers appeal to multiple learning styles.

Some of the best ways to add visuals to your lesson plan include:

• Replacing some handouts and reading selections with videos summarizing the information.
• Instead of emailing explanatory documents to your students, send your students interactive videos with captions and transcriptions.
• Use presentations to emphasize crucial facts during your lesson.

3. Maintain a Precise and Consistent Structure

A consistent structure is crucial to keep learners engaged and concentrated. An effortless way to keep a detailed and consistent format throughout your lesson or course planning is by forming a preliminary and comprehensive outline of all tasks, modules, tools, due dates, etc.

Creating a concrete lesson plan structure will help you identify thematic subjects that you can organize as modules or units to ensure consistent flow. For best results, create a checklist of all the content you need to teach in class using a comprehensive index of resources you intend to use during a lecture.

Top Factors to Consider for Your Teacher Lesson Planner Software

• Aligning curriculum with state and national standards. It is important that the lesson plan that teachers use accurately covers the standards that the government measures student progress on.
• Monitoring student progress. For each student, you should be able to monitor their progress in the lessons that are being taught and where there are knowledge gaps. Different students tend to learn at different paces, so being able to personalize lessons based on the student's understanding of the subject allows teachers to provide higher quality instruction.
• Keeping parents involved in their child’s progress. Parents should be involved in the educational process for their children. The software should allow parents to keep up to date on their child’s knowledge within a lesson or subject so they can help their child after school hours.
• Keeping a consistent learning schedule. A lesson planner software should be able to be used across teachers so that all students experience a consistent learning path. Having shared lesson plans across teachers also allow teachers to produce the highest quality curriculum possible through shared learnings.
• Sharing best practices for teachers. Teachers should be able to easily share best practices, activities, and resources across subject areas so that the highest quality education can be provided to students.
• Accessing lesson templates. Allowing teachers to access standard lesson templates enables teachers to focus on how to improve existing lessons rather than having to reinvent the wheel. Using shared knowledge, teachers are able to create lesson plans in less time while potentially offering higher-quality plans.

The Bottom Line

Embarc is a leading learning software and planning tool for teachers that helps connect learning objectives to a continuous cycle of development, delivery, assessment, and refinement for teachers, classrooms, and grade levels within K-12 school districts. Embarc helps your school align curriculum with state and national standards, develop a transparent curriculum that guarantees ongoing and systematic growth, and improve efficiencies by reducing duplication of effort.

With the help of an online teacher lesson planner, you can save planning time and help students achieve improved results. Educators can easily design a precise outline of the learning course and effective methods of incorporation for a more engaging student classroom experience that helps students be more successful.