Secondary ELA: Curriculum Planning Part I: What are You Teaching?

Curriculum planning is one of the most challenging aspects of teaching, but especially for newer teachers.  Planning for ELA is particularly tough due to the many different standards across several strands that need to be covered. On top of that, there's the challenge of limited time and the need to create engaging lessons that meet the needs of all students.  There is so much to consider - where does one even start??

The next few blog posts will cover how to create a pacing guide for your school year – at least how I do it. There is no one-size-fits-all approach, and ultimately, every teacher needs to find what works for him or her.

When you first begin planning for the year, there are many considerations. For me, I've broken them down into the big three:

1. Major Units and/or Works: What major units or works are you teaching?
2. Standards: What standards are you going to address with each lesson?
3. Time Allotment: How much time do you have to teach each unit?

Over the next three blog posts, we'll take a closer look at each one.  Let’s dig in....

What are you Teaching?

The first place to start is by knowing what you will be teaching during the school year. Here are a few things to consider:

• If you are new to a school or district, do you have a required or scripted curriculum? If so, what resources are readily available to you?
• Are you going to need to create your curriculum? How will you decide what to teach? Do you have access to physical and/or online textbooks or content?
• What is flexible and what is not? Are there some things you MUST teach?
• Does your school participate in department planning, or are you a lone wolf?
• If you are a new teacher, do you have materials from the previous teacher or a mentor teacher on site?

Once you know the answers to these questions, you can begin painting the big picture. At this initial stage, we are only trying to get an overview of the year; nothing is set in stone! If you can create your own content calendar (as I am lucky enough to do), consider the pacing guide a living, breathing document subject to change due to circumstances, student needs, time constraints, or other factors.

Step 1: Confirm your Major Units

In this stage, you finalize your major units or works based on the considerations listed above. At this stage, you should also consider how you are going to structure your units - by themes, essential questions, textbook units, etc.? Again, this isn’t set in stone, but it does help if you know this before you begin.

If at all possible, teach things you LOVE! When you are passionate, it is infectious, and that will give you the best chance of having engaged students.

Step 2: Group Your Content into Major Areas

In this step, you are taking a big picture look at how to fit some of those standard strands under the umbrella of your major units? Do you have any ongoing (weekly or daily) activities such as bell ringers, journals, or SSR? Do you have standalone vocabulary, grammar units, or literary works? Can you tie your writing assignments to the literature you are studying? If you already know any supplementary texts or materials you plan to use, add those now.

My school is divided into 4 9-week periods, and administration requires that we group content into 4 major categories for each period: narrative, argumentative, literary analysis and expository.  So, I created a Google doc that helps me organize my planning for the year based on these criteria.  This image shows last year’s major units (I’ve changed up things for the upcoming year, and that is still a work in progress! 😊):

I've uploaded these free templates on TpT! You can find the one shown above, plus two additional versions with space to include standards (which I’ll cover in my next blog post in this series).

Coming up in my next Blog Post: Curriculum Planning Part 2:

• Where to find information that simplify the standards
• How I identify the standards to teach with each unit
• A long list of FREE and phenomenal ELA resources

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