Welcome to the final blog post in this curriculum planning series! While there is so much more to say about curriculum planning than what I've written here, I decided to keep it to the key components. As mentioned in the first post, what you create now is a “living, breathing document” that is subject to change. That said, I do believe it is important to establish some structure for your curriculum before the school year begins, but it is equally important to be flexible and adaptive so that it can evolve with your students' needs and the demands of the school year.
So, let’s dive in to create your pacing guide:
Step 1: Lay out your Annual Calendar
Start by mapping out the school year on a calendar. Identify key dates such as holidays, school events, half days, field trips, testing periods, grade period end dates, and any other significant days that may impact your instructional time. Then, add in your personal calendar to include any professional development days, planned absences, and important personal commitments. This comprehensive overview will help you anticipate potential disruptions and give you a clear picture of the available teaching days so that you can plan your units accordingly.
Step 2: Layer in Your Constants
If you have activities that you know you do daily or weekly—such as Bellringers/Journals, Vocabulary lessons (especially if you use a specific program), SSR (Sustained Silent Reading), and similar routines—add them to your calendar. I suggest color-coding these activities to help you quickly identify them to make it easier to organize your schedule, ensure consistency and see at a glance how often each activity occurs, allowing for better planning and adjustment as needed. At this point, you don’t need to know the content of these activities - just use these labels as placeholders.
For me, I don’t have many “constants.” I use journals within my units and don’t do a structured bellringer daily, and I work in my grammar and vocabulary within each of my units. The 3 constants I have are library time once a week and SSR time on Fridays. I also schedule our Current Event presentations over several Fridays during every 9 weeks (you can read more about my current events projects here), and I set that calendar at the beginning of the year, so those are layered into my pacing guide.
Considerations Before Moving Forward
From this point, there are several ways
to go depending on which planning approach you intend to take. I’m only going to mention 2 of them here:
1. * Traditional/Linear Approach: This approach follows a predetermined and linear sequence, dividing the curriculum evenly across the instructional year. It aims to ensure that all content is covered within a specified timeframe, typically assigning a fixed amount of time for each topic or unit.
2. * Backward Design Approach: This approach starts with the desired learning outcomes and works backward to plan instruction and pacing. Educators identify the essential understandings, knowledge, and skills students should acquire and then develop a sequence of lessons and activities to achieve those goals within the available time.
I kind/sorta do a combination of the
two of these, which I will explain below.
Step 3: Place Your Major Units
If you've finalized your major units and their general time frames for the school year, you're ready to determine the duration of each unit (if you haven't already) and plan the additional strands (grammar, writing, etc.) you'll be teaching alongside these major units. If you refer back to my overview example in Part I of this planning series, you'll see the major units for Quarter 1 along with the writing, speaking and listening, and grammar/language units planned for that period.
*side note* Before I begin this stage of placing my units on the calendar, I like to “flesh out” my planning a bit in my major overview by including some specific additional content and standards. This helps me determine the time-frame of this unit.
At this stage, especially if you're a new teacher, going into this much detail might feel overwhelming, and that's completely okay! Just decide how much time you'll allocate for each unit and remember that you can adjust as you go. Start by setting the beginning and end points for your units in your pacing calendar. Keep in mind that this is a flexible document designed to adapt to your needs and the needs of your students throughout the year. It's perfectly fine to add or subtract components as you progress through them during the year.
Let’s get to the specifics of layering in those units. Here’s how I do it:
*I start by looking at the major reading/literature unit I’m teaching. I’ll stick with my example from last year and my Narrative Unit that began with poetry. I also know that in the writing strand, my students will write a narrative poem. In looking at my calendar (with consideration to the other things I need to cover during this unit), I know I have about 3ish weeks to cover this, so I put the first day and last day on the calendar because I know I'll be moving from poetry into the narrative unit in the textbook in week 4.
Then, I do this same process for each unit in the first quarter and continue it with each quarter of the year. At this point, you are putting in the start and end dates.
Because I’ve considered the topics for my writing and grammar units, I
will also layer those in by start and end date.
Notice that in that first week of instruction, I am only teaching poetry and media literacy/current events. Within these 2 units, the introductory content is dense and the activities take more time, so I don't add in my punctuation unit until the second week. The media literacy ends with the beginning of current event presentations, and the other assessments mark the end dates of the unit.
Step 4: Planning a Unit
So now that you know your units, when you’ll be teaching them and how much time you have to teach each one, it’s time to plan a unit. I’ve designed my pacing guide template to have a place for general notes along with a place for daily content. You can get a copy here.
*Confession* While I do lay out my units for the year and often know (at least in general) the specific content I’ll layer in (because I’ve been doing it so many years), I do NOT plan in depth for the year before the year begins. If you are a new teacher, please do not feel like you have to spend hours and weeks creating this detailed pacing guide before the year begins. You can put things on your guide such as "Introductory Lesson," "Lesson 1," "Assessment," etc. The more detailed you are, the better, but you can use these broad placeholders until you get there.
I wanted to walk through planning the first unit in my example. Keep in mind that I have a 90-minute block
class every day with my students. So, we
are always working on more than one thing within a class period. Here’s how I plan it:
*I know my narrative summative will be a narrative poem, and I have already decided the standards this unit will address and the texts I will use to teach them. This is not going to be the first time my students have encountered poetry, so I want to do a couple of introductory activities that are engaging but not overly time-consuming. Then, I will look at each text and decide how I will teach them and consider the time allotment for each activity. I then layer those into my pacing guide.
*As I mentioned earlier, at the same time I'm beginning my narrative unit, I’m also introducing my research-based writing content that accompanies my Current Event units that space out over the whole school year. This is foundational material that we will use all year long, so I’m always teaching it in the first few weeks of school. So, I know I will cover media literacy topics, making non-fiction annotations, MLA format, parenthetical citations, etc. I layer these lessons into my pacing guide.
*The final thing I’m going to layer in is a punctuation unit. Even though comma usage is not a part of the
grade-level standards I teach, I always begin here because students, and
honestly most people, misuse commas. I
like to teach students the 10 most prevalent rules with an emphasis on WHY the
comma is used. (see my Comma Unit) Then, I move on to the language
standards in line with punctuation that are in the grade-level standards.
*Very Important* As you are laying out your pacing guide, keep in mind that you will want to have some flex/buffer days where you schedule nothing so that you can adapt as needed for things that take longer than expected, unexpected classroom disruptions, reteaching time, etc. I suggest adding at least 2 days per unit.
*I love having a place for notes right in my pacing guide. It allows me to easily reference details at a glance so that I can adapt for future planning. I always change out the articles I use in my media literacy unit so that they are very current, but I may want to reference something from the previous year, so it's good to have the direct links. *Bonus Tip* - I also save pdf versions of the articles using the extension PrintFriendly just in case the article disappears from the site.
Final Thoughts
You do not need to create an in-depth pacing calendar before the year
begins. As a matter of fact, this will
likely be a waste of time as things change over the course of the year, and you
may quickly decide that your students don’t have the skills/maturity, etc. to cover
some content that you poured many hours into planning.
Instead, for your pacing guide, lay in a rough idea of where your units
will fall and how long they’ll be for the entire year, and let this be your
guide. Wait to do in-depth day-to-day planning as you move through the year. Take a weekend in bits and spurts and lay out
the next unit toward the middle/end of the previous one.
3 Final Tips
**I DO suggest that you plan your first 2-3 weeks of school - maybe even your first unit or first grading period WHILE YOU DON'T HAVE 1 BILLION OTHER THINGS TO DO.
**Remember to keep notes as you go all year long so that next year you can easily tweak or delete content that didn't work and possibly expand on content and activities that worked well.
**ACCEPT THAT NO ONE – AND NO UNIT, ACTIVITY, OR LESSON - IS PERFECT! Give yourself permission to shift gears! For example, if students are not engaged with a novel – maybe you summarize it or watch the movie. Consider the standards you can meet by shortening the unit – compare/contrast movie with work – analyze literary elements, etc). There isn't only one way to teach a unit to meet the standards - adapt as needed!
**Last, have fun and have a wonderful year!!
Missed Part 1 in the Series? See it HERE!
Missed Part 2 in the Series? See it HERE!
Want to update your syllabus for the school year? Click the image to grab this Free Website Syllabus that includes a reflection form.
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