The beginning of a new school year is filled with excitement. Students are excited to use their new school supplies, meet their teachers, and see their friends after the summer break. However, this time can be particularly stressful for teachers as they plan the curriculum for their next school year.
Planning out a curriculum is complicated enough on its own. But as an instructor, you know that you’ll also have to juggle updating old assignments, adjusting your course to meet new standards, and helping to choose which school fundraisers you’ll host that year. Plus, many instructors have to do this within a short planning period.
These four strategies can help you simplify your planning process:
- Create a big-picture plan
- Use open educational resources
- Plan fundraisers in advance
- Implement micro-credentials courses
Planning out an entire year of learning within a few days or weeks can feel overwhelming. Drafting a plan to give you a bird’s eye view of your year can build a strong foundation for more refined planning. Let’s dive in!
1. Create a big-picture plan.
Organize broad themes from your curriculum by laying out a big-picture plan to guide your school year. Map out the central learning units you’ll cover, outline your overarching goals for the year, and detail how you will accomplish them. Once you’ve laid out some of these essential elements, you can begin creating the first draft of your syllabus and blocking out a preliminary course schedule.
As you create your big-picture plan, keep these best practices in mind:
- Stay flexible. Don’t put too much pressure on yourself to finalize every detail at this stage in the planning process. Keep in mind that the decisions you make at this stage can and likely will change. As you continue to plan and later begin teaching your course, you’ll need to adapt the content or timeline to meet your students’ needs.
- Use resources from past years. You don’t need to start from scratch or reinvent each assignment, quiz, and test at the start of every new school year. Audit the resources you already have and keep the high-quality, relevant materials built into your curriculum. Then, revamp or remove those that are outdated or not compliant with current learning standards.
- Remember to reference standards and guidelines. Your school likely has a long list of state-mandated learning standards for your grade level or subject. While it may be tempting to push these standards to the side until later, incorporating them into your course from the start will make it easier to meet guidelines. Use these standards to shape your broad goals, learning objectives, lesson plans, and assignments.
Once you develop an overarching plan for the school year, creating specific lessons and assignments should feel much more manageable.
2. Use open educational resources.
Open educational resources (OER) are resources that are open and accessible to anyone with internet access. These resources come in all shapes, sizes, and formats, like PDF documents, interactive learning modules, and video resources. Because these materials are available online, you can access and use them immediately, making it easy to find resources related to your content.
Consider the following factors when assessing these resources:
- Authority. Ensure that you can identify the author of the resource. Do some brief research to determine whether they are credible, respected sources of information in their field. Look for references to them and their work in trusted scholarly sources.
- Accuracy. Scan the content in the OER for any apparent mistakes like typos, spelling errors, or significant formatting issues. Then, review the content to ensure the resource doesn’t contain any inaccuracies or misinformation. Double-check or confirm any topics you aren’t sure about before sharing the resource with your class.
- Objectivity. As you research the creator, note any characteristics about them that could qualify them as a biased source of information. For example, if they are associated with a for-profit business, they may hold a bias that favors that business’s interests rather than presenting information objectively.
- Coverage. Ask yourself if the information directly addresses a specific piece of your curriculum. The content should be relevant to your course without you needing to make any major changes to the OER. Ideally, the resource should add something new to the course by communicating the content differently or giving a new perspective.
- Purpose. Determine why the resource was created and whether that reason is appropriate for your classroom’s needs. For instance, a learning module designed for college students likely won’t be a good fit for a class of second graders. However, a video created for a world history class might also be useful in a European history class to introduce a new perspective.
3. Plan fundraisers in advance.
For many teachers, fundraising is necessary to purchase school supplies, fund field trips, and provide other enriching learning opportunities for students. But finding engaging fundraising ideas to plan in the middle of the busy school year can be challenging. Instead, choose a few simple and effective fundraising ideas at the beginning of the year, and map out when and how you’ll execute them.
A shoe drive fundraiser is a great option for schools, and because it’s so easy to get involved, children of all ages can participate. To hold this fundraiser, ask students to bring in their gently worn, used and new shoes, package them in shoe bags, and send them to your shoe drive fundraiser facilitator. Then, your shoe drive fundraiser partner will process the shoes and send you a check.
Even if you choose the simplest fundraisers, hosting several each year can be draining and take away time you could spend tutoring students or preparing future assignments. Spread awareness of matching gift programs to double your supporters’ contributions quickly.
Donation matching is a type of corporate giving initiative where a business matches donations its employees make to a given cause. So, supporters can double their contribution to your fundraiser if their employer has a matching gift program without needing to contribute more of their money. Find some educational resources about matching gifts while planning your fundraisers for the year and include them in your fundraising resources—make sure to meet with your school’s administration or the PTA first to ensure they have matching capabilities.
4. Implement micro-credential courses.
Micro-credential courses are short courses students can take to demonstrate their competency in a certain skill or subject. During your planning process, look for micro-credentials to help your students master specific topics in your course. If you anticipate that a unit or topic will be difficult for your students to grasp, look for a micro-credential course that will give them the extra practice they need to set them up for future success.
There are micro-credential courses for nearly any skill or learning topic. Here are just a few examples from this list of 2500 courses:
- Persuasive writing
- Grammar and punctuation
- Basic data analytics
- Statistics
- Music arrangement
- Graphic design programs
- Leadership
You may notice gaps in your curriculum that could leave some students behind as you plan. These short courses can help fill in those gaps, certify your students in a skill or topic, and even prepare them for the next stage of learning with self-guided learning opportunities.
You don’t have to dread planning at the start of the new school year. By mapping out your big-picture goals, identifying fundraising ideas, and choosing the additional resources you want to use before you get started, you might even have the time to plan fun activities to boost your students’ school spirit and get them excited to learn!