Teacher How To: Backward Planning Your ENTIRE School Year

There are endless aspects of teaching that cause me stress and anxiety over the course of the school year. Managing each student’s needs, developing positive relationships with parents, clubs, meetings, grading, duties, extra demands from admin… you know, all those things that pop up during the school year that are mostly beyond my control. I realized that I needed to really focus my energy on the things I CAN control, which is why I started backward planning my entire school year.

Why I Backward Plan So Far In Advance

What I’ve learned from backward planning is that it’s counterintuitive, but if I have a detailed outlined plan for each quarter it actually allows me MORE flexibility.

If I need to adjust something, I rarely have to scramble to come up with a place filler. If I want to change or add something to my curriculum, I know what I can easily change and how much space in the quarter I have to play with. It also means that I’m not writing lesson plans on Sunday afternoons, and when I was out for a week with COVID last year the lessons were already essentially ready to go – I just had to send them to my principal. I always know what standards I am teaching, why I am doing a particularly lesson, and what the assessment is. I’m rarely crunched for time at the end of the grading period, and I always build in extra grading days for myself.

And as far as the students go, I feel like I owe it to them to make sure that all of the formative activities and assessments they do reflect the full scale of content knowledge and skills for specific objectives or standards over one grading period. At my school, students must pass each quarter, but if I have to push an exam or a few lessons to the next quarter because I ran out of time, students who worked hard to catch up or master content and whose score on that assessment might have bumped their grade to passing or to an A ( or whatever) really lose out. To me, it’s not an equitable practice to let units bridge official grading periods.

Backward Planning – Yearly Level

1.Identify and prioritize your standards

I use a standards- based grading system, which means that everything begins and ends with the standards. But regardless of what your grading philosophy is, prioritizing standards and the skills students need to meet those standards means that your lessons will have a clear line of progression and a clear focus as you plan individual activities. Everything you do will be in service to those skills. Much like writing an essay, your standards alike your line of reasoning that organizes your instruction.

Prioritizing your standards will look different for every content, and of course, my specialty is Language Arts. Our standards are skill-based rather than knowledge-based. This gives us a lot of flexibility! The other benefit is that some standards, such as research standards, are also addressed in science and history. For me, this means I can incorporate them into my lessons, but they might not be something I feel the need to assess.

Ask around – avoid working in a silo!

You may want to include your grade level teams and see where there’s overlap, because we all know there are just way too many standards to effectively master them all in one year.

You might also want to speak with your content teacher for the next level up. Ask them for 5-6 fundamental skills they want students to have when they enter that grade. I taught every sophomore student for the first time last year, and without the support of other teachers with the same grade of students in my content, talking to the junior language arts teacher was an absolute lifesaver. I was able to focus my standards according to what she needed from them junior year.

Here’s what my junior ELA teacher gave me:

1. needed to be able to embed citations in essay writing
2. write a well organized argument and literary analysis essay
3. feel comfortable writing about themselves ( in preparation for college essays)
4. identify and track themes in a variety of texts
5. have a basic understanding of rhetorical moves
6. understand grammar and usage terms and how to apply them in formal writing

Some of these asks are in service of preparing for the ACT, AP classes, or college essays.

Now, do the work!

Ask yourself: what standards do I want to ASSESS? Not what do I want to touch on, sneak in, etc? YOU CAN ONLY DO SO MUCH! What standards are the most critical for you and your content/ grade level team?

Below is a clip from a spreadsheet I created to organize my standards. These standard descriptions are paraphrased, and not super organized because I had already parsed them out by quarter. Bu this should give you an idea of the standards I prioritized for my sophomores.

I skipped things like research and expository writing because those are assessed in other classes. Another one I skipped was the production and distribution of writing. I assess this within the other standards, so to me it seemed redundant and not something I want to explicitly assess. In this list, I also did not include sub standards, because I will cycle these standards and add the sub standards as we progress throughout the year ( more on that later!). Finally, some standards I combined together because for my purposes, they dovetail nicely.

2. Identify what texts and materials you will use for each grading period or quarter, and assign your standards accordingly.

The school I currently teach at breaks the school year into quarters. Additionally, students need to pass EACH quarter in order to pass the course. If they fail a quarter, they must retake it. This informed how I organize my units. I want to make sure that each quarter has a different skill focus, and I focus on one text per quarter. So, essentially, I have 4 big units to complete the school year.

I’m also lucky in that I get to choose what texts I teach and how. At my previous school, everything was planned for us with a scripted boxed curriculum – from texts to assessments to daily lessons. This didn’t mean that I didn’t have to do this work that I’m showing you now, because I often had to trim, move, or otherwise adjust lessons to meet the needs of our students.

My texts

This year, I’m teaching a writing-intensive quarter, where I’ll be using text excerpts and background- knowledge builders to support what my social studies teacher is doing. I know I want to do that first and really give students a solid writing foundation to support the analytical work of the following quarters. I’ll also teach a Shakespeare play ( Twelfth Night or Julius Caesar, I haven’t decided), Frankenstein, and a memoir lit circles.

How I assigned my standards

With standards- based grading, 6 standards is really the most you can realistically teach and assess well in one quarter, so that is the maximum you’ll see ( but also why I combine some standards). You’ll also notice that the left column includes a basic objective for the quarter and the right column includes more detailed and concrete skills derived from the standard. This makes it more student friendly as well as more objective when assessing student skill. Finally, many of the standards are revisited each quarter with more depth or nuance added. This means that if students weren’t quite able to master it in one quarter, they’ll have another chance to practice, meaning more likelihood that they’ll be prepared for the demands of junior year.

Here is an example of my 2nd and 3rd quarters:

I created this simple spreadsheet on Google Sheets.

Backward Planning – Quarterly Level

1. Craft your final assessment

When it comes to effective planning, you should always begin with the end in mind! I like to create project-based assessments that hit all of my standards and can be graded on a rubric made from my Standards and Skills work that I already did. Your assessment can be whatever you want it to be! Just keep in mind the following best practices for assessments:

1. It can be graded on a rubric so that the grading is objective and easy to scaffold/ modify for accessibility
2. Allows every student to SHOW you what they learned and can do, not guess the answers you’re looking for
3. Assesses ONLY the standards and skills practiced throughout the unit – no more no less.

Something that is super important to me as a teacher of multilingual learners is that the assessment is of the content and skills, NOT their English- speaking ability. This is why I love project-based assessments! They have typically have entry points for every student, and they are super easy to scaffold.

Read more here for supporting MLLs on assessments.

2. Brainstorm your activities/ mini-assessments

Now, the juicy part! Brain dump everything you’ll need to make sure students can meet the standards and complete the assessment. This should include:

1. background knowledge
2. notes on concepts, definitions for domain-specific language, or other terms
3. practice activities
4. quizzes, exit tickets, formative assessments ( plus what standard they assess)
5. visual supports and extras/ extensions

3. Put it all together!

Now, you’ll write a unit plan that includes a week-by-week breakdown! I call this my “Unit Map.”On a spreadsheet or table, I include the following overview items:

1. unit length ( use your school calendar to see how many weeks you have). I typically include one flex week in each unit to account for additional reteaching, non-school days, or other surprises that tend to pop up.
2. essential question
3. priority standards
4. assessments ( summative and formative)
5. texts and supplemental resources such as videos

Next, I make a table for each week. I usually plan for 9 weeks in each unit, but again this depends on your school’s official grade reporting schedule.

For each week, I outline:

1. priority standard or skill to focus on ( limit to 1-2)
2. learning targets ( I can do…. in order to… statements for each day of class)
3. activities/ lessons (just a basic statement, not the entire lesson)
4. chapters/ texts to be read
5. assessments for the week
6. materials needed ( include notes, worksheets, scaffolds, texts, etc. Anything I need to create I put a * next to, so I know I have to do that!)

Each week should build progressively to that final assessment. I like to leave the last two weeks for the assessment. It might seem like a lot, but throughout the actual teaching of the unit you might need to take extra time for some lessons, you might have a snow day, you might need some flexible workdays, teacher-student conferences, or any number of things! If I don’t end up using these days ( which is actually rare) then I’ll get to play around with some kind of an extension or celebration activity.

Backward Planning – Now What?

When I’m ready to teach the unit, I will take a peek at my unit plan. If it’s been a while since I created it, I’ll already notice adjustments I need to make. Then, I’ll print it out and use it as my planning guide. I keep a running weekly lesson planning tool that is perfect for when admin or subs need a more detailed lesson. It’s available for FREE in my TpT store! I also wrote about how I use this weekly planning guide here. As I move through the unit, I take physical notes on my physical unit plan about what worked/ didn’t, where I had to make additions or cuts, and other things to remind myself to do for the next time I teach the unit.

With this guide, I can usually be COMPLETELY prepped 2 weeks in advance. All I have to do is create my student-facing slide deck, graphic organizers and guided notes, and maybe rubrics. I get all of these little things done during my prep periods! No stress on the weekends, no staying after school until 6 or later. The magnitude of the impact this has on my mental health during the school year makes the extra prep absolutely worth it.

That’s All She Wrote!

The hardest and most time-consuming part is prioritizing the standards. Usually, when we start to craft a unit, we have tons of ideas and resources already in our heads. This process just helps get them on paper! Once I have my ideas and materials brainstormed, the process of crafting the unit plan only takes an hour or two.

I hope that this post gives you some direction on how to make your school year a little bit easier by getting the difficult work out of the way before the school year starts so that you can focus on teaching!

If you have questions, leave them here or reach out to me on instagram!

Happy Teaching!