You’re a passionate educator, and we know how much work is already on your plate. With all the conferences, meetings, paperwork, and activities happening in the school, work can be overwhelming! Laddering Your Success is solving one of the most tedious tasks for teachers – lesson planning! Read on to hear from our founder and CEO, Festus Amoye, to discover how our lesson planning app can help you save time without sacrificing the quality of your lesson plans!

At Laddering Your Success, we empower all educational stakeholders through technology and relationships to create lifelong learners. Now, I know you’re thinking, “Okay, what does that mean? How can you ensure that you’re going to create lifelong learners?” It’s by the relationships. Relationships are valuable, so we’re leveraging technology to build relationships.

Lesson planning tends to distract from the students’ and the teacher’s time. Why is that significant? We’re not talking about lesson planning in terms of, “Oh, it just sucks. It’s bad.” We’re talking about the time it takes to put those lessons together. Some teachers use a lot of time, even up to eight hours a week or more, especially if they’re new teachers trying to differentiate learning for each student.

Teachers need tools to free them up so they can focus on their students rather than lesson planning. Students need inspirational standard-aligned work that leads to hope and aspirations. Often, students are disengaged, not necessarily because they don’t like a class. If they don’t, they’ll tell you, “I just don’t like the class; I just don’t like the work.”

The thing is that the classwork is not relevant to them. This is why tying together relevancy and relationship is critical. I know; we hear the word relevancy all the time. How can we make something so abstract, written by somebody else in another state, and how can we make that relevant to our students? By us knowing our students and our community.

So while lesson planning is often good, the lessons themselves take a lot of time to develop the ideas and draft up the paperwork. Teachers spend up to eight hours a week doing lessons and assignments, which takes time away from focusing on the students, especially students with special needs.

If you’re trying to differentiate learning, you got kids with special needs; it’s challenging to be able to focus on that student, especially when you have kids with behavior problems, and then actually draft up the lesson plan and say, “Okay, I’m going to do follow these students IEP and track it for them that I’m not doing for the other students.”

Why is lesson planning important?

It’s essential to plan well; this will be more important if you’re a new teacher and did an alternative certification program. It’s important because it helps provide structure, it helps provide flow, and helps with trackability of evidence-based learning. So we’ll cover those three things:

It helps with structure.

So, having that lesson plan in your classroom helps the students know what’s happening. Many teachers do this in TLW or The Learner Will statements. This helps the students because they can say, “Okay, this is how things are supposed to go in Mr. Neil’s class.” It gives a bit of predictability, which goes a long way. Think about it like a building. Every building has a foundation, supporting beams, and a roof. The state standard can be considered the foundation. Your lesson can be considered the supporting beams. Good supporting content in the lesson can be considered the roof.

So if your kiddos know if your lesson plans are done for the next class period, even if there is a sub, they know, “Okay, we worked on summary paragraphs, so I’m reading this next time. Or, I’m working on this worksheet in the next class.” But if your lessons are exciting, they may say they are learning to do summaries for a business plan they want to develop.

It helps to establish a flow.

There’s an inevitable ebb, flow, and rhythm to your classroom that your kids can feel. The flow can range from how kids start with the warm-up and then go to small groups or when they switch units. While the powers in the state of Texas say, “Hey, our kids are not learning X, Y, or Z. We need them to learn that.” You have the power to embed nuggets of wisdom into the standards that change the kids’ trajectory. When you embed your wisdom into the standards, it establishes a cohort for this segment of the population to now know something that they didn’t know before or needed to be tweaked. This impacts homes and communities, especially when putting character into the classroom.

Trackability of evidence-based learning.

We need a Renaissance. Imagine if that spark began in your classroom! We would only know if you provided trackability. I know you’re saying,” I’m sick of administration. I’m sick of my instructional coach asking for my lesson plans; they don’t look at them anyway.” Well, the thing is, the fact that they’re done provides trackability as to what was done in the classroom. Having your lesson plans written and documented can demonstrate that you are leading a renaissance, even if it’s just in your school! This evidence-based learning is essential. Especially now in the information age, people get a soundbite from Google or YouTube, and they hang their entire lives on this soundbite. I know we don’t want that. We want evidence-based learning for our students. We want them to do actual research.

So let’s eliminate distractions while providing students with structure, flow, and evidence-based trackable learning. You can do that with the LYS Classroom app. An LYS Teacher is at the forefront of implementing revolutionary lessons in the classroom that will ensure your students’ success by igniting their hopes and goals and preparing them for a successful life and career.

They empower their students through creative and imaginative lesson plans by incorporating decision-making tools, life skills, SEL, and hard/soft skills that students can use for a path of direction to pursue not only college but a variety of post-high school options.

The result is an LYS personal path of purpose based on students’ strengths and interests to pursue their passions after high school. Incorporating Character, SEL, and hard/soft skills into their lessons effortlessly using our Being, Know, Doing Methodology. Learn more about LYS Classroom App by visiting our website. (Image by stockking on Freepik)