Podcast - In the Classroom - Episode 20: How to Improve What You Find on the Internet - lesson plan
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Episode 20: How to Improve What You Find on the Internet

Teachers cannot do it all, nor is it reasonable to expect them to! Let’s normalize purchasing lesson plans, unit plans, and resources because, newsflash, teachers still have to put in some effort to make sure what they purchase fulfills their vision and meets the needs of their students. We’re all for promoting the teacher as curator not creator. A good teacher can curate learning opportunities and resources for their students, and focus on those lessons, units, or entirely different parts of the job they really enjoy.

We don’t criticize a chef who doesn’t churn the butter, slaughter the cow, and grow the herbs of the meal they prepare. We don’t criticize the executive who relies on several employees to complete research, comb through the results, and prepare a presentation. Teachers, though? We’re often held to a different standard.

When you choose to spend your own hard-earned cash on lesson plans, unit plans, and resources (we won’t even get into the numerous problems with this), we hope it is almost exactly what you need it to be (especially if you’re buying from Three Heads). But we’re going to venture a guess that finding the 100% perfect unit plan is a once-in-a-blue-moon occurrence. It’s impossible to create a single activity that meets the needs of all English-speaking students across the country and around the world.

In our experience, what we’ve purchased (or found for free) on the Internet has been a life-saving (well, certainly time-saving) starting point for creating student materials, but even with the best lesson plans we still have some work to do.

In this episode, we talk about how we turn these already existing resources into exactly what we and our students need.

Tips for Improving Lesson Plans, Unit Plans, and Resources You Find on the Internet

  • Consider combining the best elements of multiple resources when you aren’t finding exactly what you need on the Internet.
  • When trying to decide how to spend your money, prioritize investing in resources that do something you can’t (or don’t know how to) do on your own, don’t enjoy doing, or don’t have time to do yourself.
  • Decide if the task(s) would be appropriate for your students if you added some more detailed directions, took away (or added) some scaffolds, made an independent activity a group activity, or vice versa.
  • Do you like the questions and is there an answer key? This is so important to consider! It might be worth making a few tweaks to questions if, in general, you like them. So much easier than starting from scratch.
  • What’s missing and how long would it take you to fill in that piece yourself?

There’s lots to be said on this topic! Listen to the episode for more details. Also check out these related resources: