Do This and You’ll Know You’re Planning a Good Lesson

Do you want to know the number one trick for planning a good lesson? The surefire way to know what you’ve planned accomplishes what you want or need it to? Do the activity yourself.

Yep, it’s that easy. If you don’t want to do the assignment, there are probably issues with it, and it’s unlikely your students will want to do it either. If you can’t do the assignment, there are definitely issues with it, and there’s no way your students will be able to do a good job on it. Have you thought you were planning a good lesson only to have it bomb in the classroom? Thought you created a fun, engaging project only to find out it was basically ungradable (even with a rubric—Kate, yikes!). Thought that test was just-right-difficult only to find out it was way too easy (or way too hard)?

Until we started completing our assignments, activities, and tests ourselves, we really only thought we were planning a good lesson. Once we started doing the work ourselves, we knew we were planning a good lesson (or discovered what we needed to do to turn meh to good, or how to avoid what was sure to become an inevitable disaster).

Planning a Good Lesson: 7 Reasons to Test It Yourself First

Doing the assignment helps you write clearer directions.

One of the reasons we’ve come to value clear, specific, detailed directions is that they allow our students to move toward independent learning. When our directions are vague or unclear, we spend the majority of our class time repeatedly answering the same questions and providing the same clarifications instead of providing feedback and guidance on content. We’re also often disappointed by the quality of the responses we get from students.

When we take the time to complete an assignment ourselves, we are more likely to notice places where the directions are unclear. This works best when you work as part of a PLC or collaborative team: if Steph creates an assignment, Kate completes it, and vice versa. Someone else will (almost) always notice a lack of clarity or a multiple-choice question with two plausible answers better than you will.

This could also be an opportunity to do a swapsies with your teacher bestie, call in a favor with your significant other, or recruit your own child if they’re kinda-sorta the same age or ability level as your students. If you’re not part of a collaborative team or can’t call in any favors, take a day or two between creating and completing. Do your best to think like your students. Will they be able to give you the results you want without asking additional questions?

This is especially important if students have to navigate another website or app. We found the website and know where to go, but our students don’t. When we can provide step-by-step instructions, our students are, again, more likely to complete the assignment without needing our help every step of the way.

Doing the assignment helps you set realistic time frames.

It’s easy to create an assignment or activity with only our calendar or ideal schedule in mind, only to discover it takes significantly longer than we expected or our students work significantly slower than we do. If you’re a planner and have things tightly scheduled, this can create problems with real ripple effects.

When we do assignments ourselves, we get a better sense of how long it takes to complete them, which helps us pace our units so students can complete assignments in a reasonable amount of time. This is especially helpful if, like us, you’ve come to believe in the value of a homework-free classroom.

Doing the assignment helps you develop realistic rubrics.

When you know exactly what students will find in a text or on a website, you’re able to adjust your expectations for a quality answer. We’re embarrassed to admit that we’ve assigned guided reading questions for a novel without attempting to answer them ourselves, marked students down for superficial responses, and then (when we finally did make our own answer key) realized the question was difficult to answer based on the details provided in the text.

Research projects can be an especially important place to do some digging: sometimes websites just don’t provide the information we want (especially if the website is a database where some pages have more information than others), and when we know that ahead of time, we can adjust the directions or our scoring guidelines so students aren’t penalized for something they weren’t able to do within the parameters we gave them. (Sure, we’d all love to believe they’re going to problem-solve and keep Googling until they find what we want, but we’re big believers in being realistic!)

Doing the assignment helps you explain it more clearly and avoid errors.

This one’s pretty obvious: it’s likely the reason that might have come to your mind for doing an assignment ahead of time. We always prefer to put mistake-free work in front of our students, and doing the work ourselves helps us spot the errors.

Related to this, however, is the insight it gives you into where students might go wrong or why they might be tempted to select an incorrect answer (especially when you’re assigning curated content rather than content you created yourself). When you’ve had to think through the question, you’re better able to explain to your students why an answer is correct, guide them toward the answer you’re hoping for, or give meaningful and helpful examples in your instruction.

Doing the assignment helps you anticipate problems.

Sometimes we have what we think is a great idea, but when we put it into action, we run into surprises that can make us feel as if the whole thing has been ruined. As we’ve mentioned above, any assignment that requires students to use another website or app deserves a test run: we’ve all had the experience of a website that goes down or an app that requires an account we weren’t anticipating.

We’ve found this particularly valuable when writing sentence starters for students. We used to provide students with a generic list of sentence starters they could use with any writing assignment, but it was sometimes frustrating because the sentence starters just didn’t make sense with the specific content we were asking students to include. Thinking through the kinds of responses we wanted from students ahead of time allowed us to better model a variety of appropriate sentence starters and led to student writing that was much less awkward.

Doing the assignment ensures you have a high-quality model to show students.

We have mixed feelings about showing models to students, but there are cases where it can be really helpful. Over the years, we can collect student examples, but when we create a new assignment, we don’t have those to pull from. But if we’ve completed the assignment ourselves, we have a model we can show our students that we know follows the directions.

This is especially helpful for non-traditional assignments (like when we had students make a paper quilt square to introduce Alice Walker’s “Everyday Use”) or longer, multi-step projects (like our Career Research project). You can even create a screencast walking students through the model that you post on your LMS to give them access to visuals and step-by-step instructions whenever they need them.

Doing the assignment increases student buy-in.

As a tutor, Steph has encountered quite a few assignments that she dreads helping students with. When assignments turn out to be long and tedious, have unnecessary or redundant parts, or rely on sources that don’t provide the needed information, our students are less likely to complete them, and they are certainly less likely to complete them well.

If you (the subject matter expert) don’t want to do an assignment, it’s unlikely your students (who are, for the most part, there reluctantly or even involuntarily) are going to want to do it. Doing the assignments ourselves helped us to focus on the steps that were most important, eliminate unnecessarily tedious or difficult steps, and create assignments we could sell to our students.

Doing the assignment shows respect to your students and earns respect from them.

When we’re willing to complete the assignments we’re giving to our students, we’re showing that we wouldn’t ask them to do something we wouldn’t be willing to do ourselves. We’re putting ourselves in their shoes and doing what we can to make the assignment as do-able as possible. We’re ensuring students are scored fairly on the work they complete.

Students rarely realize or appreciate the lengths to which we often go to create an enjoyable, meaningful, and productive experience for them. But they do notice when we’re not familiar with the work we’re giving them to do, and when they do notice that we’ve completed the work ourselves, they’re often pleasantly surprised.

Over the years, we’ve had enough students comment on the fact that they like that we did the assignment too to suggest that this isn’t something they often see, but is something they respect. Anything we can do to earn, rather than demand, our students’ respect goes a long way toward building the relationships and buy-in we need from them in order to have a successful year together.

Do you complete your own assignments before giving them to students? What have you found valuable about the process or an essential step of planning a good lesson? Reach out to us at [email protected] or on Instagram @threeheads.works to share, especially if you’ve got ideas we haven’t mentioned here.