The Power of Planning: Collaborative Strategies for Stronger Lessons

Planning comes up in nearly every episode of Class-Act Coaching—so this week, we’re giving it the spotlight it deserves. Ashley teams up with guest instructional coach Michelle Harada, who shares practical tips and research-backed strategies for improving the quality and efficiency of lesson planning, especially through collaborative planning.

Michelle draws from years of experience supporting teachers across grade levels and content areas and breaks down why planning is more than just picking a resource—it’s about being intentional, setting clear goals and using time wisely.

Key Topics Covered:

• Why collaborative planning is one of the most impactful things a school can do—and how to make it work even if you’re a singleton teacher.
• John Hattie’s research on effect sizes and what accelerates learning (spoiler: collaboration and clarity matter!)
• How to use the four guiding questions of planning to reflect on your practice and support all students.
• What to do when students do—or don’t—get it: tips for remediation, enrichment and peer teaching.
• Ways to make transitions smoother, maximize engagement and build intentionality into every moment of class.

Resources Mentioned:

• 📄 Michelle’s Planning Template to guide your next lesson or unit 
• 🤝 Hattie’s research on teacher collaboration and collective efficacy
• 💡 Project-based learning and content-aligned strategies

Quotable Moments:

• “The goal doesn’t change—the route to get there might. I can’t change the standard, but I can change how students get there.” — Michelle Harada
• “Organizations demonstrate their priorities by how they use their resources. Time is the most precious resource in a school.” — Michelle Harada

Don’t Miss:

• Ashley’s reflection: why “just reusing an old lesson” isn’t the time-saver it seems
• Michelle’s advice for finding planning partners: even if you’re the only one teaching your subject or grade level
• Jason’s coaching tip: how coaches can advocate for structured planning time to support teacher retention and reduce burnout

📘 Homework Challenge: Use Michelle’s planning template to reflect on one upcoming lesson or unit. Focus on just one new element—like success criteria or engagement strategies—and give it a try!

The Southern Regional Education Board is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that works with states and schools to improve education at every level, from early childhood through doctoral education and the workforce.

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Transcript

0:29

Hello, I'm Ashley. And back with us this week is Jason Adair. Jason, thank you for coming back as Dan is continuing on the road to help us do these intros and outros. Thank you so much for having me. I love filling in when Dan's traveling. And it feels just as natural as when he's here. So let's get into it. week, I want to talk about something that has come up on almost every one of our episodes. And yet, we've only really had one full episode about this topic. you might be able to guess this already, but I am talking about planning. Every coach that's come on has said, you need to plan every single detail of the class, which makes sense. And you, even when you did your episode on questioning, you have to plan your questions ahead of time. so I thought I'd be really good. Okay, if planning is this important, why don't we have another episode about how to plan? Do you have anybody that can help with that? Yeah, I love that you're reflecting on this and recognizing that sometimes we kept planning short. And so, yeah, I'd love to bring Michelle Harada on. She has, K 12 teaching experience. She's special ed certified. She really, she's been a coach for seven, nine years, probably. She's got a wealth of experience and really is one of our, Maybe gurus of planning is the right term for her, but she's excellent at that so I'd love to introduce you to, Michelle Harada. I'm looking forward to working with her and I will see you at the end of the episode for your tips to the coaches. Thank you. Thank you. Hello. Welcome. Welcome, Michelle. Thank you so much for being here today. I'm so looking forward to talking to you. How are you? I am good. How are you this morning? I am feeling pretty good. I am ready to learn all about planning. I hope that you are prepared to talk about planning. I am prepared to talk about planning. I planned to talk about planning today, Yeah. All right. Before we get into that though, can you tell us a little bit about who you are and how you came to SREB? Yeah, absolutely. So my name is Michelle Harada and I'm an instructional coach here at SREB. I grew up in Pennsylvania. currently live just south of Atlanta, Georgia. So round circuitous route to get here. I started my teaching career in New York City. I taught math and science to seventh and eighth grade. and then I stayed home for 11 years and I raised my kids. And when I got back into teaching was down here in Georgia and I taught sixth grade math, I did both general ed and special ed. but while I was at my middle school, I also taught seventh grade and eighth grade. And algebra one in geometry. So I've had a wide range of teaching experiences with grade levels. It's all been within math down here in Georgia. And then a coaching position opened up at my school and I applied for it and I got it. And I spent seven years supporting teachers in my building. All teachers, all contents. grade levels because there were multiple years that I was the only person in my building that was an instructional coach. A couple of those years I had a partner, so they would take ELA and social studies, so I spent a lot of time supporting math and science. And almost two years ago, I was given the opportunity to join SREB as an instructional coach. And then I was super excited to join the organization. We have an amazing group of instructional coaches and continue to do the work that I really love to do. It's near and dear to my heart. I just want to make the biggest impact I can and support teachers and anywhere to improve learning experiences for our students. Well, it sounds like you are very qualified. So, I am very thankful you came to SREB. You actually started around the same time I started, so we've been here about the same amount of time. Yeah. I am looking forward to hearing what you're going to teach us today about planning. We have had so many episodes where no matter what the topic is, it comes down to planning. That's what questions. Oh, you have to plan your questions. Note taking. Oh, you have to plan how you're going to have your students take notes. And I am sure I'm not the only one. Hearing this, who's going to tell, who would tell you this, but I am not a planner. I have way too much confidence in my non existent improv skills to sit down and plan, but also I'm busy. And so. Rationally, I know I need to plan, but at the same time, I'm like, Oh, I have so much to do. I can figure it out in class. I'm good. I'm good. And I don't do the planning that I need. And I know as I hear every coach every week come in and tell me plan, that's something I need to be better about. And I know our listeners feel the same. So that's why we wanted you to come on and talk a little bit about planning. Can you help us? Yes, absolutely. So you gave me a great segue there. How do you plan, like when you have to plan a lesson, like what goes through your head? Like how do you do it? Because you say that, you know, improv, but we know that's not always the best way to do it. have to have a little bit of improv skills. But how do you plan on the front end? Like what are things that you look at? Okay, so I am really guilty of, I think, two things that I would call my planning process that are the biggest parts of my planning process. One is I come up with an idea. I'm an idea person. I'll think of a hundred ideas and I'll think of this idea and I'll say, Ooh, it'd be really good if for that lesson, if I did this and I plan it all in my head and I think about it and think about it and think about it, but I don't necessarily go and type out a lesson plan all the time. Or if I do, it's not that detailed. And I'm also really guilty of, okay, I need to teach X topic. What have I already done in the past that I could just reuse now, instead of coming up with something new, because that's going to save me time. Doesn't matter if it worked in the past. I taught that subject or that thing in the past. I'm going to maybe change it a little bit, but repurpose it so I don't have to plan a new lesson around that topic. So I think those are two things I do a lot. Okay. And you are not alone. In that I see that a lot with teachers that they'll pull something out that well, we've used this in the past and it worked really well or the kids really liked it. And like you said, but we have to plan. So usually my first question to them is, does it align to the standard? And I know that's been mentioned a lot. Throughout several episodes and like I think Juliana talked about it and Debbie talked about it, but I want to recognize that not all schools have multiple teachers at multiple grade levels, or at their same grade levels. So, for example, you might be the only person in your building that teaches third grade. You might be the only person in your school that teaches. We have a lot of singletons, whether it's because you're in a really small school or whether it's because you're the only one in your building that happens to teach that content. You can still use the same process that collaborative teams use if there's multiple of you teaching a content at a grade level. We really encourage you to plan together, because Two heads are better than one, three heads are better than one, whatever you want it to be. So, the question usually is, well, why do we have to collaboratively plan? We have different kids we have different ability levels, and research has found is that teams that collaboratively plan together, they benefit from the insight, the expertise, and just the collective efforts of their colleagues. Collaborative planning is also fundamental building block of a learning organization the link between a collaborative culture in a school and improving schools, whether it's improving climate and culture, whether it's improving student achievement, it's a well established link. So organizations, and I love this thought, organizations demonstrate their priorities by how they use the resources. Time is the most precious resource in a school I don't know about you, but what I hear from teachers a lot is we just don't have enough time to do X, Y, Z, whatever it happens to Right. Exactly true. Yes. So if we have multiple teachers in a content. That can collaboratively plan together John Hattie's research, and I know that his name has come up a lot in prior podcasts. Teacher collaboration is the effect size for that is right around 0. 4. It's likely to have an effect on teacher on student achievement Can you really quickly remind us what's a good effect size so that number means something So, in John Hattie's scale, we always look for things that have a positive effect size, and what he found is that the effect size of 0. 4 is kind of his hinge point, that kids will grow a year with anything that's 0. 4 or around 0. So, that's great. That means that a student sitting in your classroom, you just doing what you do every day, just by them being within the four walls, and you're a pretty good teacher. They're going to grow the year, the conversation that I was actually having with some teachers recently, I asked them the question. How many of your students are on grade level? They maybe only a handful. And I said, so if those students who are behind grade level only grow a grade level. Where are they at the end of the year? still behind grade level. Still behind grade level. So we're looking at things that accelerate learning. So the higher the effect size, the greater the potential to accelerate student learning. So we can actually start closing learning gaps. So teacher expectations is one of the things that gets through collaborative planning. His effect size there is 0. 58. But the big one that happens is collective teacher efficacy. And that means that we believe as teachers that we can positively impact student achievement and it creates the mindset of these are our kids. They're not your kids. They're not my kids. They're our kids. So it's this, it's that idea that what I do in the classroom, I can positively affect student outcomes. The effect size for that is 1. 57. Wow. Okay, so if point four is enough to change than 1. 57 is much higher. Right. Right. So we have the potential to student learning in a year, because we're really clear on what we want to teach, how we're going to teach it, and that we're going to be able to positively impact our students. When teachers collaboratively plan there's several quality practices that occur. One of them is setting expectations for student learning in our classroom. So is instruction aligned? is it clear, and are the expectations rigorous for learning that those expectations are the same for all of our students, of where they are in their learning journey, and the goal doesn't change. So, we have our standards, and the standards are the goal. The road that we have for all of our students to take is a little bit different, getting there, so I can change the route, I can't change the goal. I like that analogy. I thinking of it as like, there are different paths to take. Somebody might want to take the scenic route and somebody wants the highway that's going to get them there the fastest, but they're both going to the same place. Exactly. Exactly. I used to tell my students, because again, math, multiple ways to solve a problem. And I used to tell them, I'm like, hey guys, the goal to get to New York City. And here's the date I need you to get to New York City by. Because there was always an end date, which happened to be state assessment. But I really don't care how you get there. I'm like. You can drive, you can fly, if you want to hike the Appalachian Trail, go for it, pony express train, it doesn't matter, right? Multiple routes to get there, and I'm like, and even if everybody drives, everybody might take a different route. but the goal is the same. I like that a lot. So thank you for sharing that. Oh, you're welcome. The another piece about collaborative planning is that it, there's some efficiency that happens when we do this. So when we really plan well, we're maximizing instructional time. So there's less downtime. There's fewer. Like transitional pieces or that transitional times are being reused really effectively. For example, I happen to be in an elementary school in a kindergarten classroom, and I was sitting, kids were working in a small group. And I was sitting talking to a student and I was asking him what he was doing and he was mid sentence with me and the timer went off and he looked at me and just stopped the conversation. He said, I have to go to my next center and picked everything up and just walked away from me. Okay, sure. She had this teacher had transitions down to a T and kids knew exactly what they were supposed to do. The timer went off. They stopped where they were. They picked everything up and she had music playing and they knew they had to be at their next station seated and with the workout ready to go by the end of the song, was fantastic. So she didn't lose instructional time through transitions. Which I loved. another example of that might be to put all of your resources in a folder and have them on the tables already or in bins and have them at the tables or student in the group. That's their job is to make sure that they get everything for the class period or for the day be sitting right there with them. So we're not wasting time transitioning between activities in our classes. I like that because I have had that happen a lot with group work, where half of the classes just then figuring out who the group is, figuring out where they're supposed to go, figuring out who's going to be the speaker, and it's like, okay, your group time's over. Oh, we haven't even started yet. right, right, is really like part of planning is thinking through all of those pieces what makes a classroom run really well. Thing that planning does is it ensures. Or maybe not ensures, but it maximizes student engagement. So is the instruction the learning process? Is it engaging for students? Are they clear on what they're learning? Are we hooking them at the start of class to give them a reason to engage in what we're doing today? If I put a question up on the board that's a review problem in math from yesterday, I'm the student who didn't understand what we did yesterday, I can't even access the start of class, and now I'm done I don't know what to do. So, you know, we look for those things that we can put up that in math, we call them low floor. every student has access to it. And, you know, in, in social studies, we can put up a political cartoon or in science, we can show a picture of a phenomenon in ELA, you could up, you could actually use a cartoon, some kind of visual as well, and then we ask students, what do you notice? What do you wonder? And I know that's come up in a couple other podcasts as well, but it's a great way to hook all of your students. And then the last thing is. Effectiveness. So does our instruction embed strategies that support high levels of cognitive understanding? Are we asking our students to work at the level of the standard? We're not watering it down. not thinking that, oh, my students can't do that. So let me give them work that they can do. We're shortchanging our students when we do that. then it's how do we support those students to make sure that they can get there. So, are you ready to talk about the actual process of planning? Yes, I do have one question. Of something you said a little earlier that I started thinking about it because I've never been in this situation, but I can imagine it would make this whole planning process, collaborative planning process more difficult. If you are what you call a singleton, if you are the only person in your grade or your subject, what do you have advice for them on how to find people to collaborate with? What do they do? Yeah, that's a great question. That's a great question. So, some of the things that I've seen in school districts or other just schools, even if they're small oftentimes, grade levels will actually plan together even if they're across multiple grade levels. So there's a great vertical conversation that happens to many teachers. Have a counterpart in another school in the district, and a lot of those teachers have formed relationships with one another. So if I teach 3rd grade, and I'm my only 3rd grade teacher, but I know that the school on the other side of the district also has a 3rd grade teacher. lot of times they will informally collaboratively plan with one another, they can't they sometimes they can't actually sit down together and plan, but they do have email conversations, they might talk on the phone, but they do have somebody that they can reach out to and bounce ideas off of. If they don't have somebody actually in the building with them. A lot of schools also have instructional coaches. So if you're a teacher and you're the only one that teaches your level or your content you need a thought partner, find an instructional coach that's in your building because most instructional coaches that I know are more than happy to sit down and think through strategies. We're not a content expert in all contents. we do know what really good instructional strategies look like and we can help you figure out how to apply it to your content level. Okay. And one thing you said that made me think of another idea you said going to another school, like the, in your district, but I would also think it doesn't have to be in your district. If you're at networking events and you meet another third grade teacher, I mean, if you're doing it through email or like we're doing right now through zoom, having this conversation, then I would assume like, even if you don't have an instructional coach in your school, or you don't have another teacher that you can, Okay. Meet through all the networking events that you do. If you go to a conference, I'm not going to plug our conferences here, but maybe I should but you know, like any teaching conference. I, yeah, like network with somebody, meet another third grade teacher or another, whatever your subject or grade level teacher is and network and set up a little collaborative planning. Okay, so now we're all on the same page. We can all collaborate and plan whether there's 100 other ones of us in our school or zero. So we're all on the same page. Take it from there. and I will say, like, one thing that I find that teachers like the, as a sixth grade teacher, I had two other sixth grade math teachers on my team with me. Actually, there were four of us because the special ed teacher is always involved, was always involved as well. but we loved going to district planning things because we wanted to hear what was happening in other schools in our grade level, even though we were a team. It's always great to hear what's happening somewhere else and what other school districts are doing and schools are doing with their students. And past podcasts, some of the coaches have told me things like, it's still good, no matter what your subject is, grade level planning. So like, if you're the only math teacher in 11th grade, but there's also an English 11th grade teacher and a social studies to plan with. It was obviously content wise, you're going to need to go outside of that. But there are things like I forgot what episode it was. Sorry to whoever that coach was, but they talked about the fact that if. You're annotating in math and you're annotating in English and you're annotating in social studies, but all the teachers teach you a different way, then it's going to be much harder. So if you're collaborating together across grade levels so that every subject's annotating the same. Things like that, then that's also useful. Absolutely. And one of the one of the great things about that as well. Besides some of those strategies being consistent across a grade level is that you start to see connections between all of your contents and maybe there's. a project based learning that you can all have your hand in. So students start to see connections between contents and they don't see them as individual entities, which so often they do, especially when they get to secondary because we separate them out. So that's always another great thing that if you want to do collaborative planning with a team, that's not content. There's lots of other things that you can do besides just look at. Content, right. We talked, I think it was Debbie's episode. We talked, it was a little bit about planning, but not collaborative planning. But we did talk about that idea of a project, like you said, that kind of goes through all the subjects where you look at the same lost dog poster that you design in English and have to think about it. What information needs to go on this poster? But you think about what in economics, what's the reward that would be most effective to get the dog back? And so like, you're still having the same problem throughout all the subjects. Right? Exactly. Exactly. when we get into the collaborative planning process, so some teachers out there may recognize do for it is Richard and Rebecca do for and they have four that drive a PLC. And if you read any of the literature that they have. Published. It's really meant to look at kind of like a leadership level on down when with the four questions, but those four questions absolutely apply to the teacher level in the classroom level as well. So your four questions that you that need to be answered during collaborative planning are what do we want students to know and be able to do? Pretty straightforward, right? yes, it sounds like it should be. It's not always. It's deceiving, I will tell you that. These are four really simple questions, but at face value, like, it's deceiving because we need to think really deeply about all four of them. So, as I said, the first question is, what do we want students to know and be able to do? The second question is, How will we know when they learned it? Question three, what do we do when they don't learn? And question four is what do we do when they do? So again, deceivingly simple questions. should be able to answer those. So, if we, if I were to ask you, what do you want your students to know and be able to do? What are the things that you think you would be looking at or planning for in order to be able to answer that question? Write a argumentative paper, write a personal narrative, write a primary research based paper, things like that. Those would be the class goals, So, you're looking at what the standard says. right? So, that's the first thing that we look at is What are our standards? state has them. Almost every content has them. So what are we teaching our students? What does the, what do our state standards say? And Juliana did a great job with her podcast on how do we break those standards down so we really know what kids need to know and be able to do. So within our standards, we create learning targets and then we can also create success criteria. And there are three different things. They're meant for three different. Audiences. If we can break down a standard into something that's student friendly, that's kind of overarching. That's a learning objective. It might take us a couple days to reach the learning objective. So if the learning objective is I can recognize I can recognize proportions. But the standard itself says you have to use a table, and a graph, and an equation. I'm not going to do all of those in one day. So, in order to be able to recognize proportional relationships, on day one, my success criteria might be, I can recognize proportional relationships in a table. Because that's all we're doing today. And the success criteria lets students know, need to be able to do this by the end of the class period, and if I can do this, By the end of the week, I'll be able to proportional relationships in multiple representations. We also need to determine what proficiency looks like. So when kids get it right, what does it look like? states have proficiency scales. Some have, I know in Georgia we have achievement level descriptors. Sometimes we can look at released assessment items, whether it's from the district or the state. And I know that Debbie talked about planning with the end in mind. And that's exactly what happens when we look at those things. Consider what prerequisite skills students may need in order to be able to access your standard. Once we've done all that, we can look at what are the resources and activities that are going to help students be able to show that they understand the standard is. What are we going to use to teach? And then what are the strategies that we're going to teach? So it's the what and then the how. How are we going to teach this? So, like I said in the beginning, that question is deceivingly simple, but look at all of the things that have to go into planning for that one singular question. So the second question how do we know when we've learned So how do you determine when your students Have learned something. How do you know when your students have figured it out? so I guess I'll pick one of the specific objectives of the class, which is we'll do an argumentative essay. No, you know, I must start because it's the first, it'll be the beginning of the semester. The first paper of the semester is a personal narrative. So first thing, write a personal narrative. And so obviously. It's an ELA class. The assessment isn't usually a test or a quiz on essay writing. It's an essay. They have to turn in a personal narrative and demonstrate that they have learned all the things that we did. So that's the assessment portion. Did they write a personal narrative? Was it? A personal narrative, I guess would be the questions to answer that question. So what are those things that you do along the way to make sure that students are on the right track? Because a lot of times, like you said, in an ELA course, it's not a multiple choice summative assessment. It's a writing piece. So Just are we getting to the end and being like, yep, they can write one or they can't. But how are we checking along the way? I mean, we do, first of all, we're obviously reading and watching. I use, I think I've talked about this before, but I use for the personal narrative section, stand up comedy and how they use personal narrative. And so we watch a bunch of stand up comedy and we discuss in class, like where's the personal narrative in that? What do they do? Why did that work? Why is it a personal narrative? And then they have to write their own in class and we do a little stand up night we do weekly writing assignments that they have to turn in with steps of like, like the first step might be, what's your personal narrative going to be about? The second one might be, okay, outline what happened? What details do you need ? What details are you missing? Things like that. So we do stuff leading up all the scaffolding up into the personal narrative itself. So you're doing some formative assessment with them along the way, whether it's check ins through you, whether it's maybe some peer review and some peer evaluation to go Oh, yes. refine what they've done to make it better. Right? So that is part of how do we know when they learned it? It's not just test. The summative assessment. It's not just the final writing piece. It's not just the state assessment. what are those other things that we do along the way as we check for understanding. So are we asking our students to turn and talk and have some discourse with one another? Are we using exit tickets? That's a form of formative assessment. Are we using student work samples? So these are all things that we can use to answer that question. How will we know when they've learned it? Then what do we do they don't learn? So what happens when your students like you think that they had it and then they write that paper and you're looking at it, you're like, I. is not what I thought they were going to do and we need to go back. So what does that process look like when we have to go back and reteach? I think there are two. different ways to answer that question. One is, and I think I would handle them differently. One is, if it's like the whole class that didn't get it, then that's on me. That's I didn't teach it very well. And I need to go, okay, we need to come back in class and be like, Sorry, I messed up. You didn't get it. Sorry, whatever it was. And maybe there's probably not time to completely start over on a whole, if it's like a whole unit that we've already done. Hopefully I've caught it early enough. If it's a whole unit that I don't wait that long. But yeah, I would have to go and kind of. Start from, start over. Let's look at that again, because nobody got it. If it's a student or a couple of students that didn't get it, I'm not saying this is the best way, but one thing that I like to do is the final project of the semester is a revision project, where they get to pick one essay. That they wrote throughout the semester and try it again using my feedback that I gave them on the paper using their peers feedback that they get using what they've learned subsequently in the class using what they learned, we do like a whole unit on revision, and then they can go and redo that paper. So yeah, so when we, when they don't learn, like you said, if it's a whole class, like I have to reflect as the teacher. Oh where did I kind of falter? Where did I miss the mark? And how am I going to go back and reteach it? So one of the things is, are we just identifying a student misconception? Because maybe that's all it is. We just, it's one thing that students missed and I was like, oh, I can fix that really quickly. And like you said, is that whole class, if it's whole class, it falls back on me. If it's a small group, it still falls back on me. But I can work in small groups to address student misconceptions. The question is, how do we teach it differently? What do we do differently when our kids don't learn it? Because. Teaching it the same way, but and louder, the same way doesn't work. Just because I go slower, and I speak a little louder, or a little firmer. How are we teaching it differently? What's another strategy that we have in our toolbox? And if I don't have another strategy in my Mary Poppins bag, I'm going to go search out somebody else. is what I did. I need somebody to give me a different way to teach this. And at the school level, it's what kind of interventions do we have in place for students? But I can still do interventions within my class. So while I may not necessarily be able to send them out somewhere, or send them with another teacher, how do I structure my class so I can have some small groups, so I can work with those students who didn't understand it? But then the question I always get from teachers is actually the next question, but what do I do with the kids that already know how to do it? Because that is the next question. What do we do when they do? And I always tell them, that's a great question. So if your students, if you have a group that doesn't understand and you know, you need to work with them in a small group to do some revisions and you have the group that does, what does that day look like in your classroom? Like what you, what would be that assignment that you would give your students already Understand the material. I think I'm trying to think of when I've had situations like that in the past, I think what I have done is if I see, and this is usually before an assessment, but if I see some students struggling and some students getting it, I have my assignment is the students that get it. Explain it to the students that don't because I find that sometimes it's just a matter of I say things weird or I don't like it's not processing in that group. And when they hear it from their fellow students, they get it more. They're willing to listen more. I remember one time, one of my favorite things that students ever done, I think, is they're doing a peer review of you. a draft of an essay, and the person did not even try to format their works cited page correctly. Like it was just like a bunch of links thrown on the page. And I would have said, hey, make sure this is formatted correctly. You know, look up the sources that I gave. But this student, this his peer reviewer was like, bruh, what? Is this mess? My guy, I even know this isn't a works cited page. You got to do something about this. Cause I can't even look at this. I was like, no way I said that, but it was perfect. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I had plenty of occasions where I would explain something and the students like deer in the headlights looking at me and I'm like, I need you to turn and talk to your partner about what you heard me say or what you heard me explain. And like the one kid looks, he's like, I don't know. And so then one says, she said, and literally verbatim explained to him exactly what I had just said. It was the words that came out of my mouth. And he went, Oh, that's what she meant. And I was like, okay, like, I'm just gonna let it go. But I'm like, that's I just said that literally 30 seconds ago, and it's okay. It's okay. Like 100%. There's a lot of times that say stuff to other kids that we can't say, or they explain it in a way that it makes sense. And I have to be, I'm okay with that as a teacher, like, like, okay, that means somebody understood All right. and I can explain it to somebody else. So we always have those couple of options, like, yes, pair, pairing them up and letting them work as peers. We know that there's. no greater test of do you really understand what I taught you than asking you to explain it and teach it to somebody else. So using those partners is fantastic. other things to consider is how can we deepen their understanding? Maybe there's a a project that we can ask them to do. Maybe there's a like a math task that lets them dive deeper into the standard than were maybe the standard calls for but we're going to we're going to give them a challenge and see if they can do it. You know, what are those enrichment opportunities or acceleration opportunities for our students and then what does that look like in our classroom that's going to look different for every teacher. It'll look different for every teacher and I just so with collaborative planning, you know, are we answering those four questions. What do we want students to know and be able to do? How will we know when they learned it? What do we do when they don't learn? what do we do when they do? the planning, it has to be, everything about planning is intentional. It's intentional right down to the strategies that we use. when we teach whatever our content grade level standard is. We can't pick a strategy because we're like, Oh, or a resource. Cause they're like, Oh, I like this. This one's fun. The kids really like this one, but the strategy may not align with the standard. So we do have to be intentional when we choose the strategies that they actually match the standard. We don't want to try to put a round peg in a square hole. We do want to make sure that strategies match up with what we want to teach as well. So hopefully, this will help any teachers out there who are maybe struggling a little bit with planning or they want to improve their planning process. And I sent a document, there's a resource kind of a template that outlines all of these things and how do they all fit together that and schools are free to use as they see fit. Yes, and you did, and thank you for that, and I will put it in the show notes so that everybody will have it. So, thank you for being here. The bell you just heard means we are running out of time. Before you go, though, as always, we ask if you'll give us all a little bit of homework. If we give our students homework, we gotta do homework, too. Yes, and we know that as teachers we, we have nightly homework. We're not out of the loop Yeah. So, for an upcoming set for an upcoming lesson or an upcoming unit. I just challenge you to utilize the resource that template that I shared and Focus on those areas that maybe you haven't considered when planning, like have you, do you want to focus on success criteria? Do you want to focus on the strategies how are we engaging students the learning? Not just what's the resource, but how are we teaching it? So , use that document. And like I said, just focus on something that it. That you're that you haven't yet. So just baby steps. So just find that area. So if you're like you said, I look at the I look at the standard and I have some resources. So let's kind of write out what that looks like now. So for you, it might just be writing it down instead of it living in your head, Right. with a lot of teachers. It lives in their head. And I'm guilty of that too, but to get some things on paper, all right, well I will try that. Thank you so much for being here today. I hope that you had as much fun as I did. I did. This was so much fun. Thank you for asking me to come on. Well, have a great day and I'll see you next time. All right. Happy planning. Wow. Those were some really great, great tips and ideas centered around planning. What were some things you got? think one really great thing that I got out of it is the idea that you can collaborate with somebody no matter who you are or where you're teaching. If you have 20 other English teachers in your grade, you have People to collaborate. If you work in a one room schoolhouse and you're the only teacher for K through 12 like in the prairie days, you could go to a conference and network with somebody at the school across the district from you and you could find somebody you can you can collaborate with different grade levels. You can collaborate with different subjects. You can collaborate no matter who you are and what you're teaching. And I think that's really important to remember that there's always somebody to collaborate with I love that you have that take away. I wanted to as we, as we talked to coaches, I wanted to really drill in on that thought and, and Michelle had some really. Wise statements. At one point she said, Collaborative planning is also a fundamental building block of a learning organization. And then she said, organizations demonstrate their priorities by how they use their resources, and time is the most precious resource. So you, you and Michelle talked about how sometimes planning gets cut short because of time. Thank you, Kevin. Yes, And so as a coach, I love this organizations demonstrate their priorities by how they use their resources. So as a coach, I recognize that a teacher's time is a very important resource and we need to help navigate the principal conversation to allow teachers to have that collaborative planning time that that you recognized, Ashley. Does that make sense? it does. And imagine if your coach was advocating for you to have three hour planning block every quarter that you could use with some partner in the school. Or if, if it was, you know, it might be an hour and a half. Every other week or something, but there was some kind of collaborative planning that was. organized by not you, right? Like that, that, that would show the organization's priority that planning is important. And so as a coach, I would challenge coaches to be that advocate that recognizes that planning is important and. I'm going to find time for it to happen or advocate for time for it to happen. So that would be my, my takeaway as a coach from this is, is that sentence. Organizations demonstrate their priorities by how they use their resources. All right. Well, I love that. I definitely see why that's important because it is something that it's like as teachers sometimes they're using their own personal time to do the planning and to do that because there's not enough time in the day. And so yes, if, if the school of leadership time for them. I can see them feeling appreciated and also. Being better maybe at sitting down and actually getting some planning done. Yeah. And, and maybe, and maybe even addressing the burnout issue, right? Sometimes young teachers burn out because they're spending two or three hours at night sometimes that, you know, they take school home with them and they, they, it kind of consumes their life. And all of a sudden they're like, I'm out. And, and, and we have a, that's an issue we have in education and we want to stop that, you know, we want to make teachers lives easier, not, working all hours of the night. So. That might be just a hidden benefit, too. All Awesome. thank you so much again for coming and helping us out. I love the tips you gave and I love that Michelle. So you did a great job picking a coach and getting some insights out of it. So thank you as always. Thank you for having me. I look forward to being on again soon. Have a great rest of your day and see you next time.