Planning the School Year

February 4, 2020

Walking down a dim hallway, the lonely echo of their own footsteps is all the math teacher can hear.  Save for the cleaning crew and 12-month admin assistant, the school is vacant and has been for a little over two months.  Most of their colleagues are enjoying the last week of summer break, but this is their third day back to work.  Being here is unglamorous, but necessary - essential for the school year to run smoothly.

Mandatory staff days will be a whirlwind of meetings, assignments, and catching up with coworkers, making quality long term planning impossible.  Even when the administration provides classroom setup time, there will be constant disruptions.

Their partner teacher will want to plan community-building activities, and the paraprofessional will be eager to show pictures of her newborn son.  The team one grade level above will ask about Robert, an emotional needs student who doesn’t always take his medication.  Someone will want to borrow their stapler, masking tape, or letter cutter; the custodian will need to run air-conditioning checks; and they hope to discuss the upcoming college football season with the PE teacher.

Students won’t arrive for two weeks, but the classroom is already prepared.  Desks are arranged, pencils are sharpened, bulletin boards are decorated, and the job chart is posted.  While their colleagues are frantically setting up their rooms and working long into the evenings, the math teacher will be completing administrative assignments, rehearsing lesson plans, and experiencing the restful nights needed to perform well during the early days of school.  They’ll teach sooner and better than those less prepared, and their students will be more cooperative, responsive, and high achieving because of it.

With the easy preparations complete, it’s time to plan.

To map out a school year, Math teachers need to collect large amounts of information, analyze it, and then make critical decisions regarding the class’ best interests.  Attempting to teach everything leads to poor outcomes, and spending extra days to help a few students can stunt the progress of many.  The world is flawed and teaching is an imperfect profession.  Fully understanding this reality, the teacher forces themself to make decisions for the collective, knowing that it’s impossible to perfectly meet every child’s needs.

Sitting at their desk, a textbook is opened in front of them; a school calendar and spreadsheet are pulled up on their computer.  They study the calendar from beginning to end, determining how much teaching time they will have.  Assemblies, field trips, and the last day of school all factor into this calculation.

A long term plan is only useful when its author is time conscious.  The math teacher not only knows how many instructional hours they have, but also how they are allotted.  There is a limit to how much new content a child can acquire in a given day, so 170 one-hour class periods produces more learning than the same amount of time divided into 90-minute blocks.

Day-by-day, they project which textbook page numbers and tasks they will teach.  Two months ago, they met with their incoming students’ teachers to find out what concepts weren’t taught, and which units were collectively successful and unsuccessful.  These insights help them forecast instructional pace and develop deeper curricular understanding.  Therefore, even if their predictions are frequently wrong, they still benefit from the process.

As they work, the teacher’s guide is stowed a safe physical and mental distance away.  The master educator knows that company pacing plans offer unrealistic, shallow suggestions.  The writers don’t know the school’s students, and many of them never even taught.  Only a classroom teacher can accurately anticipate lessons that can’t be completed in one day, need to be consolidated, or should be skipped entirely.

Opposing conventional practice, they always deliver a lesson on the first day of school.  Teaching procedures through content, they understand, is more engaging and meaningful than doing so without it.  They also know that beginning school years with a review is detrimental to long term pacing and student morale.  Using instructional days to revisit previous grade content rarely leads to stronger understandings and, too often, bores or overwhelms students.  For the same reason, the teacher only gives a cumulative review test if the administration demands it.  Breaking from teaching orthodoxy, they begin the curriculum immediately and provide short, intermittent reviews as challenges arise.

The teacher omits lessons if they are relatively insignificant or will overwhelm most students.  Although neither justifies full instructional periods, both will be addressed - the former through fluency or problem solving, and the latter as small-group extension work.  They only allot two days for a single lesson if they’re confident that the additional teaching will solidify many students’ comprehension.  Nothing is more damaging to pacing and class morale than re-teaching a concept without advancing collective understanding.

Their experience has taught them to not let challenging topic introductions bridge weekends.  Waiting until a Monday to start a complex unit will oftentimes lead to more efficient teaching and pacing than beginning the same chapter on the Friday before.  The skilled educator understands that weekends lead to retention drops and avoiding re-teaching is vital to covering most if not all of a challenging curriculum.

Three-day weekends and holidays require special consideration.  The most important and/or challenging topics necessitate consecutive, uninterrupted days and weeks.  Second grade teachers won’t introduce addition and subtraction algorithms in the days leading up to Thanksgiving break.  Fifth grade teachers avoid fraction concepts in December, because student focus wanes with each concert rehearsal, school play, and classroom celebration.

Only in situations such as these will the teacher alter the curricular sequence.  Topics such as Length, Geometry, and Data Collection are portable, because they’re not dependent on the foundational understanding and intricate sequencing of the units they’re leapfrogging.  Although non-optimal, some lower stakes lessons can bridge weekends or even be taught on consecutive Fridays.

After pacing the school year, the teacher shifts their focus.  The cross-grade level math meeting gave them insight into their incoming students’ collective fluency levels.  This helps them arrange their seating chart and determine core skills that will need to be practiced.  They know that many topics should have – but haven’t been – mastered.  They also know that trying to address every skill gap will lead to more foundational holes without plugging the original.  Using a Less is More approach, they select one or two topics to address well.

Last June, they also met with the teacher team one grade level above theirs.  In doing so, they developed a stronger understanding of how they can prepare their students for future learning.  Using the feedback, they add to their list (see completed table on right).

They return to the top of their spreadsheet, add a fluency column, and plot out interleaved practice on the concepts they’ve chosen.  For the first month of school, they’ll address them no less than twice/week (see third grade pacing plan below).

In early October, they’ll reevaluate their progress and plan how to move forward.  It’s likely that they’ll reduce the longitudinal fluency’s frequency to once/week.  If, later, they feel that 90% or more of the students have mastered the concepts, they will start addressing new topics.  In their pacing plan spreadsheets, they make a note next to the 20th school day, reminding them to analyze their plan and adjust it if necessary.

Because Sprints have been a powerful fluency tool in the past, the teacher carefully selects the first ten that they’ll deliver, making sure that each is simple for every student, but still interesting enough to keep them motivated.  Later, there will be ample time to introduce more challenging work.  These deliberate choices will help students create success associations with written fluency improving their morale in the process.

They post their Sprint list next to their desk.  For the first several months, they will rotate through these, revisiting each topic every two to three weeks.  As their students master new concepts, they will enter grade level Sprints into the rotation (see third grade list below).

Model drawing strengths and weaknesses were also discussed during the June meetings.  The teacher adds a problem solving column to their spreadsheet and plans interleaved practice for different diagram types.  Knowing their students’ current levels and where they need to take them, they are better able to map out a route.

A strong curriculum, paired with excellent teaching, produces great math students.  Desirable test scores are a welcomed consequence of the powerful combination.  Therefore, while pacing out the school year, the teacher’s primary goal is to set the curriculum on a consistent linear track.  Knowing that the strength of the curriculum comes from the sequence in which concepts are learned, the teacher doesn’t consider altering its order until the New Year.  Children who are comfortable thinking and reasoning independently can navigate standardized exams better than students who have been inundated with testing strategies, but lack flexible thinking and strong foundations.

Still, wholly ignoring standardized tests is not wise.  Even the best curricula fail to expose students to every concept and data display that show up on exams.  Many of the aforementioned are useful and should be addressed during math class.  Next to the last day before Thanksgiving break, they write themselves a reminder to reexamine their pacing plan.  During this time, they’ll project what testing topics will not be covered by the spring examination and then develop a plan to address them.

For each unaddressed concept, they question whether or not it is important enough to spend entire class periods teaching it.  A topic that shows up twice on a standardized test might not warrant being taught at all.  Or, it might be best addressed during short fluency drills every day for one week, and then revisited intermittently over the next several months.  This approach works well with surface terminology standards such as Sides in a Polygon, and Mean, Median, Mode, and Range.

Data displays such as stem-leaf plots, line graphs, and circle charts are better learned intermittently over several months than through standard lessons.  This is because answering their accompanying questions requires two separate skill sets – decoding a diagram and basic calculations.  The former is best remembered through occasional, but routine exposure to the data display, while the latter normally requires simple skills developed in previous grades.  Spending several consecutive class periods learning to decode and analyze specific types of graphic organizers might temporarily lead to stronger understanding but, in the long run, will be forgotten if they’re not periodically revisited.  Teaching and practicing these problem types for entire class periods is poor use of instructional time.  The work is vibrant and meaningful when it’s taught and learned in eight to ten minute problem solving chunks.

If the testing topics require entire class periods to teach and learn, the teacher searches for the most optimal times to interject them.  This normally falls between the end of a long unit and the one that follows it.  When positioned this way, the standardized test topic doesn’t interfere with meaningful curricular learning, and students welcome the diversion from typical routines.

Throughout the school year, test taking strategies such as estimating reasonableness of answers and eliminating multiple choice options are woven into curricular lessons and/or problem solving time.  When both are a part of routine instruction, they become a function of students’ thinking/reasoning processes.  When they are presented procedurally during test prep crams, children become confused, feel disconnected from their learning, and fall short of their potential.

Under the problem solving heading, the teacher makes a note to deliver one multiple choice elimination problem each week.  If the curriculum doesn’t provide valuable problems that fall under this category, they will create their own.

With their pacing plan complete, they go home for the day.  Tomorrow, they’ll return and prepare the first lesson of the school year.