🖥️ Lesson Plan Randomizer Beta (+ Download)
Ready to mix up your planning? Generate 100 unique lesson plans in seconds!
Teach Writing Tomorrow addresses major myths and misconceptions about teaching writing. It will move from attitudes to actions and mindset to methods, showing how any teacher, regardless of their own perceived ability or creativity, can teach writing tomorrow.
The Spreadsheet
In my post “101 Random Lesson Plans (No AI),” I talked about a thought experiment and a spreadsheet. The thought experiment went something like this: What if you could lesson plan once and never again? The result spanned several schemas and filled notebooks as I explored the mental steps to lesson planning. The mental steps, I realized, function mechanically. In coming posts, I will explore the following questions:
What are the mental steps to lesson planning? Which takes the most effort?
Name every teaching activity you know. How do you organize them?
What if you could take the mental effort of planning and push it forward?
As proof of concept, I introduced a spreadsheet which could take activities and randomly sequence them into lesson plans. From an informational standpoint, the following holds true across subjects:
1. All subjects have fairly predictable, content-specific activities.
2. Lesson plans sequence activities for given content. As such, two things follow:
3a. The same steps often recycle for different content. (Same steps, different stuff.)
3b. Different sequences become different lesson plans. (Different steps, same stuff.)
So rather than recall one activity after another, using mental energy to sequence them, shift your mental energy forwards. Instead, just input up to sixteen categories and generate 100 results in seconds. This frees your mental energy to look for novel results and combinations rather than remember and sequence.
Update: What if you could lesson plan once… and then never again?
User Guide / Instructions (Beta Version)
This spreadsheet should have no learning curve. Just (1) input your categories, (2) select the outputs, and (3) copy-paste the results into another program. That’s it! However, I have three quick notes:
This spreadsheet has volatile functions, so ANY change scrambles results.
The spreadsheet is locked to prevent accidentally breaking it. The dropdowns, however, couldn’t be protected.
Duplicated results will be highlighted. But the more activities per line you include, the odds of duplicates fall.
Here’s my only request…
Give feedback. That’s it. I want Beta testers. What works well? What should be added? What other ideas do you have? Just tell me something.
While you’re at it, be on the lookout for a post, “How to Lesson Plan Once (And Never Again).”
Note: This spreadsheet requires the most recent version of Microsoft Excel. It will not work on Google Sheets!
New to the blog? Explore some other favorites!
✏️ Need a place to start? Check out my ongoing series, Teach Writing Tomorrow.
📓 Want other tips for teaching writing? Check out some fan favorites.
🏆 And here are some other popular posts:
🗞️ Crave honest education news? Check out same satire from The Honest School Times.
I know this post is from a year ago, but thank you. This looks like gold. I want to use this in the fall when I start teaching for my first year. Thank you for making lesson planning less daunting!