This is in response to a question posted in my forums by GaryRHess:

I always wanted to know about teachers reusing the same information each year (if they use the same book). Do you just keep the same lesson plans or do you make up different ones to keep it new and exciting for yourself?

Using the same lesson plans is a normal thing among teachers. The way it works is normally as a first year teacher you have to create all new lesson plans. Many states require you to do portfolios for the first year and they have to contain extremely detailed lesson plans. It’s not like you can grab them off the Internet and claim them as yours. If you do, you’re fired. Quite simple.¹

After that first year, you take the lesson plans that worked really well and you reuse them. You file away the rest for modification or just throw them away if they failed completely. As the years go by, you slowly gather up some really good lesson plans that you end up using every year or even every other year.

Constant modifications are done to them though. Sometimes things just change. If you get a new textbook, you have to modify the lessons to fit them or file them away because they can’t be used with the new textbook. Some lessons contain links to websites that go away. You have to change those. Also, lesson plans should always be easily related to real life situations. Students need to be able to connect to the information to be able to learn it. So lesson plans have to be “modernized” often. You can’t make a lesson plan that includes “Greatest Love of All” by Whitney Houston back in the 80s and expect it to connect with students of today. That’s why I like including modern or “timeless²” movies, books, etc. in my lesson plans.

There are teachers who never update their lesson plans and use them over and over. But as the years go by, the students just don’t have the same amount of fun as the students did who first go to partake in those lessons. They just don’t connect as well³.

Using old lesson plans is perfectly ok as long as they were really good lesson plans that really got the students interested in the lesson and they also have to be relevant, or modified to be relevant, to today’s world. You could compare it to stand-up comics. There are some that have been around for years⁴, but they still use jokes they used 30 years ago. However, they make them fit today’s society⁵.

1. Some places are more lax on this. But I’m going to explain it as it is where I live. [«]
2. What I mean by “timeless” are those books, movies, etc. that have meaning even in today’s world. Songs tend to be more timeless than movies and books. [«]
3. It’s kind of like a vacuum salesman looking at a tech geek and trying to sell him one of those retro style Sebo vacuums instead of a newer style Dyson vacuum. And no laughing at “vacuum salesman,” they do still exist. I know, I was one for about 3 days. [«]
4. Such as recently deceased George Carlin. [«]
5. One of George Carlin’s best routines was about euphemisms. He used it in almost every show. All he did was change which euphemisms he used to be in more modern language and terms. [«]

• The Substitute
• Education and Change
• 6 Qualities of an Effective School
• Can School be Fun?
• Don’t Hit People

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.