Shortly into my first year of teaching high school, a foul odor permeating the tropical air of my classroom sent me poking around a previously unexplored filing cabinet, where I discovered that a mouse had found its way into the bottom drawer and died. After disposing of the creature, I discovered something else in the drawer: a treasure trove of well-crafted lesson plans left behind by the previous teacher.
For a moment, I debated whether I should use them—would it be shirking my duties or plagiarizing? My doubt quickly subsided, however, as I felt a tremendous weight lifting from my shoulders. No longer would I have to go it alone, muddling through a full year of lesson planning for five classes at this school on the isolated Caribbean island of St. Croix (in pre-Internet days).
I never met my benefactor, but her plans got me through my first year of teaching. Sure, I wove my own lesson plans around hers, but each week, I'd open that file drawer and feel like I was uncorking new messages in a bottle from my unseen colleague, as if she were saying things like, "Hey, try introducing the lesson this way" or "Don't forget to check for kids' understanding of this concept."
My experience reflects new (and old) research findings—namely, that unburdening teachers, especially novice teachers, of lesson planning can be a simple yet powerful way to improve their classroom performance.
Support Makes Quite a Difference
In a recent study (Jackson & Makarin, 2016), 363 middle school math teachers in three Virginia school districts were given varying levels of access to lesson plans from Mathalicious.com. The lessons (and units, as many were taught over several lesson periods) engaged students in inquiry-based learning around intriguing, real-life problems, such as "How long do you think LeBron James would have to play basketball to burn off all the calories in a Big Mac?"
One group of teachers was given access to the plans along with membership in an online learning community that provided webinars and opportunities to network with other teachers and the plans' developers. A second group received the model lesson plans with no online support community. A third (control) group proceeded with business as usual, presumably writing their own lesson plans.
Teachers' use of the lessons remained voluntary, so there were varying levels of uptake. Teachers in the access-only group hardly touched the plans and demonstrated no differences in student achievement from the control group. Teachers in the access-plus-online-support group, however, downloaded enough plans to cover roughly one-third of a year's worth of material, and their students showed higher achievement than the control group—a 0.08 effect size, the equivalent of moving these students from a classroom with an average teacher (at the 50th percentile of quality) to one at the 80th percentile of quality.
Perhaps most important, the lesson plans seemed particularly beneficial for weaker teachers. Access to the lessons and online support community were doubly beneficial for teachers whose quality was judged to be in the bottom quartile than for teachers of average quality.
Throwing Teachers a Lifeline
In her profiles of "dispelling the myth" schools—high-poverty schools with significant and sustained improvements in student performance—Karin Chenoweth (2009) found that some of these schools compiled and gave teachers three-ring binders full of well-designed lesson plans at the beginning of the year. Teachers seemed to welcome the support because it allowed them to focus on delivering the lessons well and managing behavior. In the words of one teacher at Lockhart Junior High, "It was very overwhelming my first year. There was just a lot to keep up with and keep track of." Striking lesson planning from her list of first-year worries removed some creases from her brow and made her feel "like I had support" (p. 101).
Helping New Teachers Get to Expertise
Left to their own devices, novice teachers often struggle to write effective lessons. An examination of the lesson plans of 67 teacher interns in Kentucky (Sultana, 2001), for example, found that 41.3 percent of those lessons primarily engaged students in basic knowledge—the lowest level of cognitive demand—and only 3.2 percent engaged students in the highest level of cognition on Bloom's taxonomy: evaluation.
Despite the seeming benefits of giving teachers access to high-quality lesson plans, doing so seems to be far from standard practice for schools or districts. A few years ago, Washington Post columnist Jay Mathews (2011) reported that when Teach for America surveyed its teachers in 31 states, only 15 percent of them said they had access to high-quality instructional tools like lesson plans. Mathews quoted a first-year Teach for America teacher in Baltimore puzzling over why he was allowed to make so many "beginner's mistakes" in his first year of teaching: "There were no exemplary lesson plans, no recommended class activities, nothing."
My point isn't that teachers should be spoon-fed lesson plans and forced to check their professional expertise at the classroom door. Rather, it's that high-quality lesson plans can give new or struggling teachers in particular an important lifeline. This may be the best way to think of packaged or borrowed lesson plans—as a support for teachers, not a mandatory "teacher-proof" curriculum. As performance researchers Anders Ericsson and Neil Charness (1994) noted, the best way to develop expertise is often to copy others' expertise—which, for teachers, can come from an online resource, colleagues, or someone kind enough to leave us their professional wisdom in a filing cabinet drawer.
