The Simple Lesson Planning Shift That Leads to Better Learning

Every back-to-school season, teachers ask themselves the same questions.What should I have my students do? What should they do for morning work? While I’m meeting with a small group? What if they finish early?  But the question “what should I have my students do?” is not the question we should be asking. The better question is “what learning do I want to happen?”  Shifting the question can make all the difference in improving instruction.  This simple lesson planning shift changes every instructional decision you make–for the better.

Here’s why. 

When we ask ourselves what we want students to do, it can lead to a more superficial time-filling task. Do often becomes synonymous with task.  But the goal is never task completion.  The goal is learning.  

Morning work is a prime example of a place we often miss the mark; where too often task completion, not learning, is prioritized.  

All too often teachers assign “spiral review” packets from TPT for students to work on quietly so the teacher can take attendance, lunch count, and check last minute notes and emails.  But the thing is, by definition, it’s only a review if you’ve taught it.  A pre-created resource might include skills your students haven’t yet learned, emphasize ideas you haven’t taught, or approach them very differently than you did. These resources are not inherently wrong, but they weren’t created with your students or your recent instruction in mind.  

And it’s only helpful if we do something with it.  Teachers don’t typically collect this work to look for misconceptions or errors.  That doesn’t just mean a totally missed opportunity for corrective feedback, it means that those misconceptions and errors were only reinforced, because for some students,  the work amounted to little more than incorrect practice.  

Left unchecked, not only are those incorrect practices further ingrained in students, but now the teacher’s job is that much harder, because a greater amount of reteaching will be required later.  

So instead of disconnected practice materials, students should practice with authentic curriculum materials as much as possible.

Rather than assigned practice pages that someone else created, consider what you’ve taught that you’d like your students to review.  Maybe it’s last month’s vocabulary words.  Or last week’s lessons on combining sentences.  Or recalling what the social studies lesson you taught yesterday was all about.  

When we start lesson planning with the learning goal, the task we’d like students to do in service of learning becomes clear. 

It’s big-picture thinking, not filling daily time slots.

For example, perhaps students edit their own writing, looking for places they could correct erroneous apostrophe use, if that’s something you taught a few weeks ago.  Maybe you taught a couple of lessons on attending to dialogue tags to read fluently, so partners reread a section of a story or social studies text you read last week to practice this skill. 

Rereading is an incredibly evidence-based intervention that helps students with reading disabilities improve fluency skills (Kim, Bryant, Bryant, & Park, Y. (2017) .  Maybe you simply set a timer for 3 minutes while you take attendance and students write about a concept you taught yesterday that you plan to expand on this week.  You can collect what they write, note confusion, and address it in your upcoming lesson.  

Morning work is just one example of where we can be more intentional in what students do.  This is the mindset that should guide lesson planning for the entire day.  

There are three excellent reasons for reframing our ideas about what we want students to do. 

When we instead think about what learning goals we want students to work toward, everything shifts.

Now, it’s not just task completion.  It’s intentional retrieval practice, something that has consistently shown to improve student learning (Brown, 2014, Brain Behavior, 2020) .  Retrieval helps solidify learning.  Cult of Pedagogy’s Jennifer Gonzalez sums up the benefit of retrieval practice perfectly when she says, “if we do more asking students to pull concepts out of their brains, rather than continually trying to put concepts in, students will actually learn those concepts better.” 

If solid learning is the goal, the tasks you choose for students to do now involve judicious use of materials they’re already familiar with.  The teacher is now in the driver’s seat, ensuring that students have been exposed to the material, something we can’t confidently do with an outsourced set of materials.  

This shift also means far less time spent on teacher prep work.  Using the same materials you’re already using–or have already used–means no extra time spent searching for, downloading, and printing or assigning more materials.  Any time we can save ourselves time is a win in my book!

But the biggest reason determining learning goals should precede task goals is that students are now completing tasks in service of the real goal–real reading and real writing.  Asking students to do work that is directly applicable to their actual reading, writing, and learning is the whole point.  

So consider…

• Instead of filling in grammar worksheets, have students work with a peer to improve their own grammar in a piece of writing they’re working on.

• Instead of correcting punctuation errors from a sentence on a slide that you had to hunt up, remind students of what you’ve taught them and give them time to find and correct those same sort of errors in their own work.  Or type up a sentence that reflects the content you’ve been teaching, where each word and the punctuation is inside a box–but in mixed up order.  Give each student or partnership a set of boxes, have them cut the boxes apart (this will take 5 seconds), and unscramble the sentence.  This is hands-on application of the skill that simultaneously reinforces concept learning.

• Instead of hunting down or AI-generating another passage for students to read for fluency practice, pull out a part of a text you used a couple of weeks ago (or even yesterday!)–from any subject–to have students read it a couple of times with a partner.

• Instead of pulling a highly contrived premade text for context clue practice, give students an excerpt of an upcoming text you’re going to use that contains a potentially confusing word.  Post the anchor chart you’ve been building that lists the kinds of context clues a reader might try, and let them grapple with it a bit.  It’s going to make for an excellent discussion later, when you turn to that same text for teaching.  And, you’ll have very much piqued students’ curiosity!

• Instead of a worksheets that involve coloring or word searches, ask students to explain a concept from the day or week before–again, from any subject.  

The list of possibilities is truly endless. 

Notice that none of them take more than a couple of minutes to prepare.  They all nudge real learning forward.  This is no accident.  This is purposeful lesson planning, starting with the right question.  Not“what should I have my students do?,” but rather, “what experience would help further my students’ learning?”

This simple, subtle planning shift is powerful. And it holds true all across the day, not just morning work. It changes the way we plan instruction, every teaching decision. Instead of searching for something for students to do, we can begin by asking what learning we want to strengthen. That’s a small change not just in wording, but in thinking. It leads to better instruction, less teacher prep, and much more meaningful learning.

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Who is Coach from the Couch?  I’m Michelle Ruhe, a 25+ year veteran educator, currently a K-5 literacy coach.  I continue to learn alongside teachers in classrooms each and every day, and it’s my mission to support as many teachers as I can.