Welcome to Season 3, episode 6 of Angela Watson's Truth for Teachers.

I'm your host Angela Watson, and I'm here to speak life, encouragement, and truth into the minds and hearts of educators and get you

energized for the week ahead. Today I'm going to share some thoughts on how to make

co-planning lessons with other teachers more efficient. You can visit truth for teachers.com to get the

transcript links to recommended resources and to share your thoughts on the show.

So lesson planning is really something that is just too important and too challenging and

to time consuming for you to try to do all of it on your own.

And this is especially true if you're a new teacher or if you are new to the curriculum or you have new standards or assessments.

It's wonderful to utilize the experience of other teachers and use time-tested instructional strategies

so that you don't have to spend as long planning out your lessons. Many teachers

already planned with their grade level or subject area teams but in many cases it's not working

particularly well. Either the meetings consume just massive amounts of times.

I mean I know teachers who spend five hours a week co-planning. It's crazy. Or there's personality

conflicts and that keeps the endeavor from really being productive. So let's look

at some different ways to efficiently co-plan.

It's important to give each group member, each team member,

a clearly defined set of responsibilities

according to their individual strengths.

One way is for each teacher on the team to pick a unit or a part of a unit and create the lesson

plans for the team. Another option for elementary teachers is for each person to

pick a subject area to plan for. So you can stick with the same subject throughout

the quarter or semester a year or you can switch it up. The idea is for each team member to choose

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