Planning and Preparing to Teach a New Course: Simplifying the Process

Are you gearing up to teach a shiny new class next year? Maybe it’s a brand new program or course that’s in high demand. Now as a multiple prep teacher, and specifically if you are an elective teacher, like a CTE teacher, we often find ourselves. In this boat of ever-changing industries, new technology, student requests, and the desire to stay full-time, so needing to add additional preps to our already multiple prep load.

Sooner or later we’re going to be asking on the challenge of teaching a new course and this. Is you this year. Fear not today, we are going to be going over some tips to help you plan and prepare for that exciting new adventure without spending your entire summer planning for this course. Welcome to The Secondary Teacher Podcast, the podcast for middle and high school.

Teachers juggling multiple preps to get the strategies to reduce overwhelm so that you don’t have to choose between being an effective teacher and prioritizing important relationships. I’m your host, Khristen Masek, a 10-year high school engineering teacher, former middle school assistant principal and teacher coach.

Every week, we will discuss strategies, systems, and time-saving tips to help you not only survive but thrive as a multiple prep teacher. As we dive into this episode, I want to give you a couple of reminders before you really. Start into this journey of planning for a new course. The first one is you still need to have a summer, so do not spend your entire summer planning every little detail about this course.

And the second that kind of adds onto that is it’s okay not to be the expert. You do not need to also spend your entire summer becoming an expert on this content. You’re going to need to give yourself a break, give yourself some grace, and spend at least this first year. If not your first and second year, learning about the content and how to deliver it properly.

This is going to be a learning experience. You need to allow yourself some time to fail, some opportunities to fail, and also still give yourself a break because you have other classes. That you are still needing to teach. This is our first tip is going to be to tap into existing curriculum resources whenever possible.

You will need to find out from your state or your district if there are any. Strands and standards or objectives that you are going to need to adhere to for this course. And then from that first off, see if they have anything already available. Hopefully they do, but in a lot of cases, most cases, especially when it’s a new class and new emerging technology or something that’s changed with industry, there may not be a lot that the state has, but industry should have some resources that can help you.

And this would be in the form of someone else’s curriculum. See if you can find another teacher somewhere, anywhere. Could be your district, it could be the state, it could be another state who is teaching that same course or something similar, and see what you can get from them. You could. Possibly need to purchase something like this, or maybe they have resources online or even just some ideas of how they started.

That is one way to look at it, is using someone else’s curriculum that they’ve already developed. Lesson plans, assessments. Any of that that is ready made that you can grab and you can go, and then you can tweak during the school year to fit your teaching style. Now, if there isn’t anything like that, another way that you can start is you can find some textbooks.

Or some industry resources that might help you as well. Really what you’re trying to do is kind of get a basic idea of filling in those gaps of here are the strands and standards, and here are some core things to teach about those. Now, at the time of this recording chat, G p T and AI have started to become really big.

Now, the tricky thing with this is that you are not. An expert yet, but you might be able to use chat, G p T or some other AI to at least come up with a basic framework so you can copy and paste your strands and standards. Into chat G P T and ask them what core items would need to be taught so that students could be proficient in each of those strands and standards.

You will need to go over this and look at it and verify, maybe cross-reference, do some research, do some checking to make sure that everything is correct because with these ai. They are writers. They’re not necessarily, you’re not searching the internet, you’re not doing research that way, but at least it could give you an idea of some outlines, some ways, some places that you could go, some strands of standards, some skills that your students might need to learn in order to meet proficiency for those particular strands of standards that you have.

Received from your state. Now if you don’t have anything from your state, other states will probably have something. Don’t be afraid that if someone is wanting you to teach a new computer science class, but you have no idea where to start and they really haven’t given you anything. Don’t hesitate to go somewhere else.

Look and see what other states are doing, other districts are doing, and start using that to just get a basic framework. Once again, you are not creating lessons plans at this point. You are just coming up with this overall. This is what my students should be able to do by the time they leave my class. That is the first step, or your first tip, is to use someone else’s curriculum.

Or find other resources that you can use that you don’t need to be the expert in. The second idea is to create a course map for the year. This is definitely something that you can do during the summer. Or even partially do it to get you through the first term to see how your sequencing and your timing is going, and then you can adjust for the rest of the school year.

But to have that curriculum map or that course map in place will really help you as you are trying to navigate this new course. With that, you’ll need to. Take what you have decided as far as that curriculum goes, and you will need to figure out what units you would like to teach. This is the, as far as you’re going right now, is just to the unit level, and then you’re going to map out and figure out how long you want to be spending or you should be spending on each of those units.

You are still experimenting and it’s totally okay for you to experiment. And adjust. You will probably want to plan in some buffer time as well so that you can adjust, you could make a unit longer or shorter while you are teaching it. Don’t worry about that right now. Just put in the buffer time so that you can be prepared when that happens, when you hit it in that first term or that first semester, and you need to adjust.

When you’re coming up with this curriculum map, you can use my tool, the plan out your course blueprint that has a spreadsheet and some videos on how to do this step by step. But there are some things that you’re going to want to take into account, like holidays and also your. Other classes, hopefully you have curriculum apps for your other classes.

If not, you can also use to plan out your course of blueprint to do that so that you can make sure that your classes and your assignments and your assessments, everything is a little bit staggered so as to reduce your overwhelm. When you are doing your day by day planning and grading and all of the other fun stuff that happens every day for you at school, the final idea or tip to help simplify this planning of your new course is to find your tribe or find an.

Online community of people who are teaching either the same class or similar classes that you can get ideas from. One of my favorite places is Facebook. There are a lot of education or educator Facebook communities, and you can do a search to find a specific group that is teaching. At least the overall topic or content area for you.

And then you can get ideas, you can post questions yourself, or you can just watch four things. Now when you’re doing that, I would caution you to not save every single good idea that you see, because more likely than not, you’re not going to go through your saved list. But you can search those groups, which is probably one of the best resources because you can actually look at the unit you’re going to be teaching or the skill you’re going to be teaching, and you’re wondering, how in the world am I going to do that?

Does anyone have an idea for that? You can actually type in some of those keywords into the search and it will pull up any. Content or any conversations or any posts that somebody else has done going back until the group group was created and gives you some ideas of how to target those specific things.

Instead of just going through and scrolling and getting overwhelmed when you are using those communities, just be really. Intentional about using those content and those pieces that you are looking for. Now, the same thing holds true if you are attending any workshops or any online other learning.

Where you’re learning from courses is to specifically look for certain tasks or items that have to do with your units. Now, once again, We are just going to be looking at kind of coming up with this curriculum map idea, and if you want to go a little bit further, my suggestion by the end of this summer would be just to have your first 10 days planned.

That’s it. And more likely than not most of the things that you are doing in your other classes as far as establishing routines and your processes and procedures, All of those are going to be very similar, so don’t plan too far in advance because you’re not really sure about what students you have, but that will get it so that you feel confident going into that next school year teaching this new course and that you are ready to go.

Even though you are not yet an expert and that you are giving yourself permission to learn as you go, let’s review these tips for you. My new course Teaching Friend, the first is to explore existing curriculum resources such as colleagues, plans, textbooks, or any sort of. Online curricula that might already be out there.

The second is to develop a comprehensive course map that is tailored to your teaching style, but then also any vacation, holidays, anything that is happening throughout the school year. And then finally, Find a supportive teaching community where you can exchange ideas and also seek guidance during these first couple years of teaching this new course.