I had met with Brian Curwick a few weeks back and saw a rough draft of his Common Core lesson plan template. I was really impressed by his outline and thought it would be great to use Google Forms and Scripts with it to aid in communication and collaboration amongst staff members.
Click Here to fill out sample lesson plan
Click Here for step by step directions
Idea 1: Submitting lesson plans to administration
Some school sites require that teachers submit lesson plans. This may be an opportunity for administration and teachers to collaborate, however the nature of either paper or emailing documents back and forth reduces the efficiency.
- Create a document with a template of the school lesson plan format.
- Create a Google Form that asks for all of the information for the lesson plan.
- Install and run the autocrat script to create an editable Google Doc
- Teachers will fill out the form to submit their lesson plans.
- Administrator receives all lesson plans in one spreadsheet instantly. This allows the administrator to review the lesson plans of all the teachers at once.
- The autocrat script created a shared document that gives the teacher and the administrator access.
- The teacher and administrator can immediately collaborate together on the lesson plan to align to school expectations and goals and to maximize student achievement.
- During observations the administrator can pull up the shared Google Doc and insert->comments right into the document. This allows for there to be a single living document with all the information from teacher submission, pre-observation, observation and post observation.
Idea 2: PLC and team collaboration
Truly collaborating together as a grade level or subject level can be challenging. One way to really collaborate together is to divide up responsibilities for different parts of the day or unit. One teacher will design the math lesson, another will design the reading lesson, etc…
By creating the lessons in a Google Form the entire grade level team can have access to the spreadsheet to see everything all at once. The autocrat script links to the documents created in the spreadsheet so it is easy to find the lesson plans. In the PLC meetings, team members can open the lesson plan documents easily and add comments and improvements.