Every lesson plan can feel like an endless series of decisions: What should students do? How should I teach this? How will they practice it? How will I know whether they learned it? What needs to be differentiated? What should happen next?

In this episode, I'm talking with Jennifer Gonzalez of Cult of Pedagogy about how having a clearer decision-making framework can reduce some of the mental load of lesson planning. Rather than starting with activities and building a lesson from scratch every time, you can make a few key decisions in a more deliberate order, then choose strategies that serve those decisions.

Jenn walks me through four shifts from the framework she developed while creating her new course, Mastering the Lesson Plan:

• Stop starting with activities, and start with the destination
• Ask what students need to do with the content (acquire it, process it, or apply it)
• Build assessment into the plan instead of adding it afterward
• Create a planning process you can reuse

We also talk about why planning doesn't automatically get faster with experience, and in fact can take LONGER for veteran teachers. Jenn explains what to actually do with exit slips once you've collected them, and how to get from the four-page lesson plans you wrote in college to the bullet points in your planner.

A framework won't fix your workload, and neither of us pretends it will. But it can make your planning more intentional and repeatable.

Check out Jenn's NEW course, Mastering the Lesson Plan, and use the code ANGELA for $10 off: https://cultofpedagogy.teachable.com/p/mastering-the-lesson-plan?affcode=102837_hq3ox7wk

(That's an affiliate link, so I earn a small commission if you enroll, at no extra cost to you.)

Listen on or read: https://truthforteachers.com/truth-for-teachers-podcast/why-lesson-planning-takes-so-long-and-how-to-reduce-decision-making/

I had an experience when I was a new teacher that shaped much of what I believe about how educators should use their time and the most effective way to reach students.

It was my very first exposure to understanding and questioning school norms, and made me realize that so much of what we assume about the ways school "should be done" is based on a very specific construct in our local area or even in our individual buildings.

Part of this story is in my book "Fewer Things, Better: The Courage to Focus on What Matters Most" but I felt like it was too lengthy to include the best details, and I really wanted to share the entire story with you. So, I hope you'll join me for this episode as I recall the very first time I went against school norms, and why the experience shaped my thinking from that day forward.

Listen on or read: https://truthforteachers.com/truth-for-teachers-podcast/the-first-time-i-questioned-tradition-vs-whats-best-for-kids/

You've probably heard the phrase "activate prior knowledge" a million times. It shows up in every lesson plan template, every observation rubric, every methods textbook. And teachers are good at it. But the behavioral science on how priming actually works in the brain goes way deeper than asking kids what they remember from yesterday, and once you understand it, you start seeing opportunities to prime learning in places you probably weren't looking.

In this episode, I walk you through six research-backed ways to prime students' brains for learning, all grounded in cognitive science, and most of them are things you can try this week without changing your curriculum, your schedule, or anything about your school's expectations.

We get into what priming actually is (and I'm honest about which parts of the priming research have held up and which parts haven't), and then I share six specific strategies with classroom examples for every grade level. We cover how to use the 60-second window before class actually starts, how to treat your opening hook as instruction rather than just engagement, how to use prequestions the way the 2024 ManyClasses study suggests they actually work, how to prime the emotional state kids walk in with, how to prime the cognitive mode you want them in (scientist, historian, writer), and why the last 30 seconds of class matter more than most teachers realize.

If you've ever felt like a great Monday lesson somehow evaporated by Tuesday, this episode gives you a clearer lens for evaluating what you're already doing and where you might tweak. You don't need to overhaul anything. You just need to start noticing the priming that's already happening in your classroom and making more deliberate choices about what you're priming kids for.

LIsten on or read: https://truthforteachers.com/truth-for-teachers-podcast/6-ways-to-prime-students-brains-for-learning/