A central feature of the work that interns and collaborating teachers do together is co-planning. Planning for teaching is a complex activity that does not look the same for all teachers.  Some teachers write out detailed plans while others keep track mentally of many aspects of their planning.  As teachers gain more experience, they may gradually begin to write less and keep more in their heads.  However planning is carried out, there are key areas that all teachers need to consider in order to engage in standards-based teaching.  This section discusses three main topics:

• expectations for planning during the internship

• key questions to consider while planning

• how mentors engage in co-planning with their interns

Expectations for Planning During the Internship

  Interns are expected:

• to write unit plans for every unit that they teach during the year, and to discuss those units with their collaborating teachers, and sometimes field instructors, before they teach them

• to write lesson plans for every lesson that they teach during the year, and again to discuss those in advance with their CTs, and regularly with their field instructors.

Reasons for making written plans.  Interns might wonder why they are expected to write unit and lesson plans.  In a student's experience with teachers, it is not obvious that a teacher's day in the classroom includes planning.  Therefore, it might be difficult for some interns to regard planning as being part of a teacher's work.  A given intern might see that her collaborating teacher does not commit much of her plans to writing (or perhaps does not commit as much to writing as s/he did earlier in her career).  Thus, interns may wonder why they are expected to plan thoroughly and extensively--on paper.

Particularly at the beginning of one's teaching career, it is important to plan instruction carefully and to evaluate and reflect upon instruction thoroughly.  One major benefit of careful planning and thorough reflection is that it helps to build good teaching habits, and to give the teacher a measure of control over those habits, thus increasing the teacher's capacity to serve her or his students.  Writing out plans also helps novices who are not used to thinking of all the details necessary to carrying out a successful lesson be thorough about all aspects that require attention.

During the internship year, an intern's unit and lesson plans also serve to inform the collaborating teacher, field instructor, and course instructor about the intern's intentions, so that they can better help the intern to act on those intentions--or to reconsider them. Access to interns' thinking about unit and lesson plans is a key way CTs,  field instructors and course instructors identify interns' strengths and problem areas and help interns further develop the knowledge, skills and dispositions they need to meet the Teacher Preparation Program Standards.

Finally, recall that the collaborating teacher is the teacher of record for the class, the one who will be held responsible for it.  Therefore, the CT needs and deserves to be informed, in advance and in some detail, what is going to be done with that class, and why.  That information can be provided efficiently in unit and lesson plans.

A Unit/Lesson Plan Guide and Outline for Daily Plan is included in this website.  It can be downloaded so interns and CTs can make it a useful part of their collaborative planning.