Quarterly Planning
The quarterly pacing calendar, which is built from the scope and sequence, is a document that I work in each day. This resource allows me to plan out exactly how and when I will teach the skills outlined in my scope and sequence, and because of the calendar format, I am able to clearly plan how to work through Bloom’s Taxonomy by scaffolding my objectives toward mastery of the rigorous learning goals I set in the scope and sequence. While the scope and sequence rarely changes once the year has begun, the quarterly calendar is a living document that I adjust almost daily. Again, because of the freedom I am given by my school, I have the authority to push a lesson plan by a day in order to respond to the specific needs of my students, whether that is to re-teach a lesson or organize an energizing activity to reinvest students in the text.
quarterly pacing calendar
The quarterly pacing calendar includes the following information:
Units/novels covered within that instructional quarter – Each of my units is based on an anchor text. Within the year, my goal is to have taught six books and seven units, with a flex unit planned at the end of the year. The novels I choose are intentional and work together to help my students answer our course essential question: How does what we know about the world shape the way we view ourselves, and can literature serve as a vehicle to change that view or perspective? Each unit covers a story and characters from a different cultural background, and each unit is directly relatable to my students either via the setting, the characters, or the themes.
Key dates for major exams or Socratic Seminars – These dates are key for the Student Supports Coordinator at my school, who works specifically with students who have IEPs or 504 plans, and our ESL coordinator. These dates help us plan across the grade level when various levels of support, such as exam read alouds, are needed.
Focus standards covered – These standards come directly from the scope and sequence and help to focus my unit plans.
Anticipated changes – This section of the pacing calendar helps my coach see where I may need additional support and varies throughout the year. For example, in the Quarter 2 Pacing Calendar, above to the right, I anticipate changes in pacing because the novel we are reading, My Antonia, is an archaic text that will take extra time to read in class. However, in my Quarter 3 Pacing Calendar, that same box includes anticipated changes due to snow days.
Daily plans – These plans inform the daily student-facing resources I create. Each includes the text pages being taught or read, the focus objectives, vocabulary integration, homework assignment, and exit ticket essential question, as well graded assignments.
Coaching & revision
Just like the scope and sequence, I submit each quarterly calendar to my literacy coach for feedback and revision. To the left, you can see my Quarter 2 Pacing Calendar with edits made by my coach (in green). Based on the feedback, I revise my quarterly calendar (see the finalized version above to the right). Because I am more familiar with some of the books than my coach, I also include brief notes and summaries on some of the daily plans, as seen in the purple comments to the right of the pages. Not only does this give my coach a better lens through which to evaluate my pacing calendar and daily lesson plans, but it also allows me to revisit my thoughts later on in the unit.
Many of my coach’s edits for this calendar are pushing me to increase the rigor of my objectives, as seen on page 1 to the left, as we mastered the lower levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy in the first quarter. Additionally, my coach analyzes whether my objectives and Exit Ticket questions are aligned and provides suggestions for instructional strategies activities that I can try out with different lessons. With these suggestions in mind, I meet with my coach each week as we discuss how to make the lessons rigorous, while also supporting the needs of every student. Sometimes this means adjusting an objective, while other times it means adjusting the levels of questioning in a planned close read of the text.
vertical team Reflection & planning
At the end of each quarter, I reflect one what went well and where there is room for improvement, focusing specifically on which lessons were the most successful, which standards were mastered, and which standards were not mastered (see reflective documents to the right). When considering the lessons that were most successful, I always found that those were the days that were the most well-planned out and the lessons that were not rushed, as shown on pages 2-4 to the right. So often, I feel the need to speed through a lesson or piece of text in order to get to the end; however, on those days neither I nor my students are invested or feel confident about the objective. This reflective practice helps solidify my planning and implementation practices in the next quarter. Additionally, looking through the standards that are at, below, or near mastery helps me identify which standards can be spiraled, which standards may need to be re-taught, and which standards are right on par with where we are going in the next unit.
While the document to the right begins in quarter one reflection, it ends in planning for quarter two, see pages 5-8. One of the most impactful practices we priorities in vertical teams while planning for the next quarter is the grade-level collaboration (see below). In this document, we work together as a grade-level literacy team, including reading, writing, and social studies teachers, to identify where we need to be consistent for our students and where we can drawn upon the knowledge of cross-disciplinary skills. In the document below, we identified a single question that we will each focus on throughout our units in quarter two: How does the author’s background impact his or her ideas? This question can be applied in each of our classes, whether evaluating what an author wrote or in treating the students as author’s of their own writing. In addition to identifying cross-curricular connections, we also streamlined how we are teaching reading and writing in order to increase the rigor for our students and maintain consistent expectations in each of our classes.
For example, in reading class, I heavily use the Control the Game reading strategy, which has created a no-opt-out culture in my class and engages all of the students each day. The social studies teacher had identified engagement during reading as an area for improvement in her class, so I was able to share resources and instructional moves for her to try this quarter. We also worked on streamlining how we are teaching writing, both in essay form and short-response expectations. The writing teacher was able to share what she taught the students with us, and the social studies teacher was able to share her sentence-starter toolkit — all of which we decided to use across our contents in quarter two.
Without this team collaboration and planning time, we would not be responding to our students’ progress as effectively and we would not be able to ensure consistency for our students. This valuable time allowed us to compare our pacing calendars and work together toward student mastery of rigorous learning goals across each of our curricula.