George Lucas Educational Foundation

Curriculum Planning

Looking for ways to develop dynamic, compelling, and standards-based course content and activities? This is the place to start.

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  • Boosting Math Skills With Daily Practice

    Adding an extra period of math every day gives students an opportunity to review what they’ve learned and strengthen their mathematical thinking.
    437
  • Thinking Like an Editor About Curriculum Design

    Effective curriculum design can follow a compelling narrative by streamlining content, resources, and standards.
    Heidi Hayes Jacobs, Allison Zmuda
    144
  • 60-Second Strategy: Framing the Lesson

    When teachers make their teaching and learning goals clear to their class, every activity has a purpose and every student understands what they’re doing.
    2.5k
  • Children playing with pine cones in forest

    Why Learning at Home Should Be More Self-Directed—and Less Structured

    On March 18, 2020, Simone Kern tweeted that simply “recreating schools at home” passes up a golden opportunity to engage kids in authentic, self-directed learning.
    31.6k
  • A young woman reads a heavily annotated book.

    6 Techniques for Building Reading Skills—in Any Subject

    Students need good reading skills not just in English but in all classes. Here are some ways you can help them develop those skills.
    37.3k
  • Adolescent girl doing homework.

    What’s the Right Amount of Homework?

    Decades of research show that homework has some benefits, especially for students in middle and high school—but there are risks to assigning too much.
    29.6k
  • How to Turn Your Math Classroom Into a ‘Thinking Classroom’

    The researcher Peter Liljedahl evangelizes for practices that prioritize and stimulate more hard thinking in classrooms.
    3.7k
  • Shifting From Linear Learning to a Spiral Approach in Science

    Repeated exposure to important concepts helps students retain more information and think deeper about the material they’re studying.
    4
    649
  • How to Plan When You Don’t Know What to Plan For

    What school will look like in the fall is still uncertain for most of the U.S., but teachers can develop flexible plans that work for distance and in-class teaching.
    12.1k
  • Teacher standing in front of class with students' hands raised

    5 Highly Effective Teaching Practices

    We teachers are always looking to innovate, so, yes, it's essential that we try new things to add to our pedagogical bag of tricks. But it's important to focus on purpose and intentionality -- and not on quantity. So what really matters more than "always trying something new" is the reason behind why we do what we do.
    29.5k
  • Designing Science Inquiry: Claim + Evidence + Reasoning = Explanation

    The Claim, Evidence, Reasoning framework is a scaffolded way to teach the scientific method.
    30.6k
  • Rethinking How We Teach Reading in Elementary School

    To become better readers, Natalie Wexler says, students should grapple with abundant, high-caliber texts in the elementary grades—not just skills and strategies.
    3.8k
  • Girl sitting at a table next to stairs working on her laptop

    What Is Your Educational Philosophy?

    While lesson planning this summer, educators might also take time to reflect on their core beliefs about learning and teaching.
    22.7k
  • Young girl lying down, smiling, in the grass with heart-shaped globe above her head.

    Kindness: A Lesson Plan

    Classroom activities and resources for developing a vital character trait.
    17.8k
  • Classroom Routines That Support Students’ Voice and Choice

    A sense of predictability can help facilitate deep thinking, and teachers can also use routines to promote student agency.
    1.2k

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George Lucas Educational Foundation

Edutopia is a free source of information, inspiration, and practical strategies for learning and teaching in preK-12 education. We are published by the George Lucas Educational Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization.
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