A pacing guide helps us decide what we’re going to cover over the course of a year. I especially find it helpful to set one up as a week-by-week plan.
Pacing guides are important structures to help us stay on track throughout the year; this is important for several reasons. In some school districts your students may need to pass a state exam in physics such as the MTEL or Regents. Some students want the opportunity to go onto AP Physics, or to major in a STEM subject in college. They are best served with a rich curriculum covering many important areas.
Yet a pacing guide is not scripture. The needs of students will vary from district to district, from year to year. Sometimes you have exceptionally well-prepared students who already know some of the material covered below. Other years you may have a class that wasn’t as well prepared in their middle school years; they find even the basic concepts very challenging.
A pacing guide is made for us teachers and our students. It shows we are doing in class each week; it can be as detailed as showing what we are doing each day. The guide is about ideas and content, not about administration.
Pacing guides tell us – what ideas are we covering today/ What phenomenon will we investigate? What labs or manipulatives will we use? What videos, GIFs, or infographics will we use? What equations will we introduce? Basically – you as the teacher decide – “What do I need to know, to walk into that classroom feeling fully prepared?”
Lesson plans tell us: what the “do now” is; what the skills and vocabulary goals are; what pedagogical methods the teacher will be using; what learning standards the lesson addresses. They are often designed in great detail; they vary significantly from district to district. In private conversations most teachers have told me that they don’t find school-demanded lesson plans to be very useful. Teachers might spend an hour a day or more on these; and then, over the course of our careers, they need to be totally rewritten in new formats when new trends develop.
Sometime later this month I will be placing a useful and detailed pacing guide for sale on Teachers Pay Teachers. Stay tuned.
– Robert Kaiser
KaiserScience 