For Permanent Teachers

Here are a few hints and suggestions for permanent teacher who are putting together lesson plans for substitute teachers. If you have other ideas, please include them as a comment below.

The first thing permanent teachers should know is that substitute teachers want to teach and want to do a good job. In order for them to do this, you will probably have to go back to your college style lesson plans. We can't expect, as professional educators, someone to immediately walk into our classrooms and pick up where we left off.

Substitute teachers are at a severe disadvantage. First off, they don't know the students' names. They don't know our rules, they don't know our routine, and they are unsure by what we mean when we say in the lesson plan, "Have students get into group and read chapter four."

Because we are in the classroom each day, we can confidently adapt another teacher's lesson plan, but most substitute teachers haven't ever been trained in effective classroom management skills or teaching strategies. While it's important to have high expectations for both the students and the substitute teacher when you are gone, as Dr. Todd Whitaker says, "Great teachers have high expectations for themselves."

Here is a checklist of things that permanent teachers can do to help substitute teachers. Because I know you have constraints on your time, just pick one thing at a time and perfect it.

Checklist for Permanent Teachers:

__ Lesson Plan that includes:

1. Objective
2. Time
3. Where materials are located
4. Step-by-step procedures
5. Assessment