The weekly plan: a one-page template that gives you your weekend back

Definition

Weekly plan: A page a teacher writes for each class before the week starts, setting the goal of each lesson, the question that checks that goal at the end of it, the homework, and the materials that must be ready.

The template: five days, four lines each

A weekly plan is not five lesson plans squeezed onto one page. It is the decision that comes before them: what has to happen in each lesson, and how you will know it did. In “How to Write a Lesson Plan” (Cult of Pedagogy, September 2026), Jennifer Gonzalez describes this step: a rough outline of the unit noting “the main thing that has to happen on each day”, without the specifics of each lesson yet. The template below is that outline, set out as a table.

A full example: a week of adding and subtracting fractions, Grade 6

This example was written for this post, not copied from a textbook or an official form. It assumes five maths lessons a week, Sunday to Thursday. If your school week starts on another day, change the day names and nothing else.

Notice three things about this week. The first lesson opens with a review and the last one ends with a short quiz, which is what Barak Rosenshine describes in “Principles of Instruction” (American Educator, Spring 2012): many successful programmes, especially in the elementary grades, built in extensive review, and one way to do it is to review the previous week's work every Monday and the previous month's work every fourth Monday (for you, the first day of your school week, whichever it is). The same article reports that even at secondary level, classes with weekly quizzes scored better on final exams than classes with only one or two quizzes in the term. The third thing: each lesson builds on the one before it, so if a lesson runs late, the table shows you what slips with it.

Tuesday's lesson is planned in full, all forty-five minutes of it, in the lesson plan template. And the check at the end of each lesson is an exit ticket: you sort its answers into three piles, then write what you decide in the follow-up line.

The 40-minute routine: in this order, on the last school day

Write the plan on the last school day of the week, at school, with the exit tickets and the week's quiz in front of you. In a Pew Research Center survey of 2,531 US public school teachers, run in October and November 2023, 84% said there is not enough time in their regular work hours for tasks like grading, lesson planning and paperwork. We have no comparable figure for Arab teachers, but what is not done at school gets done at home. The order below makes the plan a forty-minute job instead of an evening.

1. 1

   Read last week (5 minutes)

   Sort the exit tickets and Thursday's quiz: who needs another go, and which question many students missed. Write the names in the follow-up line, then write three review questions to open the first lesson.

2. 2

   Fix the week's goal (5 minutes)

   Open your pacing guide and find where you are: which lessons this week, and how many periods each. Then write the week's goal in one sentence. If it needs two sentences, your week holds two topics, and one of them belongs to next week.

3. 3

   Write five goals and five checks (10 minutes)

   A goal for each day, then its question straight after, before any activity. This is backward design: the goal first, then how you will measure it, then the activities. Do not write the activities here; they belong in the lesson plan, the day before the lesson.

4. 4

   Decide homework and materials (10 minutes)

   A short task on each day's skill, or “no homework” when tomorrow holds a quiz or a review. Then the materials: what gets printed, cut out or shown. Write the number of copies next to each.

5. 5

   Gather what to print and prepare (5 minutes)

   Copy the materials line from all five days into one list, and send it all to print at once. A sheet printed on Sunday for Wednesday's lesson is not forgotten on Wednesday morning.

6. 6

   Check the plan before you close it (5 minutes)

   Three questions: does each check measure its day's goal? Is there a review at the start of the week and a quiz at the end? Is there room for a lesson that runs late? In the example above, Thursday is that room: if a lesson slips, the word problems get shorter and the quiz stays.

Three mistakes that turn a weekly plan into a form you fill and never use

• Copying lesson titles from the pacing guide: “Monday: adding fractions” is a title, not a plan. The plan says what students will do and how you will know they did it.
• Five full lesson plans in one evening: the fourth lesson changes after the third lesson's exit tickets. Plan the week at the level of goals and checks, and write each lesson's detail the day before it.
• A week with no room for a late lesson: a plan that assumes every lesson will go as written falls apart by the second one. Make the last day of the week a review and a short quiz, so a delay can borrow from it.

If you teach more than one class, or your school wants an official form

• Two sections of the same grade: one page is enough; add two follow-up columns, one per section. The goal and the question are the same; the delays are not.
• Different grades: one page per class. Start with the class that has a quiz or the end of a unit this week, since it is the one that cannot slip.
• An official form: your school or supervisor may require a weekly planning form, with fields that differ from country to country, and we do not reproduce any official form here. But goals — “learning outcomes” in many forms — assessment questions and homework appear in most of them. Write the page this way first, then copy it across.
• Subjects other than maths: the four lines work for any subject. In a language class, the check might be “Write the main idea of the text in one sentence.”

Written with String's editorial team: we use AI for research and first drafts, and a person checks every fact and every source before anything is published. How we write