The Teachers’ Ultimate Guide to Planning for the 2018–19 School Year

Right now, teachers around the nation are meeting new students; setting goals for the school year; and preparing lessons, assessments, and more. If you're a teacher, you’re probably reflecting on your instructional style, approach, and best practices. What are some of the successes you've had? What are some changes that you think you could make? To help you start another successful school year, we’ve pulled together some resources to line up with common educator goals for a little extra support when you’re planning!

What are your goals this school year?

1. Implement blended learning in your classroom

At their core, blended learning models are designed to help infuse technology effectively into

the learning process and personalize learning experiences for every student. To implement blended learning successfully, you must first have a complete understanding what blended learning model you wish to employ and how to use it successfully. Here are a few resources to help you with that.

• 5 Traits of Successful Blended Learning Teachers
• 5 Outstanding Edmentum Implementations for Blended Learning
• Blended Learning Workbook: Learn about the different models of blended learning to see which one will work best for your classroom. 

2. Improve standards proficiency

Preparing students to excel on state assessments can be challenging, but nonetheless, it is a priority for you. It’s important to start building students’ foundational skills early during the school year so that test prep doesn’t feel like a cram session. Use the following resources to get started.

• 3 Reasons to Use Tech in Your Test Prep Efforts
• 10 Classroom and School Tips to Improve Test Scores
• Formative Assessment Workbook: This workbook will help you create goals and learn best practices for formative testing.

3. Personalize learning for your students

Personalized learning is a great way for you to meet the needs of all learners and let your students have more ownership over how they learn. Although there can be a lot involved with personalized learning, the ways you see your students benefit from it will make it all worthwhile. Because this is a big undertaking, we've complied a few resources to help you successfully implement personalized learning for your students.

• 5 Steps to Differentiated Instruction
• Personalized, Individualized, and Differentiated Learning: A Simple Math Equation
• Personalized Learning: Where does engagement fit into the equation?
• Personalized Learning Workbook: This workbook takes the guesswork out of personalized learning by providing a step-by-step plan from development to implementation. 

4. Provide more targeted intervention to struggling and advanced learners

Using targeted intervention can help support the strong development of students and their educational growth. Additionally, it helps fight against issues touched on in state ESSA plans, such as chronic absenteeism and ELL and special population student performance. Use the following resources to help you set up a successful intervention program for your students.

• Response to Intervention: The Latest Resources
• Classroom Strategies to Support Advanced Learners at All Grade Levels
• 6 Back-to-School Tips to Support Your ELLs

5. Use data to guide instruction

A key to ensuring that your students continue to make progress is using data to track how they are doing. But, collecting data and actually determining how to use that data to drive instruction are two very different activities. Explore a few different resources that bring data to the forefront in your instructional planning this year.

• 5 Tips to Improve Student Outcomes with Data
• 4 Steps to Using Your Students’ Assessment Data to Promote Growth
• Actionable Data to Inform Instruction

We hope that these resources will help you feel more prepared for the school year ahead and encourage you to share them with other educators. For more tips and tricks, check out more of our Edmentum blog posts, and don't forget to download Edmentum's School Year Success Kit!