Unlocking the secrets of effective lesson design

Ever feel like you’re spinning your wheels trying to improve your teaching, but not seeing the results you want?

In this episode, we delve into the transformative power of sequential lesson design with Gretchen Bridgers of Always a Lesson.

Gretchen is a teacher coach and trainer who has spent more than two decades mentoring and coaching educators, and leading professional development. She has a fantastic podcast called Always a Lesson’s Empowering Educators podcast which I often recommend to Truth for Teachers listeners, as there’s a lot of overlap between Gretchen’s mindset and areas of interest and my own. Her advice is really practical and spot-on. And, she recently published her third book, Always a Lesson: Teacher Essentials for Classroom and Career Success.

In our conversation today, Gretchen breaks down some key ideas from that book. She counters the common narrative that classroom management is the first and most important thing to nail down and reveals why lesson design is actually the secret sauce to transforming your classroom.

Join us as we explore:

• The pitfalls of improving instructional skills in isolation
• The “Teacher Success Pathway” and its four foundational bricks: lesson design, classroom management, student engagement, and student choice
• Why a well-thought-out lesson plan can prevent classroom disruptions before they start
• The importance of creating strong habits to free up cognitive load for both teachers and students

Learn how to identify and fill gaps in your current instructional strategies, avoid common pitfalls even veteran teachers fall into, and use simple ideas like video self-reflection to revolutionize your teaching. Gretchen’s fresh take on reusing what works (instead of constantly reinventing the wheel) is a total game-changer for busy teachers.

Key takeaways

• “When you can create a habit, it frees up brain space to actually focus on the new information, process it, store it, and reuse it again. So yes, let’s create strong habits and do simple things well.”
• “You have to go in below classroom management to the planning phase so you can prevent the misbehaviors from even occurring.”
• “If you don’t put in the time for lesson design, you’re going to deal with the same issues all year. Prioritize the time and the payoff is huge.”
• “Lesson design is about more than just planning—it’s about creating a safe, rigorous learning environment where students can lead their own learning.”
• “We’re prioritizing assessment over the activities we assess. The design of the lesson is the foundation for great teaching and learning.”
• “Lesson design is the heart of good teaching, and when we focus on it, classroom issues stop feeling like a game of whack-a-mole.”

Listen to episode 310 below,
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Sponsored by Opportunity Gap and Brisk Teaching

The Problem with Isolated Instructional Improvements

ANGELA: Gretchen, much of our focus on instructional improvements is in isolated blocks. We try to work on routines and procedures for a while and then consequences for student behavior and then engaging lessons and so on. But your book centers around the idea that if we approach growing instructional skills in a sequential way, we can make and see improvements faster. And in fact, you argue that the sequence is the magic. So tell us about this. What happens when we try to improve pieces of instruction in random isolation?

Gretchen: I’m glad you asked because I think we are doing this without even realizing we’re doing it. We are listening to what the district says, this is our focus, or what if the school has decided this is what we’re working on? And across the board, it’s like classroom management or student engagement’s low, or our scores are awful, so we’re going to do this. And when you do that, it creates a haphazard attack. And so you’re working endlessly, your wheels are spinning, you’re exerting so much effort and energy and you’re not seeing a return.

Students are learning but maybe not growing as fast. And you’re thinking to yourself, I don’t understand. I’m dedicating so much time to improving in this one area. Why am I not seeing the gains? And it’s because there’s something underneath the surface that still needs to get worked out. And once that’s solidified, then you’ll take off and then you’ll see the returns. And so it really has to be a differentiated approach based on what’s happening with that teacher with that specific grade or that specific subject. And so we’ll talk more about this in-depth in a minute, but one thing I caution everyone is just choosing a blanket thing to focus on. And everyone works on that because it’s not going to translate to the academic gains you are hoping for.

That’s an important point. I feel like a lot of schools do it that way. This is our focus for the year and everyone’s going to improve on this.

Right? But not everyone needs to, nor do they need to work on the same things within that umbrella of things. And it really takes a skillful and intentional eye to decide this is the piece, this is the piece for you, and this is how it all builds. And for one teacher, it could change if you have different classes of students coming in, it’s a yin and yang relationship. And so how you approach instruction differs based on who’s in the room. And so you may not need to work on the same thing with each class. And so I think that’s allowed folks to really take a sigh of relief, of no wonder I’m not seeing the progress, I’m just not attacking it in the right way.

You’ve named your recommended sequence the Teacher Success Pathway, and you refer to each instructional focus in the sequence as a brick because when we build instruction from the ground up. It’s firm, it stands the test of time, and there are four bricks that should be laid in this order: lesson design, classroom management, student engagement, and student choice and ownership. I find that order intriguing because often teachers are told that classroom management should be the first thing they focus on. Why is lesson design first?

Yes, I’m glad you brought this up. When I first started coaching, that was all we worked on with our new teachers. No matter if you taught kindergarten or seniors in high school, it was classroom management because they assumed you came into this teaching position knowing how to write a lesson plan. Well, lesson design is not necessarily the plan. A design is like you’re putting on a play from start to finish, how everything orchestrates together. And when you don’t think thoroughly about how you’re going to execute this lesson, then things start to crop up and create issues. And so there’s a method to the madness. And so even though we do see problems with classroom management, it actually cannot be fixed by just sitting there and putting out fires all day because you’re not gaining academic time on the clock. You have to go in below it to the planning phase so you can prevent the misbehaviors from even occurring.

That’s how you get more time on task. You get to deeper learning. Students can showcase what they’ve learned. And so a lot of folks think I know how to write a lesson plan. I’m like, Listen, it’s not the format. That’s not what I’m talking about. We have to think about how we’re executing this lesson from start to finish and there are so many details. And if we’re not thinking through it, we’re going to have issues crop up that prevent us from being successful. So classroom management is a huge brick that we need to work on. It’s just not necessarily the first for some folks.

Strategies for Effective Lesson Design

So let’s get into this whole lesson design thing. What’s the process that teachers should use to address their lesson design issues?

The first thing is alignment. And they’ve learned this in school. We learned it in our PLCs. You have your standard, you’ve written your daily objective related to the standard, and then you go to the end and you assess whether it’s informal or formal, but how do we know students know and can do whatever we’ve just taught? And then once that’s all aligned, then we can go put in the fun little activities and practices along the way. And so when you feel like you’ve done at least the alignment piece, then I urge you to start chunking your lesson. So the introductory portion, when students walk into the room, what happens? What are you doing? What are they doing? How much time do they have? What’s the volume? How do they get materials? See how it’s so much more than just, Oh, they do a do now and this is the question they’re answering. No, there’s so much happening and we have to plan for that.

And then after you’ve chunked the introduction and you feel confident and competent in running that thoroughly, then you’re thinking about your direct instruction. You can rehearse in the car, you can rehearse in the shower. What are you trying to convey to students? What is the main idea? How can you be super concise and very clear in your delivery so that they don’t get confused? And once you’ve got the “I do” portion, then chunk it to the “we do”. What are you going to do together to practice what you just taught? How are students going to be paired together? Where are they going to go around the room to do it? What materials do they have or need access to? And so on and so forth. And you go through the rest of the lesson, what they’re going to do on their own, how you’re going to assess.

And when you start chunking your lesson, you’ll realize, Man, this one part of my lesson is always tripping me up. This is where I lose students, or this is where they don’t get engaged, or this is where the flare-ups of classroom management happen. And now you can hone in. It’s not like I have to rewrite this lesson plan. No, we have to hack this one section and we have to think about it. Oh, all the way down the nitty-gritty of what’s happening. So we can prevent putting in protocols and procedures to make sure it’s efficient and that they’re actually able to produce what you want them to produce. And then if you feel like, Okay, I’ve got the chunking, I feel like I’ve attacked the section that continues to be a problem.

Now we go into scripting, and this is either scripting the questions that you want to ask students, or maybe scripting the main points of the lesson, I have to make sure I say this, I cannot forget to say this. This is the essential piece. And then you even script ideal student answers because if you don’t know what you want to hear from them or see on their paper, then how are you going to know that they are traveling along the path ready to be successful at the end of the lesson?

So you really got to think through what am I asking and what are they going to tell me? And once you’ve kind of scripted and rehearsed that, now you’re ready to think about the management, the engagement, the ownership piece, all of this thinking and preciseness happens in the planning phase. And you might think, gosh, this takes a long time. In college, I had a week to write a seven-page lesson plan. I can’t do that now. And I totally agree, but a lot of this is how you run a room. It’s the vibe of your classroom.

You’re going to reuse a lot of these things you’re putting in, you’re just swapping in and out content. And so yes, in the beginning, it’s like, Whoa, I really got to get a handle on how I want things done and how I can support students to do it in that way and explain to them the purpose of why they should do things and get them on board. But once you’ve done that over and over, it just becomes the way you do things. And it’s really helped students achieve and feel confident to go on to the next grade level. And obviously, teachers are much more prepared to teach at a deeper level and then continue to help generations of kids.

I think that piece about reusing things that work well is so crucial. That’s the piece that takes us from being overwhelming to actually doable, especially with the limited amount of planning time that teachers have in the US. This idea that every lesson does not need to be completely different. And in fact, we can waste a lot of our own time and waste instructional time trying to chase this new and shiny thing. We think that we have to keep adding in all of this new variety in order to keep kids engaged. But if you don’t have the fundamentals in place, then my advice, and I think what your advice would be too, is to focus on finding something that works, repeat that over and over. Refine it, get it really, really good. And then you can switch things up. You can add little activities in there, but you need to know what’s actually working well.

And don’t be afraid to rely on that instead of always looking for something different. You should not be doing, in my opinion as a teacher, you should not be doing something completely different every single day because then you’re just reinventing the wheel. And kids are spending so much of their cognitive load trying to figure out What did the teacher want me to do? What am I supposed to be doing here? How do I experience success? Am I supposed to do it like this? When you’re following these sort of lesson routines and these activities that are effective for your students, they can focus on the learning because they’re not so busy trying to figure out what’s going on, what’s happening next? Where are we going with this?

Yes. When you can create a habit, it frees up the brain space to actually focus on the new information, process it, store it, and reuse it again. So yes, let’s create strong habits and do simple things well.

The Role of Lesson Design in Effective Teaching

Let’s continue with the Teacher Success Pathway analogy of laying these brick foundations. So once this lesson design brick is laid in place, you then move on to classroom management followed by student engagement. And then finally, student choice and ownership. These sound like they are all pretty related. Can you explain the sequence and how it works?

Yeah, and I wish I could take credit like, Oh, I invented this really cool thing didn’t, it’s just from watching what great teachers do and where teachers get trouble. And I realized, man, when they start working on things in a certain order, now kids are just soaring and this is fantastic. We’re all working hard and we’re all trying our best, but it seems to be a certain way and rhythm and sequence that matters most. And so once you’ve planned everything, now you can focus on classroom management, which by the way is not behavior management, not you have to sit a certain way and act a certain way. We cannot control people. That will only make you more frustrated in the end. And it’s so distracting to you being able to deliver a lesson because you’re putting out fires. And so a lot of the prevention comes in the planning.

You know how your lesson is supposed to go. Of course, you have consequences if necessary, but the goal is to not have to get that point because you’re so well-planned. And so when you’re actually executing your lesson, you’re now actually able to have a self-run classroom, which is important because another brick is about ownership. The kids can’t own the classroom until you’ve created the system and the processes for it to be self-running. And so this is what I mean about the sequence matters. We have to lay the bricks and allow them lots of reps to practice and get used to how things are run. And then you can move into engagement. How do I want you to engage with me, the teacher, with your peers, and with the content? And we do that throughout the lesson. It’s not like one section. It’s constantly, you need to engage in these three levels to help you learn, understand, and ask questions.

And yes, this is where it gets fun and we can have really cool activities or use great tech tools, but again, it’s not about checking the boxes. It’s about how can I have a rigorous discussion that’ll help you better understand content? And I can’t do that if my classroom setting isn’t shored up and it isn’t solid and I’m busy dealing with other issues. And so now that the classroom and the processes are in place, we can engage at high levels without it getting out control. And then when I’ve managed it and facilitate it, guess whose turn it is now? It’s time for that ownership, for kids to run the show. They’re asking questions, they’re answering their peers’ questions. They’re running the delivery of the lesson that day. They’re showcasing their learning at high levels, but you cannot get there, which is the piece everyone wants to do because it’s fun unless everything below it is in place. And so the sequence matters that you’ve thought things through, that you create the processes in the classroom and run it well so that students can engage at a high level so that then they can have the ownership and the accountability necessary to perform well.

Classroom Management as the Second Brick

In your book, you said that many times teachers feel like they’re strong in one area, but the root of the issues that they’re seeing is actually in that area. There’s a future brick that is not solid because of the foundation underneath it. So I wonder, what are some of the common patterns that you’ve noticed when you’re working through the Teacher Success Pathway with educators? What are some common things that teachers may not be aware of that are sort of sabotaging their success?

Yeah, it is sabotage and it’s like Swiss cheese and we have to figure out where the holes are in our bricks. And this happens a lot with veteran teachers who are like, Listen, I have lesson plan for decades. I run my classroom like a dictator. Those kids are in rows and they’re quiet and they do what I ask them to do. And I’m like, that’s great and everything, and I’m sure you have great test scores, but sometimes there’s things that we need to tweak based on who’s in the room. You might have taught for years, but have you ever taught this kid or this group of kids or in this current environment or what’s happening with culture, now we’ve got a new curriculum. There’s always a new element that forces us, no matter how many years we’ve been teaching, to go back to that lesson design phase and say, do I have holes? Is this Swiss cheese or are we good now?

Let’s go to brick two, classroom management. How are things looking with this group? And if you are in middle school or high school and your classes are changing, you’re going to be in different bricks depending on which group of kids you have. And that’s totally normal. You just respond with where you are together as a unit. And so the first problem that I’m noticing is a misdiagnosis. So they might notice the eruption. So for example, wow, I walk in the classroom, the kids are all talking and they’re sitting on top of their desks and they’re not paying attention. And so we think classroom management. Well, that’s where the eruption happened, but is that the root of the problem? No, it happened in planning because the teacher didn’t plan that when students walk in, we drop our backpacks off, we grab our pencils, we sit down at our desk, we have the do now projected on the board, and we’re silently working.

That has to come before you can even deal with students sitting on the desk. It’s not going to happen because you’ve already prevented, you’ve got a routine in place. And so sometimes we’re misdiagnosing, we’re seeing where the fire is, and we’re saying this is the problem, but that’s not actually the root of the problem. And the second piece I noticed is disillusionment, which is we’re not self-reflective, or maybe we lack awareness and denial. Maybe especially we’ve been teaching a while of how bad it is. And so we just keep doing what we’ve always done, thinking it’s going to work itself out and it just doesn’t work itself out. And so we have to be open to constantly learning about how to be responsive to the people in front of us. And so the solution to either of these two problems is first, understand the Teacher Success Path, understand why the bricks are in the order that they are, how they rely on each other, how some are more important than others in terms of being foundational.

And then set up a camera for the piece of your lesson that things go sideways and I don’t need to see it. No one else needs to see it. But when you watch it as a third-party participant, you start to notice, Oh, I didn’t notice this was happening over here, or I swore my directions were clear. And you start seeing things from a new perspective and you’re like, okay, I know exactly where I need to tweak and fix. And with Swiss cheese, it’s not going to take forever to work on something. You could fill the holes real fast and boom, you’re up to the next brick. So I want you to be encouraged, even though you think I don’t want to go all the way back to the beginning, it’s not going to take a long time because you already know great teaching practices, you have experience. If you’re brand new, you’re excited to figure it out and you have this roadmap to rely on. There are ways to continue to grow and pre-planning with your coach or your colleagues and PLCs is the best way to make sure your bricks are solid and moving in the right direction.

That tip about videoing a part of your lesson that is probably going to be problematic or that hasn’t worked in the past is really important because not everyone has the support of an instructional coach. This is the kind of work you and I do as coaches, and there should be dedicated time for it. This isn’t something teachers should have to do on their own. However, in reality, not everyone has that support, but that doesn’t mean you’re stuck.

I noticed when I videoed my teaching, I would give directions while transitioning from whole class instruction to independent practice. I’d tell the students what to do, and I thought they weren’t listening because they’d ask, “What did she say? What are we doing? What page?” I assumed the issue was with them.

When I watched the video, I realized I would trail off when giving directions. In my head, I knew what I wanted them to do, so I wouldn’t say it as clearly. I’d say, “Okay, here’s what we’re going to do, and it’s on page 14,” and they’d respond with, “Wait, what?” I didn’t emphasize the key points enough. I learned that I need to be clear, project my voice, and maintain engagement before releasing students. The video revealed I wasn’t as clear as I thought, and there’s no way I would’ve known that without watching it. Even something like that can make a big difference in how instruction goes and how much class time is saved.

I completely agree! In our heads, we know what we want students to do, but it’s their first time hearing it. You might have thought about it 12 times, but the videotape doesn’t lie.

What recommendations do you have for a teacher excited about this process and wanting to delve deeper into their instruction? I’m thinking about a quick, easy win for someone, and then something for a more in-depth transformation of their teaching.

A quick win would be to self-diagnose and get to the root of the issue. I have printables in my book and on my website that you can download for free and do a self-assessment. You might think the problem is student ownership, but it’s really a management issue. If you want more and are ready for a deep dive, we have a book study you can join. I’ll announce dates on my website and in my newsletter, so make sure you’re signed up.

I want people to use the book as a resource. Read whatever chapter makes sense for what you need, when you need it. Stop and reflect, think about what it looks like for you, try it out, make some tweaks, then move on. It’s meant to be a support. Reread it as you work with new groups of students or change schools.

That’s a great suggestion because this isn’t a bingeable book. It’s something you’d come back to over time. If you notice an issue with student engagement or lesson design, you can go back to the specific chapter for guidance. The book is organized in a way that makes it easy to find what you need without fluff or filler.

Exactly.

Is there anything else you think teachers should know about improving their lesson design? Are there common issues, like students not following directions or talking when the teacher is talking, that can be addressed through lesson design?

Yes, I think collaborating with someone and talking through your plan is key. This is what a PLC should be. It’s not about dividing up sections and sharing. It’s about talking through ideas and getting feedback. Someone might ask, “Who’s supposed to be doing that?” or “Is that a strong pairing?” That perspective can help you identify holes in your plan. You might realize you need to connect things better or add a procedure to prevent distractions.

The design piece is tough when you don’t have much planning time, and I feel like schools don’t value it enough. It’s easy for things to go off track when we don’t prioritize design. We end up relying on quick tips and tricks to keep students engaged, but sitting down and designing a lesson from start to finish is what makes a difference.

Exactly. We’re prioritizing assessment over designing the activities we assess. We’re jumping to outcomes without paying attention to the design of the lesson. Focusing on instructional design for your content and grade level, then tweaking it for the students in your room, is much more satisfying and effective than trying to fix surface-level issues.

It can feel like playing whack-a-mole with classroom issues. But designing a lesson is more structured and yields better results. If you don’t put in the time for design, you’re going to deal with the same issues all year. Prioritize rest so your brain can be creative, and prioritize lesson design time, even if you’re multitasking while doing errands. Once you’ve figured it out, it becomes easier and the payoff is huge.

To close, what’s one takeaway you wish every teacher understood about lesson design?

I think it’s about thinking beyond the plan. Envision a major learning experience and how to execute it to the best of your ability. Focus on creating a safe, rigorous learning environment where students can be highly engaged and lead their own learning. Taking pride in how we plan and execute lessons will elevate the quality of teaching and learning, and have a ripple effect throughout the school. It’s about designing something meaningful and making time for it, and that will make all the difference.