Lesson Planning with Google Form Objectives
This one’s for my North Carolina peeps with “Essential Standards” to address. Those of you not from NC could also use a form of this process for whichever objectives you’re expected to stick in your plans, and in fact, my example includes the ACTFL standards as well as our Essential ones–just to keep me honest.
I got tired of hunting for the write standards to copy and paste for each day of each week, so I decided to make it easy on myself. I took ALLLLL of those objectives I’d been sifting through and made myself a pre-sifted form to reuse each week. Now I just check, check, check then copy and paste my results into my weekly plans! AND there’s the added bonus of being able to quickly see areas that might need more attention by checking for holes in my spreadsheet!
Set up your own form
Before getting started on the form itself, I recommend copying and pasting standards into Google Docs to clear formatting. Mine are split up by level and by strands, e.g. Novice Mid Connections to Language and Literacy (CLL), COD (Connections to Other Disciplines), and Communities (CMT), although my ACTFL standards are all just gathered by level on my portfolio template instead of a Doc.
1. Create a Google Form for one level
Plus when it’s time to move up, I just make a copy of this original for each new level I introduce, then change the Mids to Highs and copy and paste the standards over the lower level placeholders.
2. Create a header for each section
I went ahead and separated out the Essential Standards from the ACTFL Can-Dos and then broke the Essential Standards down with headers for CLL, COD, and CMT.
3. Create a checklist “question” for each mode (plus culture)
Ever noticed how CLL 1, COD 2, and CMT 1 are all interpersonal? They are. The 2s are all interpretive, the 3s presentational, and the 4s culture (more revelations here).
For ACTFL standards, I break it down by Interpretive Listening, Interpretive Reading, Interpersonal Communication, Presentational Speaking, and Presentational Writing.
4. Copy and paste the overarching objective as the question, the individual standards as answers
For the Essential Standards, I actually paste all of the standards for a particular objective as help text and then just put the numbers as the answers for quick notation on my lesson plan forms: I just copy the numbers. I think the ACTFL standards are more useful, though, so I let each standard be its own answer so my principal could actually see what they are instead of just that I’m fulfilling state requirements.
5. View live form and align plans
Now I prefer to plan first with my Alphabet Soup outline and then fill in which objectives fit, maybe maneuvering in-between activities to address some standards I haven’t hit yet, but you could also start with the form and build your plans based on what you want to work on that week!
Examples
So just so you get the full effect, here’s what my Novice High form looks like:
(Like my relaxing header? Also, I put the date in there so I could plan ahead of timestamps…or behind them, if need be.)
And here’s what it looks like in my lesson plans (at the top) after I have copied and pasted from my form response spreadsheet (Novice Mid so you get the idea sans snow days):
For more examples, you can see all my weekly lesson plans on my class webpage, and if you are one of my NC tweecher peeps, feel free to DM me your email so I can add you as a collaborator to my form so you can just make your own copy!
