Teacher Lesson Planner

Plan a teaching week on one page

The teacher lesson planner is a one-page printable grid built for classroom teachers. Days of the week run down the left-hand column and your subjects or class periods run across the top, so every cell is a single day-by-subject slot to jot the learning objective, the main activity and the resources needed. An objectives and notes box underneath gives room for the week's aims, differentiation reminders and anything that does not fit a cell.

Print it on a Sunday evening, sketch the week in pencil, and adjust as lessons evolve. Because it is a paper template, your weekly plan is fast to tweak without re-typing or fighting a clunky planner app.

Choose 4 to 7 day rows, list up to six subjects or periods, and print in A4 or US Letter.

Periods, not hours

A school week is divided by a timetable that the teacher does not control, and a planner is only useful if its columns match that timetable. The subject row across the top is therefore free text: it takes Maths, English, Science, History, Geography as it comes, but it equally takes P1, P2, P3, P4, P5, or a mix — Registration, P1, P2, Break, P3.

Secondary teachers generally want period numbers, because the subject is fixed and the class changes. Primary teachers generally want subject names, because the class is fixed and the subject changes. The same grid does both, and the choice is the first thing to make before you print a term's worth.

Five days is the default. Drop it to four if you have a non-contact day, or if you are planning a week broken by an INSET day.

Writing it so a cover teacher can use it

The moment a weekly plan earns its keep is the morning you are not there. A plan written for yourself is usually unusable by someone else: it is full of abbreviations, it assumes you know where the resources are, and it says "continue" without saying from where.

Two habits fix that without adding work. Write the page or resource in each cell, not just the topic — "Fractions p42" rather than "Fractions". And put the room and the set in the header along with the week, because a cover teacher who cannot find the class cannot deliver any of it.

A planner that can be handed to the office at 7am is worth the twenty seconds a day it costs to write that way, and you will not be writing it on the morning you need it.

A term in a ring binder

Print the whole term at once rather than a sheet a week. Twelve or fourteen sheets, hole-punched, in date order at the front of a binder, is the arrangement most teachers converge on — and it survives being carried between rooms, which a laptop planner does not always do.

Set the week-of field before printing if you want the dates already on them; leave it blank and write them in, which is quicker if the term has an awkward half-term break in it. The name and date fields can be switched off entirely for a personal planner — they exist for the version you hand to a trainee or a cover teacher.

Keep the previous term's sheets. Planning the same unit next year is far faster with last year's annotated week in front of you, including the lesson that overran.

What this planner deliberately does not do

It is a weekly overview, one page, one week. It is not a lesson-plan proforma and it will not hold objectives, differentiation notes, assessment criteria or a seating plan — the cells are a few lines each.

That is the point. The detailed plan belongs in a document per lesson or per unit; what a teacher needs on the desk is the shape of the week, visible at a glance, showing where the double period is and which afternoon is already gone to assembly. Trying to make one sheet do both jobs produces a page too dense to read at 8:40am.

If you need the detail as well, print this alongside a unit planner rather than instead of one, and let this sheet be the index to it.

Related planner printables

• Grade Book
• Attendance Register
• Homeschool Lesson Planner
• Monthly Budget Planner