Ep 335: Teacher Tips for Choosing the First Unit to Plan

About this episode

Khristen Massic discusses effective strategies for secondary teachers to choose their first unit to plan, emphasizing the importance of leveraging instructional value and student engagement.

Choosing the first unit to plan should not feel like a guessing game, but for many secondary teachers, that is exactly where the spiral starts. These teacher tips are for the moment when every course feels urgent, every standard looks important, and your summer turns into reorganizing instead of finishing. After episode 334 challenged the idea that you need to plan everything before August, this conversation gets practical: start with the first domino. Strong teacher planning is not about following the standards list in order. It is about choosing the unit with the most leverage. That matters even more for a multiple prep teacher who cannot afford to rebuild every course from scratch. Khristen chose the engineering design process over the “first” listed CAD standard because it gave students a hands-on reason to stay, created a foundation for the year, and reduced disconnected reteaching later. This is where the right teacher tips change the work. Look for the concept students will return to again and again. Look for the standard with the highest instructional value. Look for the unit that can help you build repeatable lesson structures, so teacher productivity comes from systems…

People in this episode

Host: Khristen Massic

Topics covered

• teacher planning
• curriculum design
• unit selection
• student engagement
• multiple prep teaching

Keywords

• teacher tips
• first unit planning
• curriculum choices
• student retention
• instructional value

More episodes of Secondary Teacher Podcast

• Ep 343: CTE Teachers Need More Than "Build Relationships" · June 11, 2026 · 10 min
• Ep 342: Teacher Strategies for a 10-Minute End-of-Year Reset · June 9, 2026 · 9 min
• Ep 341: Teacher Planning Starts Here When You Have Multiple Courses · June 4, 2026 · 11 min
• Ep 340: Teacher Work Life Balance Without Giving Up Your Summer · June 2, 2026 · 10 min
• Ep 339: Teacher Planning With the Introduce, Practice, Produce Framework · May 28, 2026 · 12 min
• Ep 338: Secondary Teacher Strategies for Building Courses From Scratch · May 26, 2026 · 12 min