Welcome to Week 2 in the Life of Teaching Faculty, a blog series documenting the hidden labor of teaching faculty, celebrating milestones inside and outside of the classroom, and sharing new pedagogy resources.

This week, I’m sharing how I use Notion to organize my lesson plans, as well as a brief glimpse at paragraph mapping, one of my latest open educational resources.

Building Lesson Plan Databases in Notion

Notion has revolutionized how I manage all aspects of my work: curriculum building, writing projects, speaking engagements, professional development, etc. Having all of my materials in one place, accessible on all devices, has made balancing the different aspects of my work so much easier. Though there is a bit of a learning curve with this tool, Notion is free, and there are many amazing free templates out there to help new users get started.

My entire process for using Notion to build new courses deserves its own post (or, perhaps, series of posts), but today, I want to share how I use this tool to create and organize my lesson plans. Each course that I teach has its own dedicated Notion page: a space where I capture the course description, credit information, student learning outcomes, and my curriculum map. Below the broad overview, however, is a lesson plan database.

Databases are one of Notion’s best features; databases are essentially organized collections of pages. These course databases are how I am building and organizing all of my lesson plans this year. Since I am experimenting with new preps this semester, this system ensures I record thorough plans and documentation to streamline the course revision process whenever it is time to teach these courses again.

*A peek at one of the lesson plan databases I use to organize my Introduction to Fiction curriculum.*

As you can see, the database is organized chronologically, and this bird’s-eye view provides enough information (units and keywords) so that I know what the lesson plan generally contains without having to open it.

What truly streamlines my lesson planning each week is the template I have built into this database. When I go to create a new lesson plan, I am able to quickly import my template and hit the ground running.

The first part of the template includes my class prep checklist. This checklist ensures that I am mindful of documenting what and how students are learning and of the instructional decisions I can make based on data gathered during the period. I use the comment function to capture any reflections about how the class went, noting any changes that need to be made to timing, as well as any important questions students had.

The rest of the lesson template outlines the structure of the class period and explicitly connects content to the student learning outcomes. It also allows me to link any helpful resources that shape my lectures, as well as my personal, annotated copies of the readings. Everything I need is truly in one place!

This is just a sneak peek at how I’ve built out my Notion to suit the various components of my work. If you’re interested in how else I use Notion, let me know! I’m always looking for opportunities to share how I use digital tools to improve the teaching and learning experience.

OER Spotlight: Paragraph Mapping

This week, my poetry and honors students created their first paragraph maps, allowing them to unpack a small piece of a larger, complex text. For my poetry students, this was J.S. Mill’s essay “What is Poetry?”; my honors students read Kant’s “What is Enlightenment?” Both are dense texts posing rather complicated questions. With it only being the second week of the semester, I wanted to introduce students to a tool that can improve their reading comprehension while giving them talking points to contribute to our class discussions.

What is paragraph mapping?

In order to effectively analyze the entirety of a rigorous text, whether it be a primary or secondary source, students need to hone their comprehension and analysis skills. Paragraph mapping is a visual close reading strategy that begins when students select one particularly rich or dense paragraph or passage from an assigned text. They start by identifying, researching, and defining four key vocabulary words. Then, they research the context of the text’s authorship before summarizing, analyzing, and reflecting on the passage.

You can click here to download my instructor’s guide to paragraph mapping, or here to access the blank worksheet.

What are students saying about paragraph mapping?

This exercise was a hit with students, as it encouraged them to slow down and take greater ownership of the text and their comprehension. One of my honors students remarked that “we might feel like we comprehend 80 or 90% of a text, but that’s not enough. Paragraph mapping forces us to sit with and unpack the 10% we can’t make sense of or aren’t confident in.” No matter the percentage, paragraph mapping adds a new tool to students’ note-taking and annotation toolkits, and it can be used with any genre.

From Paragraph Mapping to Group Discussion

My honors students created jigsaw groups at the beginning of class to debrief on their chosen paragraphs, paving the way for a fascinating class discussion that paired major takeaways from “What is Enlightenment?” with Joan Didion’s essay “On Being Unchosen by the College of One’s Choice.” By putting these texts in conversation, students were prompted to think critically about maturity, the individual (student) versus the social forces and institutions (such as families and admissions committees) that so often dictate our academic trajectories and paths toward enlightenment.

Preview of Coming Attractions

Next week, I’ll share how I brought an obscure Victorian short story into my intro to fiction classroom to teach the value of social annotation.

As always, thanks for reading. If you have questions about any of my content or have ideas for collaboration, please contact me at gabrielle@gabriellestecher.com.

WITL #2: Lesson Plan Databases & Paragraph Maps