How to teach a class with no textbook or curriculum
Building an entire scope, sequence, and daily lesson plans from scratch forces teachers to reinvent the wheel every single night. Designing multiple levels simultaneously creates an unsustainable workload that leaves educators completely exhausted.
What people tried
Every workaround mentioned in the threads below. We haven’t tested any of them — and nobody here is claiming they worked.
- 1Searching for Facebook groups and online communities where fellow teachers share pacing guides and activities
- 2Buying external lesson plans, books, and workbooks from marketplaces like Teachers Pay Teachers
- 3Creating a standardized daily classroom routine or template so that only the lecture portion requires active planning
- 4Purchasing old textbooks off Amazon to use as a baseline for sequencing and pacing
In their words
Unedited, most upvoted first, each linked to the thread it came from.
“I teach two traditionally boring classes that don’t have a curriculum or text book, so I’m basically doing the entire scope and sequence by myself and feel like I’m reinventing the wheel trying to make new lesson plans every night”source ↗
“I teach an elective that also doesn't have a textbook. There are two levels of it, so I am designing curriculum for students who have taken my class earlier so I can't reuse the same thing in both classes. It is completely exhausting.”source ↗
Where this came up
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- 2Special education pull-out services during core instruction time