Death of the Pre-Made Lesson Plan

Lynn Astarita Gatto should be an inspiration to all teachers. She incorporates the different subjects under one theme while making the lessons fun and meaningful to her students. Gatto refuses to use “success guaranteed literacy programs” because she feels that the corporations producing these programs do not know her students… and she is right, corporations are not in the classroom. They do not know what the interests of the students, what is important to the students, what would be meaningful to the students, or what skills the students have or need to develop. The programs that corporation creates leave very little decision making for the teachers. They don’t allow for “teachable moments” such as Jacob Lawrence’s death or for connections between literacy and social practices (the students wrote letters to the Mexican government to implement better environmental practices for butterflies.


Gatto asked a few question at the end of her essay. These questions should be asked by all teachers when they consider using pre-made lessons:
• Do publishing companies and corporation know what’s best for our students?
• Do teachers feel so powerless that they will allow publishing companies and district officials to tell them how to best provide literacy instruction for their students?
• Do teachers really believe that standardized tests measure teaching and learning?
These questions can be beneficial for new teachers and veteran teachers to ask themselves. Teachers should realize that only the teacher, not the corporation or even the school officials know his or her students.



In my future classroom, I will be very weary about using pre-made lessons. These lessons will not create meaning for the students. As the teacher, I should make it a point to see what the students are interested in and incorporate those interests into the lessons. Like Gatto, I would incorporate interdisciplinary instruction into my classroom. This way, students can see how all subjects connect and perhaps interdisciplinary teaching will spark interest in subject areas that may not have always been of interest.


Creating lessons plans should be on every teachers’ agenda. Pre-made lesson plans will not spark interest in students and they will consider it “busy work.” These pre-made lesson plans are geared toward standardized tests and at best they engage students at very low levels of cognitive thinking.