Rejig your term plan at the two-week mark, before drift sets in

Rejig your term plan at the two-week mark, before drift sets in

The Term 3 plan you wrote in the winter holidays was a good plan on the day you wrote it. It is also two weeks old, and the class has now told you things about itself the plan could not have known. Half the year levels in Australia are at the same point this weekend: two lessons behind the sequence, three students further out of their depth than you expected, one activity that landed harder than you hoped, one that fell flat, and a memory of Weeks 1 and 2 that is already smoothing itself into "yeah, fine". The move most teachers make is to keep running the plan and let the drift accumulate quietly. By Week 5 you notice, and by Week 6 you are running two lessons behind. The move worth making this morning is a deliberate rejig while the specifics are still fresh and the term still has room to absorb the change.

Fifteen minutes with a coffee and this prompt is the whole ask.

The prompt

You are helping me rejig my Term 3 plan for a class I teach in an Australian [PRIMARY / SECONDARY / TERTIARY] school. I have taught this class for two weeks. I need to make deliberate adjustments to the rest of the term now, before drift sets in, rather than reactively in Week 5.

You are a senior colleague reviewing my plan with me over coffee. Direct, dry, unsentimental. If a plan change is wrong, say so. If I have missed something obvious, name it.

CONTEXT
- Year level and subject: [e.g. Year 8 Maths]
- Curriculum frame: [ACARA v9.0 content descriptors, or VCE/VCE-VM/HSC/QCE study design line]
- Term 3 summative task and week it lands: [e.g. "in-class test, Week 5, covering the whole unit"]
- Weeks remaining after this one: [e.g. "8 weeks including this one; summative in Week 5, then two weeks of the next sub-unit, then Week 9 assembly and reports"]
- Class composition in one line: [e.g. "26 students, mixed ability, three EAL/D at intermediate, two on ILPs for written output"]

THE ORIGINAL PLAN (what I wrote in the holidays)
- Sequence, week by week, in dot points. Keep it rough:
  Week 1: [what you planned]
  Week 2: [what you planned]
  Weeks 3 to end of term: [what you planned]
- Where the current unit ends and the next one starts: [WEEK]
- Any fixed dates (summative, PL day, parent-teacher interviews, assembly, camp): [LIST]

WHAT WEEKS 1 AND 2 ACTUALLY REVEALED
Write two to five lines. Honest. Specific. Not "it went okay". Examples of the level of specificity I mean:
- "Roughly a third of the class does not have the prior-unit skill I assumed. They can substitute into an equation but not solve one. Diagnostic exit tickets in Lesson 3 confirmed."
- "The activity in Lesson 4 (partner problem solving) collapsed because the pairing was wrong. Not a content problem, a routine problem."
- "Two students I did not expect to struggle are struggling. Both are quiet. I have not caught it in class yet, they came up in the marking pile."
- "The pace is too slow for the top third. Three students finished the Lesson 5 task in ten minutes and were bored for the remaining thirty."
- "The novel is landing harder than I expected. The class is engaged. I could push further on the analytical work earlier than planned."

MY LINES:
- [WHAT I NOTICED, LINE 1]
- [WHAT I NOTICED, LINE 2]
- [WHAT I NOTICED, LINE 3, if you have it]

PRESSURE POINTS I ALREADY SEE COMING (in the weeks left)
List anything I know will eat time or attention:
- [e.g. "Whole-school PL day Week 4 Wednesday, one lesson lost"]
- [e.g. "Assembly Week 6 Friday, one lesson lost"]
- [e.g. "Parent-teacher interviews Week 7, marking window collapses that week"]
- [e.g. "I have a personal thing Week 5 Thursday and Friday, on leave both days"]
- [e.g. "None I know of yet"]

PRODUCE FIVE THINGS, IN THIS ORDER.

1. THE ONE THING TO DROP
Name one specific piece of the original plan I should drop. A lesson, a sub-topic, an activity, a resource. Say why, tied to what Weeks 1 and 2 revealed and what the summative actually requires. Do not tell me to drop content on the grounds that "less is more". Give me a real reason.

If nothing should be dropped, say so plainly and move on. Do not manufacture a drop for the sake of the format.

2. THE ONE THING TO ADD
Name one specific piece I should add. A retrieval slot, a diagnostic, a re-teach, a stretch task, a checkpoint. Say where it lives in the week and how long it takes. Say what it replaces (a chunk of an existing lesson, a Do Now, an existing activity).

3. THE REVISED WEEK-BY-WEEK
Rewrite Weeks 3 to end of term as a dot-point sequence. Do not rewrite Weeks 1 and 2, they are done. Mark every change from the original with a leading asterisk (*). If a week is unchanged, write it exactly as I wrote it in the original.

Preserve any fixed dates. Absorb the pressure points I named. If a pressure point collides with a load-bearing lesson, say so and move the load-bearing lesson.

If the summative date needs to change to hold the sequence, say so explicitly and give me the new date. Do not silently move it.

4. THE MONDAY-MORNING CLASS SCRIPT
Draft the two to three sentences I say to the class in the first two minutes of Monday's lesson to name the change. Not "we are going to try something different". Something the class can hear as deliberate, not scrambled.

Rules for the script:
- Name the change in specific terms.
- Give one line of why, from the class's point of view, not the teacher's.
- Do not apologise. Do not say "sorry to shift the plan".
- Do not oversell. No "this is going to be an exciting new direction".
- Read it aloud in your head before you write it. If it sounds like a corporate email, rewrite.

5. WHAT I HAVE PROBABLY MISSED
One paragraph. Direct. What have I not told you that I should have. What would a senior colleague sitting across from me ask, if they had the plan and my two-line summary in hand. Give me the two or three questions worth answering before I finalise the rejig, ranked by which one changes the plan most if the answer is different from my working assumption.

RULES
- Australian English throughout. Year 8, not 8th grade. Term 3, not Q3. Semester 2, if relevant.
- No em-dashes and no en-dashes. Commas and full stops only.
- No sycophantic opening. Start with Section 1.
- If I have not given you enough context to make a call in a section, say so and name the specific bit of context you would need. Do not invent.
- Do not tell me the rejig is "a great opportunity for reflection". It is Saturday. I have coffee, a laptop, and 15 minutes. Give me the rejig.

What it does well

Forces the sequence most teachers skip. Notice, name, adjust, communicate. Section 1 (drop) and Section 2 (add) are one each, deliberately, because a term plan that gets six edits in Week 2 is one nobody follows by Week 4. The revised week-by-week in Section 3 with changes marked by asterisks is the artefact you print or paste back into your planner, so the change is visible and reversible. Section 4 is the quiet high-value one. Every teacher has stumbled through a class-facing "so we are going to do something a bit different this week" mumble that the class reads as "the plan is broken", and every teacher has, once or twice, had a two-line script land as "the plan is being taught by someone who is paying attention". The difference is 90 seconds of drafting. Section 5 exists because the biggest risk with a Saturday-morning rejig is over-confidence in your own two-line read of the class. Naming the questions a colleague would ask catches the rejig that fixes the wrong thing.

Where it falls over

The prompt cannot see the class. If your two lines about what Weeks 1 and 2 revealed are wrong (you named the wrong students, you named a content gap that is actually a routines gap, you were harder on yourself than the evidence supports), the rejig will be wrong in the same direction, because the model is drafting from what you gave it. This is why Section 5 matters and why the honest answer is to run the prompt Saturday morning and re-read it Sunday night before you commit. Second failure: the model has a mild bias towards adding more than dropping, so Section 2 will read more confidently than Section 1. If the honest answer is that nothing needs adding this week, push back and ask for a rejig with only a drop. Third failure: if you named the summative date wrong, or you forgot a pressure point, the revised sequence in Section 3 will collide with reality by Week 4. Double-check the fixed-dates line before you paste. Fourth failure: this is a planning prompt, not a diagnostic. If Weeks 1 and 2 revealed a problem you have not named yet (a specific student, a specific misconception, a specific classroom-dynamics issue), the rejig is not the tool. The right tool is a run-of-the-week diagnostic exit ticket, or a conversation with your head of learning area, or a phone call home. Do that first, then rejig.

Try it like this

• For a Year 8 Maths class in the middle of a linear equations unit: in the "what Weeks 1 and 2 revealed" block, name the specific prior-skill gap you saw ("cannot substitute a negative into an expression without a sign error"). The rejig will most likely drop a middle lesson on worded problems and add a two-day re-teach of directed number under a linear-equations frame. That is the right trade if the summative in Week 5 assumes fluency with signed numbers.
• For a VCE English class on a novel study: in the same block, name the analytical move that is not yet landing ("students can identify the technique, they cannot argue its effect"). The rejig will most likely swap a content-heavy week for an analytical-writing week with a scaffold, so the SAC in Week 6 is not the first time students are asked to hold thesis and evidence together in a paragraph.
• For a primary Year 4 class where the term plan is five learning areas at once: run the prompt per learning area, not once for the whole week. The pressure points are the same across all five, but the "what Weeks 1 and 2 revealed" is different for each. Fifteen minutes per learning area on Saturday morning is a manageable buy for a term of aligned rejig.
• If you only have five minutes today: run Section 1 and Section 4 only. The one thing to drop plus the Monday-morning script. That is not the whole rejig, but it is the two moves the class notices most, and Section 3 you can generate later off the finished Section 1.

The Term 3 plan you keep running unchanged is a plan that was designed for a class you had not yet met. The one you rewrite this Saturday, deliberately, at the two-week mark, is a plan for the class you actually teach.