Re-plan the rest of your unit in twenty minutes

Re-plan the rest of your unit in twenty minutes

There is a specific Friday feeling every teacher knows. You planned an eight-week unit in Week 0, you are now in Week 5, and roughly a fortnight of that plan has quietly not happened. The class isn't where the sequence said they'd be. The SAC or the topic test is three weeks away. Monday morning you were going to sit down and figure it out, but Monday morning is Monday morning, so you push it to next Sunday, and by then you've lost another week. The move a good head of faculty would make sitting next to you on the couch is not to re-write the unit. It's to cut it. Name what has to land before the assessment, name what should land if there's time, name what can be dropped, and re-sequence the remaining weeks around the hinges. Twenty minutes with a coffee, done. Nobody does it, because it takes longer than twenty minutes when you have to hold the whole unit in your head at once. It stops taking longer than twenty minutes tonight.

The prompt

You are helping me re-plan the remaining weeks of a unit I am partway through. I have a written plan from the start of term. That plan is now out of date because the class did not land everything I expected them to land in the first half. Your job is to help me cut, re-sequence, and protect the assessment window, so the second half of the unit is honest about where the class actually is.

You are the senior teacher on the couch next to me. Not a course designer building a beautiful unit from scratch. You are here to make the call about what stays, what goes, and what is bank on Monday morning.

You are working in the tradition of Wiggins and McTighe's backward design (the assessment is the anchor, work back from it), Rosenshine's Principles of Instruction (small steps, high success rate, review before new content), and Dylan Wiliam's formative assessment work (evidence of what has actually landed drives the next move, not the original plan). That means:
- The assessment is the immutable point on the calendar. Everything else bends to protect it.
- What actually landed with the class beats what the plan said should have landed. If they don't have Concept A, teaching Concept B on top of it is wasted time.
- Cutting is the move. Adding is the mistake. If the plan is behind, it is behind because there was too much in it, and adding "catch-up lessons" on top just pushes the same problem to Week 7.

CONTEXT

- Year level: [YEAR LEVEL, e.g. Year 9]
- Subject and unit: [e.g. Year 9 Science, Newton's laws and forces]
- Curriculum frame the unit is against: [ACARA v9.0 content descriptors, or your state's study design or syllabus line. Paste the specific lines, not the topic label.]
- Where I am now: Week [X] of [Y]. Weeks [X+1] through [Y] remain.
- The assessment at the end of the unit: [TASK TYPE, e.g. topic test, SAC, extended response, practical report, oral], on [DATE], weighted [X%] of the unit grade.
- Any fixed dates in the remaining weeks I cannot move (excursion, camp, public holiday, sports day, staff PD half-day, my own known absence): [LIST, one line each]
- Class context in one honest line: [e.g. "26 students, mixed-ability, five who need extra scaffolding on any calculation-heavy content, two who finish everything early and coast, group as a whole responds well to worked examples and badly to unstructured practice"]

THE ORIGINAL PLAN

Paste the unit plan I wrote at the start of term, week by week. Learning intentions and key content per week are enough. Do not clean it up first.
"""
[PASTE THE PLAN]
"""

WHAT ACTUALLY LANDED (honest, not polished)

For each of Weeks 1 through [X], one line: what I actually taught (not what the plan said), and one line on how the class handled it. Include the bits that went sideways. Include the weeks I ran out of time. Include the lesson I lost to the fire drill.
"""
[PASTE, WEEK BY WEEK]
"""

WHAT THE ASSESSMENT ACTUALLY DEMANDS

In one paragraph: what a student needs to be able to do on the day of the assessment to sit comfortably in the C, B and A bands. If I have the task or a comparable past task, I will paste it below. If I don't, describe it in your own words.
"""
[PASTE THE TASK IF I HAVE IT, OR DESCRIBE IT]
"""

PRODUCE, IN THIS EXACT ORDER. NO PRE-AMBLE. START WITH SECTION 1.

1. THE HONEST DIAGNOSIS
Three lines, no more.
- Line 1: what my week-by-week notes actually tell me about where the class is right now (not where the plan said they'd be).
- Line 2: the gap between where they are and where they need to be for the assessment.
- Line 3: the one concept I keep re-teaching, that is probably the actual root of the gap.

2. THE PRIORITY TRIANGLE
Three tiers, named clearly.
- MUST LAND before the assessment. Two or three concepts, no more. These are the ones that appear on the task and that the class does not have yet. If the class already has one, don't put it here.
- SHOULD LAND if there's time. Two to four concepts. Useful, but the student can sit the assessment without them and land in the C band.
- DROPPED, with rationale. Every concept in the original plan that is not in MUST or SHOULD goes here, with one line each on why (e.g. "not on the assessment", "already landed", "would take longer to teach than it is worth", "belongs to next unit anyway"). Do not soft-cut. If something is dropped, say so.

3. THE RE-PLAN, WEEK BY WEEK
For each remaining week from Week [X+1] to Week [Y], produce:
- LI FOR THE WEEK: one sentence, tied to a MUST or a SHOULD from the triangle. Do not put two LIs in one week.
- LESSONS THIS WEEK: how many lessons this class has that week (account for the fixed dates I gave you) and what each one does, in one line each. Not a full plan. Just the shape.
- THE HINGE CHECK: one specific thing I do at the end of the week that tells me whether the class has landed the LI or not. A hinge question, an exit ticket, a two-minute cold-call sweep. Named specifically. Not "I'll check in".
- WHAT I DO IF THE HINGE FAILS: one line. The specific reteach or re-sequence move for the following week.

The final week before the assessment MUST be an assessment-prep week. Do not fill it with new content. Explain in one line what "assessment prep" looks like for this specific task (past-paper walkthrough, worked-example gallery, rubric-critique lesson, mock exam under conditions).

4. THE MONDAY MOVE
One paragraph. What I do in the first lesson on Monday to bank momentum before I start delivering the re-plan. Usually the highest-yield move is a retrieval sweep or a hinge question on the MUST concept I named as the root of the gap in Section 1, followed by one clean re-teach. Be specific about the words on the board, the question, and the follow-up.

5. THE ASSESSMENT-PREP WINDOW
One paragraph. In the final week and a half before the assessment, exactly how many lessons are dedicated to assessment prep, what each of them does, and what the student walks out of each one holding. Be honest about the trade-off: every lesson spent here is a lesson not spent on new content, and that is the trade-off you are asking me to make.

6. THE FALLBACK
Two lines. First line: if Week [X+1]'s hinge fails, the sequence of moves I run to recover without blowing up the rest of the plan. Second line: the single concept from the SHOULD list that I sacrifice first if I have to buy time.

7. THE ONE THING I DO NOT WANT TO HEAR BUT NEED TO HEAR
One sentence. The single call in this plan the senior teacher on the couch would push me on, and would ask me to defend before Monday. Not a criticism. The thing I have probably talked myself out of seeing.

RULES

- Australian English throughout. Year 9, not 9th grade. Colour, realise, analyse. Metre, not meter. Term 3, not Q3.
- No em-dashes and no en-dashes anywhere. Commas, full stops, parentheses and semicolons only. Regular hyphens in compound words are fine.
- Do not open with "here is your re-plan" or "great starting point". Start with Section 1.
- Do not add "review" as an LI for a week. "Review" is not an LI. Name the specific concept being reviewed and what students will be able to do at the end.
- Do not silently add lessons that do not exist. If the class only has three lessons that week because of a public holiday, three lessons is what you plan.
- Do not recommend I extend the assessment date. That is not on the table.
- Do not use "flexibility", "differentiation as needed", "check in with students", "engage learners" or "meet them where they are". These phrases mean nothing on a Sunday night.
- If the plan I gave you cannot honestly cover the MUST concepts in the weeks I have left, say so in Section 1 and name the single concept I have to consider dropping from the assessment itself (which is a conversation I then have with my head of faculty on Monday). Do not silently squeeze it in and pretend it will land.

What it does well

The priority triangle is the whole reason to run this. Most Sunday-night re-plans fail at the same point, which is that the teacher tries to keep everything in the original unit and just squeeze it into fewer lessons. The triangle forces the model to name what gets dropped, in writing, with a rationale, and hands that call back to you as a clean list rather than as a guilty feeling. The other move that pays off is the hinge check at the end of each week. It is what stops the re-plan from being a fresh version of the original problem (a beautiful plan the class quietly does not keep up with), because every week has a specific piece of evidence built into it. You are not planning three weeks of content. You are planning three weeks of checkpoints, each with a fallback if it fails. The "one thing I do not want to hear" section at the end is the sleeper. It costs the model almost nothing to produce and it usually names the thing you have known for a fortnight and been avoiding.

Where it falls over

The re-plan is only as honest as the "what actually landed" section. If your week-by-week notes soften what happened ("Week 3 went well overall" for a week that was actually a train wreck), the model has no way to see the gap and will produce a plan that continues to fail for the same reason. Write the honest version, even if you cringe writing it. Second, this prompt will not tell you whether the assessment itself is appropriate for the class. If the assessment is genuinely beyond where a mixed-ability Year 9 in Week 8 can sit, no re-plan fixes that, and the conversation to have is with your head of faculty about the task, not with the model about the sequence. Third, on senior secondary (VCE Units 3 and 4 in particular, or Year 12 in other states), the study design outcomes are non-negotiable in a way the model does not intuitively feel. Paste the actual outcome descriptors under the assessment-demands section, or the model will let you cut something that would actually surface on the SAC.

Try it like this

For a Year 8 Maths unit on linear equations three weeks out from the topic test: the MUST list is almost always "solve two-step equations with the unknown on one side", "translate a worded scenario into an equation", "check a solution by substitution", and everything else on the original plan is a SHOULD. The re-plan usually looks like one week of tight worked examples and independent practice on solving, one week of translation with a worked example gallery, and one assessment-prep week running a full past paper under time.

For VCE English Unit 3 on close analysis two weeks out from the SAC: paste the specific outcome descriptor into the assessment-demands section. The model will hold you to it and will resist letting you cut the metalanguage vocabulary that shows up in the marking criteria, even when your class enjoys close reading more than they enjoy metalanguage.

For a Year 6 Humanities inquiry unit four weeks out from a group presentation: the MUST list is usually "one clear claim, one piece of evidence, one link back to the claim, three times". Everything else, including the "students will investigate multiple perspectives on..." framing from the original plan, is a SHOULD. The re-plan usually shortens the research window and lengthens the drafting window, which is the opposite of how most teachers do it the first time.

If you only have ten minutes on the couch: skip the "what actually landed" section (yes, really), and give the model just the original plan, the assessment task, and the class in one line. Ask only for the priority triangle and the assessment-prep window. The priority triangle alone, printed and stuck to your laptop for Monday, changes what you plan on the fly for the rest of the unit.

Do this once at the halfway point of every unit and the second half stops being the part you apologise for at the parent-teacher interview.