ABSTRACT
Teaching may seem at first to be simply a presentation of material that constitutes a lesson. Teaching involves understanding curricular goals set forth in standards, pacing guides, and teachers’ editions of textbooks. Curriculum is a term often heard in staff rooms, colleges of education, legislative halls, and school district offices. Important aspects of implementing a curriculum include planning how much time lessons and units will take. Several structures help teachers and students manage the time allocated to achieving learning objectives and standards. Individual lessons are the operational details of learning experiences in the classroom and represent how teachers interpret and implement the curriculum on a daily basis. Teachers often include a time estimate for each component of a lesson. Some instructional activities go much more quickly than planned or may take longer than estimated. Lesson planning is one of the most basic activities of teaching, but it is also one of the most complicated.
