Why Video Planning is Good Planning

No matter what, where, or how you teach, effective planning is essential. Well-planned lessons engage, inform, and inspire students; poorly planned lessons can become disasters. It’s a lesson I’ve learned many times -- and all too often the hard way!

There are many good approaches to lesson and unit planning. I don’t want to advocate one over others -- as with everything in MCP, I want you to use what works best for you -- but I do want to highlight a few ways in which recording instructional videos reinforces best practices in planning:

Chunking & Sequencing Instruction: If you’re going to distill a complex topic into a short video, you need to be highly focused on the specific learning objective at hand, and you need to know where this video fits in among others. There’s no room to ramble here! Your instruction inevitably becomes clearer and more concise when you start creating videos.

Planning Opportunities for Engagement: Embedding questions in videos, and creating guided notes for students to complete as they watch, are great ways to capture student attention. Drafting these questions and notes forces you to consider how you’ll involve students actively in their own learning process. The more engaged your students are, the more they’ll understand.

Making Learning Multimodal: Students watch your video while listening to your voice, reading text on screen, and writing down notes. This engages students with a variety of learning styles, and builds several sets of skills simultaneously. When in school, blended learning also leaves plenty of room for more kinesthetic ways of learning too.

So the next time someone asks you how you create well planned, highly engaging, multimodal learning opportunities, just tell them -- by recording videos, of course!