LEARN NC

K–12 teaching and learning · from the UNC School of Education

Lesson plans collection policy

LEARN NC's policies for accepting lesson plans for publication and managing its collection of lesson plans.

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Web Publishing & Collaboration Guide
LEARN NC works collaboratively with educators and other individuals from a variety of backgrounds to develop web-based resources for teachers and students. This manual guides educators through the process of developing content for publication on the web, including writing, design, technical guidelines, and copyright.
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LEARN NC’s lesson plan collection includes thousands of excellent peer-reviewed instructional plans, all linked to and from the North Carolina Standard Course of Study. Teachers face a constant need to educate students more effectively, especially with the added pressure of high-stakes testing. As a result, they need quality resources to help them teach the Standard Course of Study, but they have less time than ever to find and create them. For these reasons, the lesson plan collection is one of the most popular areas of the LEARN NC website.

Purpose of the lesson plan collection

The purpose of the LEARN NC lesson plan collection is to provide North Carolina teachers with excellent, innovative strategies for teaching and assessing key goals and objectives of the North Carolina Standard Course of Study in ways that address the needs of various types of learners.

Areas of focus

We are happy to review lesson plans for all grade levels and curriculum areas. However, in order to make the best use of our resources while remaining responsive to the needs and goals of North Carolina’s teachers, we now prioritize the publication of lesson plans.

Each spring, LEARN NC determines areas of focus for the following academic year based on the following:

  • ongoing teacher feedback
  • weblogs of frequently used website resources
  • distribution of resources in required courses
  • disaggregated end-of-course/end-of-grade test data
  • new graduation requirements
  • new revisions of the North Carolina Standard Course of Study
  • other statewide educational needs

Sources of lesson plans

Our lesson plans come from North Carolina teachers, other educational partners, and the World Wide Web.

North Carolina teachers

The bulk of LEARN NC’s lesson plans come from North Carolina teachers. Some of these plans are submitted by individual teachers, while others are developed in workshops. All are reviewed and approved by expert teachers.

Educational partners

Educational partners such as Thinkfinity (previously MarcoPolo) contract with us to catalog their resources, align them to the North Carolina Standard Course of Study, and make them available through our website. Other partners submit lesson plans directly to our website.

The World Wide Web

In an effort to maintain balance and focus in the database, our reviewers also search the World Wide Web for excellent instructional plans targeting specific, important objectives. They then catalog these plans and align them to the Standard Course of Study.

Review and publication

Lesson plans are reviewed for publication based on standards for content, developmental appropriateness, implementation, and formatting, and against current focus areas and the needs of the existing collection. Plans selected for publication will be edited and formatted for ease of reading on the Web.

Standards for reviewer selection

Our reviewers:

  1. Have three or more years of classroom teaching experience.
  2. Have demonstrated their success as an educator through awards, recognition, test results, etc.
  3. Have documented their conscientiousness and the thoroughness of their work through professional references.

Maintenance policy

Each lesson plan in our database is re-reviewed and re-aligned to the current Standard Course of Study at least once every five years. While this may result in good resources being removed from the database, it allows us to guarantee that all resources in the collection are of excellent quality, up to date, and relevant to the most recent version of the curriculum. In addition, we will ensure on a monthly basis that links to external resources and all links within plans are active.