Snowed In and Writing Sub Plans: A Real-Time ELA Planning Session
I was in the mountains of Southern California looking at what was supposed to be a driveway and was currently a snow bank. I was not making it to school tomorrow. (Or, as it turned out, for the next 10 days, but that’s a story for another blog post…)
Welcome to my spontaneous sub-plan planning session - filmed from a window seat, on the floor, in my cozy socks, with a blanket and the very real pressure of having students starting a new unit on Monday.
I'm sharing this one because I think it demonstrates something important: when your units are built on essential questions and backwards design, unexpected absences stop being catastrophic. They become a puzzle. And puzzles are solvable.
What we were supposed to do - and what I changed
My sophomore class was starting a dystopia choice novel unit - one of my favorites. The essential question anchoring it: In the midst of extreme uncertainty, how do you find your voice?
The original plan for Monday was a book tasting: students would browse the novel options (The House of the Scorpion, The Maze Runner, Red Queen, The Giver, Unwind, Uglies, The Hunger Games) and choose their book for the unit. But I was supposed to go in on Sunday to set up all the books - and I wasn’t at home. I was in four feet of snow.
So… pivot!
What I built instead - in about 20 minutes
Here's the thing about well-designed units: the pieces are interchangeable. The book tasting can move to Tuesday. What I needed for Monday was something that would re-anchor students in the unit's focus after a week off, without requiring any books to be in their hands yet.
Here's what I put together:
TED-Ed: How to Recognize a Dystopia. A gentle, engaging re-entry into the atmosphere after a break. Students have already studied dystopia this quarter - this is a warm-up, not new content.
Censorship article from CommonLit. Students read and annotate for connections to other texts, to the real world, and to their own lives. Physical copies - I wanted them writing on paper after a week off, not on screens.
Movie trailers: Divergent, Ready Player One, The Giver. Students look for elements of dystopia and censorship in each trailer and connect back to texts they've already read together (Fahrenheit 451, Harrison Bergeron).
None of that requires me to be there. None of it requires books to be checked out. All of it connects directly to the essential question and builds toward the work they'll do when they do get their novels.
The real lesson here
If you've been listening to the Brave New Teaching podcast, you've heard Amanda and me talk about this over and over: units built around essential questions with inquiry at the center are flexible. They have to be - because teaching is not predictable. Snow happens. Illnesses happen. The moment you're backwards planned down to your essential question, you can move things around like puzzle pieces without losing the thread.
If your sub plans feel like a completely different class than what you normally teach - that's a sign the unit might need some restructuring. Watch the full video to see exactly how I thought through the pivot and built the Monday materials in real time.
Want to build units that flex like this?
Two BNT University courses are directly relevant here. SYS 101: The Essential Question Framework teaches you to anchor units in un-Googleable questions that make everything more flexible. INQ 101: Inquiry Through the Dystopian Lens goes deep on using dystopia as a vehicle for critical analysis. Both are free at the 100 level.
