Hey everybody, Antoine here and welcome to this week's episode of the Teacher Support Network podcast. Let me start by asking you a question.

Have you ever sat down and just felt overwhelmed by lesson planning and having to do it for all the classes or groups you had to teach?

Well, I'm sure many of you are nodding your head yes to this, because sometimes lesson planning can be really overwhelming, especially when you have a lot of classes or groups to prepare for.

What if I told you there's a simple method, a strategy to make your lessons more structured, more effective for your students,  and just less stressful for you.

Today we're going to dive into what I think is a game changing strategy for teachers in the classroom that can really help with your lesson planning.

I know it really helped me when I was teaching in a classroom.

So today, we're going to talk about simplifying your lesson planning using the Gradual Release of Responsibility Framework, or GRR as it's commonly referred to. Now many of you know or have heard about the Gradual Release of Responsibility framework and others of you may not have heard of it.

So here's a quick rundown of it. The Gradual Release of Responsibility, or GRR teaching strategy, is an instructional framework that's designed to support students in becoming more independent learners. It involves the shift of responsibility from me as the teacher and you as the teacher onto the students moving through a few distinct phases in a lesson or lessons when teaching a specific concept.

A lot of times you might hear it as "I do, We do. You do", or "I do it, we do it, you do it." Let me just break these down a little bit and what they actually mean.

So in the, " I do it" phase, it's more about focused, direct instruction. It's the teacher modeling how to do it. So the teacher models the tasks, they demonstrate the process or the think aloud process, whatever it may be when teaching a new concept.This phase really sets the foundation by providing direct instruction and clarifying the expectations for the students.

The next phase is "We do it." It's more of guided instruction and guided practice. So here the teacher and students work together on the tasks. The teacher will provide instructional support and guidance going through it, while allowing students to practice with assistance from the teacher. The teacher encourages collaboration and dialogue together, but you're working through it together with the students and guiding them through the process.

The next phase is "You do it", and this can be broken down into two separate parts.

One part is "You do it, together". This is more of the collaborative learning piece where in this part of the "you do it" phase, students work in pairs or small groups to apply what they've been learning.Then the teacher can monitor and provide support as needed. But here the focus is on student interaction, their active engagement and working together.

And then you go to, "You do it, independently". This is more independent practice. At this step, or this phase, students work independently to complete the task. The teacher is available for support, but really steps back and  you're allowing students to demonstrate their understanding and skills without your direct oversight over them.  You as a teacher want to know if they have mastered the learning objective that was taught and if they haven't, here's your opportunity to really see what they can do.

So, that's the phases of the Graduate Release of Responsibility method… "I do it, we do it, you do it," but the "you do it," like I said, can be "you do it together," and the other part is "you do it independently."

So what are the benefits of GRR in terms of lesson planning?

One, it simplifies your planning. So this kind of phased approach creates a natural structure for your lessons. This can reduce the overwhelm and stress that can occur, especially when you're planning for multiple classes or preps. So knowing this, you know, as you go through a lesson, you're going to be modeling, then going to be guiding the students together with you.

Then, they will work together in smaller groups or pairs, and then they will be showing how they can demonstrate the concept independently. As you're planning a lesson, you can think of it in those four little buckets. So, it really kind of simplifies that for you in your lesson planning.

Second, it encourages student independence. The responsibility for learning really shifts gradually from the teacher teaching it to the students working together and then the students independently doing it themselves.

Third, it saves time. You can really reuse this GRR framework or method or strategy across many different topics or subjects. It might not work one hundred percent for everything, but you can really use it in different ways.

Fourth,  it really builds some consistency. The gradual release of responsibility creates really predictable routines for your students.

Routines can really help improve classroom management because the students know your teaching flow.  So, when you're teaching a concept, first, they're going to be hearing it from you and learning from you. Then, you're going to be doing it together with you. Then, they're going to be doing it together with each other. Then, they're going to be doing it themselves.

Those are real benefits of GRR in terms of your lesson planning.

Now let's look more practically in a step by step way, how you may plan a lesson using the gradual release of responsibility. How does this look in practice?

Step one is where you kind of start with the end in mind.

And that really is to define your learning target or objective. What are you going to be teaching? I mean, we should always be doing that. Then step two, you plan each phase of the lesson using the GRI framework.

So "I do it", right? So that's the focus. That's the kind of focus and structure where you're modeling it. So there you might be outlining how you will model a skill or a concept you're writing on a board. You may be using a powerpoint presentation. You may be using different things. Kids might be taking notes, but you are really modeling it for them during that first part.

Then, in the "we do it", guided part, you might be preparing questions or activities to help engage the students actively together with you to help promote their learning on a deeper level of the particular topic. Then "you do it together," the collaborative learning part,  you might design a group activity, or you might have them work with pairs on an activity.

Finally, the, "you do it independently." You may create an activity for students to demonstrate their mastery. That could be different things that you choose for them to do. Basically, you will be choosing different activities for each one of the GRR phases.

Throughout the whole lesson, you're going to be building supports for diverse learners, especially  for students with disabilities, English language learners, um, and so forth. Then you're going to be gradually reducing the supports as you go through the phases.

So I want to make this more specific and give you some concrete examples. So let's say for instance, you may be teaching a lesson about narrative writing.  So, in the I do phase, you might model writing a paragraph, like using think alouds and things like that, but you're modeling it yourself and the students are just watching you go through the process.

They're observing at this "I do" phase. Moving on to  the "we do" phase, you're collaborating with students to write a paragraph as a whole class. So they may be giving you some ideas.  You may be calling on people in the class to help you write the paragraph. So they're engaging with you in this process and you're guiding them through it.

Then "you do it together," you might have an activity where you have students work in pairs, and they write their own narrative paragraph together. You may have two students working together, and they're writing a paragraph, but they're sharing the responsibility.

And then, at another time, you may have them do it independently, "the you do independently" part, where students write their narrative paragraph independently, and turn it in. You get to see after going through the, I do it, we do it, you do it together parts, how much they are able to write a paragraph on their own independently.

This helps you as a teacher really assess where they are at.

Now, I want to give a very specific example of how I leveraged this gradual release of responsibility teaching strategy in one of my classes that I taught to simplify my lesson planning for the whole week. 

So, I was teaching an Algebra Readiness class to students with disabilities in a high school setting.

It was for students who were not ready to take Algebra 1 at the high school level. It was like a class right below it. At one point I was getting really overwhelmed with the constant lesson planning I was doing and students not always retaining the concept of the information and, and it could have been because I was going through it too fast or I didn't give them enough time to actually engage with it.

And like I said, I felt like I wasn't giving them enough time to learn it and practice and engage. I thought about how I can make the process more meaningful and effective for the students, but also less stressful for myself. I was already using the gradual release phases, but I chose to use them differently.

I made a shift to use GRR over the course of a week on the same topic and learning objective, rather than just get through the topic in  just maybe one or two days.

So here's an example of how I simplified my lesson planning process and delivery during a 45 to 50 minute class period.

First, I had to determine my objective for the week. I used to make unit plans for topics I would be covering with my students. And in another podcast episode, we'll talk about unit planning because it really helps to also simplify lesson planning, but I'm not going to go into depth with that now.

But I would have a unit plan for topics I would be covering. So, let's say, I am in the unit plan on integers.  We will be learning how to add, subtract, multiply, and divide integers. But let's say for this particular week, my learning objective was just to teach how to add integers. I'm not talking about subtracting.  I'm not talking about multiplying. I'm not talking about division. That'll be later, but right now this week we're going to focus on adding integers.

So after I knew my specific objective for the week, I chose one phase of the Graduate Release of Responsibility framework to focus on each day.

So, on Monday, if I was introducing a new concept, I modeled the concept, so in this case it would be how to add integers. Students would take notes, they'd write down the steps, I'd give some really clear examples of the processes and procedures to help them really understand the learning goal. And in this phase right here, they're just seeing me model it, they're taking some notes so they can have to go back to and refer to later. That's it.  That's how we would do Monday.

Tuesday, "we do it." So then we will work through some more example problems together, following the notes and examples from the previous day that I did. And so I was telling them to refer back to their notes, but here, they're engaging with me and we're working through problems together.

And they're giving me answers and using their notes to tell me what the steps are and I'm putting them on a board, but we're working together. I'm guiding them through practicing these problems.

On Wednesday, "you do it independently." Now this is where, you know, you do it collaboratively or you do it independently.

I shifted to having students doing it independently first. I chose to have students do the independent practice first, so I could see where they were at individually, which would help me see common errors or areas I needed to reteach or reinforce as a class or with specific students. It also allowed me and my instructional assistant that I was working with to work one-on-one with individual students if they needed more help and assistance to learn the concept.  So that was Wednesday.  I might give a worksheet or an activity where they were working on it themselves and I'm seeing what they had learned over the past two days, Monday and Tuesday.

Then when Thursday came, that's when I kind of did more of the collaborative, "you do it together" phase. So this was the day when I had students work together on a concept in pairs or small groups.

I would try to make it fun and use different engagement activities. A lot of times I would use math games to have them work together on a concept like adding integers. With integers using playing cards was a real engaging activity for the students. So I would have them work in pairs doing math games together, and I would just kind of go around and monitor what they were doing and my instructional assistant would monitor them as well, but they were working together and helping each other out in that process and hopefully having fun with some of the activities.

Finally Friday was my assessment day, and so I would give a short 5 to 10 problem assessment to see how well they individually understood the concept for that week. In this case it would be on adding integers.

So if you notice, Monday "I do it," Tuesday "we do it", Wednesday "you do it independently", Thursday "you do it together", Friday we have an assessment. 

So I was also able to use that for my grading purposes. What that did was, give me something that I could grade quickly, which helped me plan my next steps and determine whether it was a topic that needed more explicit teaching on a designated "intervention day" that I would have every other week as part of my teaching routine.

We can talk about that in another episode too, about having intervention days as ways to help fill in the gaps when students don't really get concepts, but you need to move on to other concepts.

So, that's how I simplified my lesson planning, and when I just stopped trying to push everything into one or two days, and I expanded it over the course of a week, I saw how much more my students were retaining it, how much more independence they had, and better confidence they had in doing the work themselves.

It really was a gradual release over the week and it really simplified my lesson planning process because I wasn't having to plan on teaching addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division of integers all in one week. I spread it out over a 3-4 week period.

You would have to adapt how I used the GRR method in my lesson planning process based on how well your students are getting it or not.

But that was the general rhythm of my lesson planning for this particular class and it really helped simplify it. I was also able to get a grade and progress monitoring formative assessment every week.

How you use the graduate release of responsibility method will vary a bit from grade to grade, from subject to subject, based on your students. It is a great way to really help teach new concepts, simplify lesson planning, and really help students really internalize the material, and be more independent learners.

So I hope you can see how the gradual release strategy can really help you simplify your lesson planning by giving it a structure and a way to deliver the lessons effectively over a longer class period, or a few days, depending on your students, the time you have, and even the resources.

So question for you, my listeners, do you use the gradual release of responsibility method with your students? And if so, how has it been working for you? And if you're not using the Gradual Release of Responsibility, I encourage you to try implementing Gradual Release in your next upcoming lessons and let me know how it goes, um, by leaving a comment on the show notes page for this episode.

Follow us on Facebook and Instagram,