Have you ever been handed a teacher’s edition of a textbook and told by your admin, “Good luck! Everything you need to know is in here!”? I remember the excitement I had when receiving the textbook, and the panic when I opened the textbook and realized it gave either too much or too little information to be of any practical help. Of course I need to teach about Latin America. But for how long? And what do I teach after that? How do I divide my units? Do I have a test after every chapter? How in the world am I going to cover all of this information by the end of the year? In case you haven’t figured this out yet, you won’t cover everything. It’s just not possible. But you can try to approach the course with a plan that will help you do the best you can to cover most of content (without feeling completely overwhelmed in the process).
One of the hardest things about being a teacher (whether new or experienced) is figuring out how much time to spend on each unit and what you should cover. Teacher materials that come with textbooks often don’t give specific enough details to help a teacher. After teaching World Geography last year, I decided to create this detailed pacing guide. It is divided by week and gives you an idea of how much time you should spend on each unit and what topics you should teach in each unit. It does not tell you what resources to use in order to cover each unit, because many teacher use many different resources. Rather, it’s to give you an idea as to how much time to spend on each unit and the topics you should consider covering.
I hope one day to come up with a very specific day-by-day plan for World Geography for those of you who need more help. In the meantime, you can use some of the resources listed on my World Geography Resources page and this high school World Geography Pacing Guide to make things a little easier!
