First-year teachers

Lesson planning help for first-year teachers

TeacherHero gives a first-year teacher a full day's plan with the reasoning attached. Every lesson is six gradual-release sections, each one labelled with who is doing the work and what you should be doing while it happens — plus the packet, slides, and exit ticket already built for you.

In year one the problem is rarely a lack of ideas. It is that nobody has time to tell you what “I Do / We Do / You Do” means in practice at 9:40 on a Tuesday, why this activity goes before that one, or what you are supposed to be doing while thirty students work in groups.

One day, six sections.

The gradual-release spine every TeacherHero lesson is built on, and what each phase looks like in your room.

  1. Section 1

    Warm-Up

    Post it, let them work silently, and read over shoulders. Do not teach or correct yet — you are collecting information.

  2. Section 2

    I Do

    You do the thinking out loud while students watch and annotate. They are not practising yet; this phase is entirely you.

  3. Section 3

    We Do

    You lead and the class answers together. You still hold the pen — call on students, but you write and correct in real time.

  4. Section 4

    Y’all Do

    Students work in groups while you circulate and listen. Ask questions instead of answering them.

  5. Section 5

    You Do

    Students work alone and silently. You monitor and support only the students you flagged earlier in the lesson.

  6. Section 6

    Exit Ticket

    Independent answers in the last few minutes. Collect every one — that stack is your data for tomorrow.

What that gets you.

A finished example is waiting on day one

Creating an account seeds a real course, unit, and week: day one is fully built with all six sections, a source, a support version, and a saved alignment check, and days two through five are planned but not yet generated so you can watch the coach work on a real day.

Every choice comes with its reason

When a section is generated you see which instructional strategy was chosen and why. You can accept it, choose a different strategy yourself, or ask for a fresh aligned alternative — so the tool is teaching the reasoning, not hiding it.

A guided walkthrough of the real screens

A built-in tour walks the actual product — course, unit, week, lesson, and the coach — rather than a video of it. It only ever reads; it cannot change your curriculum while it runs.

Frequently asked questions

I have never used gradual release. Will I be lost?

Each of the six sections is labelled with a plain-language line describing who does the work — “you model it,” “students practise in groups,” “students work alone and silently” — plus a sentence on what you should be doing while it runs. The vocabulary is explained where it is used, not assumed.

What do I actually have to type before it can plan?

A learning target and what students will produce by the end of the lesson. The final product is a pick-one list of common options, so it is a click rather than an essay. Generation is blocked until it is set, because every section is written backwards from that answer.

Can I change what it gives me?

All of it. Every field is directly editable, you can highlight any sentence and ask for a clearer or rewritten version, and you can regenerate a single section without touching the other five. Version history keeps prior takes so an experiment is never destructive.

Is it free while I am figuring this out?

The complete example course is free to explore, so you can learn the workflow before paying or entering a card. TeacherHero Pro is $8.99/month when you are ready to generate new AI work. Nothing you build is published unless you deliberately share one lesson to the public library.

Example free · generation with Pro

Start with a lesson that already exists.

Creating an account lands you in a fully built example course, unit, week, and lesson, so you can watch the coach work on a real day before planning your own.

Explore the example free

Your curriculum stays yours · Nothing is published unless you publish it