Teaching is hard enough.
You care about your students and about real rigor, and you also deserve a weekend and a coffee you drink while it's still warm. The Planning Room is a library of thoughtful, high-engagement English lessons, built by a teacher who scaffolds everything, so you don't have to choose between doing the job well and having a life outside of it.
What's inside
200+ classroom-tested resources for 7th–12th grade English. Click any title to see what's there.
Film lessons built for English class
- Coraline, Frankenweenie, Into the Spider-Verse, The Babadook, Get Out
- The Farewell, Reservation Dogs, Mean Girls, Neo Yokio and more
Literature and short stories
- The House on Mango Street, Coraline (the novel), One More Thing (BJ Novak)
- Pride & Prejudice, The Marrow Thieves, Wandering Stars and more
Analytical and creative writing
- CER/PEA, analytical paragraphs, thesis and claim writing, passage analysis
- Paragraph and essay organizers, film analysis mentor texts, Poe Gothic story writing, college essay scaffolds
Visual literacy and film analysis
- Film form vocabulary, frame analysis, cinematography grids, close reading for film
- Preview lessons from H&L Film Studies: shot-by-shot, sequence analysis, Parasite, Ex Machina, It Follows
The Vault: not sold anywhere else
- Full units, pacing guides and assessments for The Catcher in the Rye, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and When the Emperor Was Divine
Why teachers join
- Rigor without gatekeeping. Lessons that make students feel capable, not overwhelmed.
- Film as the scaffold. Students already know how to read a scene; these lessons turn that into close reading and analytical writing.
- Scaffolds built in. Exemplars, mentor texts and differentiation options, so you're not printing four versions yourself.
- Classroom-tested. New lessons land in the library after I've taught and refined them, with works-in-progress shared as I go if you want an early look.
Rigor doesn't have to mean overwork. Join for $99 a year →
Founding members: your original rate stays locked in.