Planning Coach.
A blank page and a plan you’re unsure about are two different problems. Planning Coach has a tool for each — and a third for the slides you already built.
None of it writes your lessons for you. It gives you something to react to when you’re stuck, an honest read when you’re not sure, and a revision you can take or leave. The plan stays yours.
The problem is rarely the ideas
It’s the hour you don’t have, and the fact that nobody reads your plan before your students do.
Beat the blank page
A draft you can argue with beats a cursor blinking in an empty doc.
Get a second read before your students give you one
Tuesday’s class is a rough place to discover the gap.
Find where it’ll wobble
Usually a transition, the timing, or the part that’s genuinely hard to explain.
Get the delivery, not just the plan
Opening hook, pacing, engagement checkpoints, how to close it.
Adapt it without rewriting it
Simplify, add challenge, get more students talking, or fit the forty minutes you actually have.
See a revision without committing to it
A rewritten version sits beside yours until you choose to use it.
Keep the objective in frame
Give it your standard and objective and everything comes back tied to them.
Plan in the time you actually have
Ten minutes at a desk, not a protected planning period you never get.
Start from what you already made
Upload the slides, the reading, or the worksheet and the lesson is built around it.
A generated plan is a starting point, and the card says so out loud — it doesn’t know your students, your room, or what happened in class last Thursday. You do. Treat it like a draft from a colleague who’s never met your third period.
Good moments to open it
Three lanes, one objective field
Which one you want depends entirely on how much you’ve already written.
Build a Lesson
You’re starting from a topic, or from material you already have.
Say what you’re teaching — “introducing cells” is enough — and how long you have. Get back a full lesson: objective and success criteria, a timed sequence with what you say and what students do, materials, checks for understanding, likely misconceptions, and an exit ticket. If your school has its own lesson plan form, the lesson can come out in it, ready to hand in: upload the form once from Manage formats. Or ask for Quick Ideas instead: three to five practical moves, briefly explained. Or Plan a Week: give the week’s goal and the days you teach, check the objective Wivoza proposes for each day, and get the whole week filled in — in your school’s weekly form if it has one. Any day opens as a full lesson.
Improve a Lesson
You already wrote something — finished, half-done, or rough notes.
Paste or upload your plan and get coaching on it, an open follow-up chat, and — if you want one — a full Suggested Revision you can use or dismiss. Your learning goal and the parts that work stay as they are.
Review Slides
The slides are built.
Upload a .pptx or .pdf and get a read on grade-level fit, visuals, ideas, length, and implementation. Export Google Slides or Keynote as PDF first.
- 1
Pick the lane that matches where you are
Blank page, written draft, or finished deck. Each is a tab in Planning Coach, beside a fourth for reviewing an assignment, and you can move between them.
- 2
Say what you’re teaching, and how long you have
A topic is enough — no formally written objective required. Grade level and subject come prefilled from your profile and stay editable. Standard, unit, essential question and anything else sit behind “More details — optional,” and none of them block anything.
- 3
Or upload what you already have
Slides, a reading, a worksheet, an activity — or a photo of the page on your desk. Wivoza reads it, fills in what it appears to be about for you to check, and builds the lesson around your material rather than replacing it.
- 4
Read it as a colleague’s draft, not an answer key
A generated plan says so on the card: it’s a sample for ideas, meant to be adjusted. Feedback names what’s working before what isn’t, and you can keep asking follow-ups until it’s useful.
- 5
Adapt it to the class you actually have
Simplify, Add Challenge, Increase Participation, or Adjust Time. Each one rewrites the lesson and shows you the result first; your current version stays until you choose it, and your original is kept however many adaptations you apply.
- 6
Take the parts that fit
A Suggested Revision sits next to your plan with “Use this version” and “Dismiss.” Nothing is ever applied to your work automatically. Then save it, share it as a read-only link, or download it.
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Turn it into a presentation
Review Slides can build an improved PowerPoint that applies every recommendation, and the delivery coaching on a plan can become a classroom-ready deck. Preview it, then download. Attach your original file and your own pictures stay on their slides.
The part most planning tools skip
Alongside the plan itself, you get coaching on actually teaching it — how to open, how to pace it, where to check that they’re with you, how to explain the hard part, and how to land the close.
Build a Lesson · 45 minutes, guided practice
SampleObjective
Students will be able to solve two-step equations and explain why each step keeps the equation balanced.
The lesson
1. Warm-up (5 min) — three one-step equations on the board as students enter. 2. Model one (10 min) — You: work one example aloud, naming the question at each step. Students: copy and annotate why. 3. Together (12 min) — You: take the next step from the room. Students: call the move before you make it. 4. On their own (13 min) — Students: three problems in pairs, then one alone. You: circulate. 5. Exit ticket (5 min).
Likely misconception
Students often undo the operations in the order they appear rather than in reverse. Put a worked wrong answer on the board and ask which step broke the balance.
Exit ticket
One problem, plus a sentence on which step was hardest. A strong answer names the step and why; an answer that only gives the number tells you to model the reasoning again tomorrow.
Presentation & Delivery
Pacing & timing — the We Do usually runs long. If you're past 25 minutes, cut to one pair problem rather than shortening the close.
Nothing is ever applied to your plan automatically. Save, share as a read-only link, or download any of it.
Ms. Park’s story
A plan that looked fine, one gap she couldn’t see, and a revision she only half took.
Ms. Park writes Tuesday’s ELA plan on Sunday night: symbolism in the novel they’re halfway through. It looks fine. She can’t say why it doesn’t feel finished.
She pastes it into Improve a Lesson. The coaching names something she hadn’t seen — her We Do does almost all of the analytical work, and then the You Do asks students to find and defend a symbol on their own. The jump between them is bigger than one class period.
In the follow-up chat she asks for a revision. It comes back as a Suggested Revision beside her plan: split the You Do, give students one identified symbol to defend before asking them to find their own.
She takes that part. She dismisses the rest — the suggested closure is generic, and hers ties back to a discussion the class had in September that no model could know about.
Tuesday goes better, and specifically at the seam the coaching flagged. Students who’d have stalled at the independent step had a rung to stand on first.
The plan is still hers. It always was — she just got a read on it before twenty-nine ninth graders did.
Taking half a revision isn’t a failure of the tool — it’s the tool working. You’re the one who knows which half.
Bring whatever you’ve got
Half a plan, a messy list, or one sentence about what students should be able to do. All of it is enough to start.
Already wrote it? Start there
Improve a Lesson on your own plan is more useful than building a new one you’ll have to rewrite anyway.
Add the standard
It’s optional, but it’s the field that most changes how specific the response is.
Don’t take the whole revision
Use the parts that fit your class, dismiss the rest. Half a good suggestion is still a good suggestion.
In the follow-up chat you can just ask — “make the You Do shorter,” “this won’t work with 32 kids,” “give me a version without the group work.” Asking for a revision is how you get one.
Come back after you’ve taught it
A plan is a prediction. The debrief is where you find out how good a predictor you are — which is the skill that compounds.
This is the one teachers skip, and it’s the one that changes next year’s unit. Five minutes after the lesson beats rewriting the whole thing from memory next August.
Five questions, that’s all
- What did you try?
- What happened?
- What seemed to help?
- What would you adjust next time?
- What’s your next step?
What you get back
A short summary
What you learned, in a few lines you can actually reread.
One honest observation
Something you did well — named specifically, not flattered.
One practical next step
The single thing worth carrying into the next plan.
Then it’s your call
Continue This Conversation
Keep talking if the debrief opened something up.
Set a Next Step
Write down the one thing you’re committing to.
Save My Reflection
Keep it to read before you plan this unit again.
Start a New Talk It Through
Begin fresh on something else.
Somebody should read it before your students do.
Ten minutes of honest feedback on Sunday is worth more than an hour of rewriting on Tuesday.
Open Planning Coach