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Unit planning for next year starts long before you open Pinterest or hunt for activities. If you’re sitting down to plan and your first move is searching for fun projects, let’s pump the brakes—you’re not alone, but you might be putting the cart before the horse. This mistake is pandemic among secondary teachers, especially if you’re building a course from scratch or juggling CTE and electives. That urge to collect shiny activities is strong, but host Khristen Massic is here to steer your planning in a direction that delivers a bigger payoff for your students and your sanity.
Many teachers—yes, even the most dedicated—start by looking for what to do, not what students will create or demonstrate. The result? Busy classrooms, energetic students, and a sneaky feeling things are working…until a well-meaning administrator or director asks a pointed question about rigor. Khristen drops a story right from her own teaching life: she built an entire high school course around a “detailed” curriculum, only to realize much too late that it was designed for middle school, not the AP-track kids in her room. The realization landed hardest when she requested equipment, and the CTE director wondered why she was shopping in the wrong aisle.
That moment exposed the hole in her planning: she’d never asked what high school students should be able to do in that course. Instead, she’d just grabbed activities and hoped for the best. Sound familiar? This episode is a wake-up call and a practical playbook to make sure you’re not just keeping students busy, but actually moving them toward mastery.
Stop guessing. The conversation focuses on moving away from “what can I do with my students?” to “what should my students be able to produce?” Secondary classroom teachers, in particular, need this mindset shift. Khristen makes an unpretentious case for starting with outcomes. It doesn’t matter whether your point of reference is a curriculum, industry certification, EOC exam breakdowns, or a coffee-fueled late-night brainstorm—what matters is answering the toughest question: What does mastery look like in your class, at the right grade level?
Secondary teachers, especially those on their own with a course no one else teaches, know the pain of building benchmarks from scratch. It’s hard work. There’s often no AP rubric, no group of teammates down the hall, no standardized test to reverse-engineer your units from. You’re not just teaching, you’re doing curriculum design in the shadows, at night or over the summer, for no extra pay and little recognition. But skipping the step of defining rigorous, age-appropriate outcomes means your “engaging” activities might be missing the mark.
Khristen offers a clear, three-question framework: First, what’s the actual product or performance students should create by the end of the unit? Second, what do they need to get there—what practice, knowledge, and skills do you have to build? Third, where are students starting from, in terms of what they know, what they can already do, and what misconceptions they might bring? Secondary classrooms are full of wildly different skill sets and backgrounds, and smart teachers don’t assume everyone starts from zero.
That third question—where are students starting—is the one most teachers skip. Khristen admits she did it for years, defaulting to lowest-common-denominator content or hoping kids would catch up on their own. Sometimes all it takes is a non-scary pre-assessment: sticky notes, a brainstorm, a quick conversation. Knowing your students’ starting points keeps you from either boring them with content that’s too basic or smacking them with challenges they aren’t ready for.
The discussion explores the power of making all your classroom activities point toward that ultimate outcome. Labs become essential skills practice. A discussion introduces a concept students will need for the culminating project. Every activity is intentional, not just something you found on a website because you needed anything to fill the hour. Secondary classroom teachers know: When the end product is crystal clear, everything you do serves that goal.
One concept discussed was the trap of confusing “busy and engaged” with actual learning. It’s easy to celebrate energy and project-building in your room, but if the rigor isn’t there, you’re selling your students short. When you define the outcome up front, rigor isn’t a menu item—it becomes your design criteria. You’re not just asking “will this be fun?” but “is this worthy of what my students can actually do?”
This episode is for every teacher staring down another year with too many preps, not enough resources, and a passion for giving students more than just hands-on fluff. If you’re ready for a smarter, more effective approach to unit planning, Khristen’s tough-love message will help you build outcome-first sequences—where every single lesson points toward a worthy product, not just another busy day.
Before you lose yourself in a rabbit hole of activities this summer, stop and ask what students will actually produce by the end of the unit. Define it, visualize it, and then plan backward. That’s how you build units with real depth, purpose, and excitement—for you and your students. Host Khristen Massic challenges you to make classroom rigor and hands-on learning the same thing—and to never settle for just busyness again.
Your secondary classroom deserves more than hustle and hope. Trade activity-chasing for outcome-driven unit planning, and let your students do work that’s both fun and truly challenging. Don’t just fill days—build something with teeth.
Smash “just busy” and level up learning—your students are ready, and so are you.
