Flex-Point Planning: Save Your Lesson From the 23-Minute Trap

Welcome to the show, everyone. I'm Renata Salas, and I'm here with Colin Whitfield. And Colin, let's talk about Monday morning, fourth period. It's 10.23 a.m. You planned a beautiful eight-minute warm-up on figurative language, but the kids are actually arguing about whether a metaphor can be too dramatic, and suddenly we're 15 minutes in. The lesson plan is already off the rails, the panic sweat is starting, and you're trying to redesign the next 30 minutes of your life while pretending to listen to a 7th grader talk about Shakespeare. Ah the mid lesson triage It's a deeply visceral form of panic isn't it We've all been there Standing at the whiteboard doing mental division to split the remaining 22 minutes into three activities But the problem isn't that the warm up ran long The problem is we treat our lesson plans like train timetables instead of roadmaps Yes and that's exactly why I fell in love with this article from Jennifer Gonzalez on the Cult of Pedagogy from April 27th 2026 It's called The Art of Classroom Timing 10 Ways to Fit It All In She introduces this incredibly elegant concept called flex point planning The whole premise is that you don't make decisions about what to quote or expand at 1023 a m when your brain is half cooked You make those decisions on Sunday on your couch with a cup of coffee It's brilliant because it tackles the psychology of decision fatigue Before we get into her specific system of pluses minuses and stars we need to talk about what pacing actually is Craig Simmons wrote this fantastic piece in ASCD Educational Leadership where he defined pacing not as a race against the clock but as the skill of creating a perception that the class is moving at just the right speed The perception of speed. I love that because sometimes a fast class feels like pulling teeth and a slow, deep dive feels like it flew by. Exactly. And there's classic research on this. Back in the late 70s, Denham and Lieberman broke classroom time down into three distinct layers. You have allocated time, which is just the 50 minutes the schedule says you have. Then instructional time, which is the time actually spent teaching after you've dealt with attendance and lost pencils. And finally, engaged time, which is when the student's brain is actually processing the content. Right and when we panic triage at minute 23 we usually sacrifice the engaged time to save the allocated time We rush through the actual student practice just so we can say we covered the slides We swap deep thinking for speed We do because we confuse precision with responsiveness A plan that says 10 05 to 10 12 vocabulary is precise but it's fragile It has zero tolerance for human curiosity or indeed a student who needs to sharpen their pencil You need deliberate slack built into the system So how do we build that slack González suggests this dead simple coding system when you're writing your plan You mark every activity with either a plus sign a minus sign or a star Let's start with a plus A plus means this activity is elastic it can stretch if we have extra time But here's the kicker You don't just write a plus you write the exact expansion move next to it Right you don't just say talk longer you write add a second turn and talk with a partner swap or have students find one more counterexample in the text If you're doing a gallery walk your expansion move might be extend the timer by three minutes and have them leave a sticky note question It's a pre programmed high quality extension Exactly. And then there's the minus sign. This is your release valve. This is the activity you are prepared to shrink or completely sacrifice if the warm-up eats your morning. And again, you pre-decide the cut. If you're doing a mini lesson on analyzing character motifs and you plan to model it with two different paragraphs, the minus sign next to that activity says, if we are behind, drop the second model text and go straight to guided practice. Which is so much easier to do when you've given yourself permission in advance If you try to cut a model text on the fly you start worrying oh but what if they miss the nuance But if Sunday Renata already decided that one model text is structurally sufficient for today Monday Renata can drop it without the guilt You can also turn a five minute pair share into a quick whole class call out or tell students we're going to write two paragraphs instead of three for our independent practice but I want your best focus on the topic sentence And that brings us to the most important symbol the star The star is your non negotiable anchor This is usually your formative check your exit ticket This item is sacred It protects that engaged time Denham and Lieberman talked about No matter how much the rest of the lesson flexes that starred item must happen and it must get its full allocated time Because without that star what happens The exit ticket gets squeezed into the last 90 seconds of class while kids are packing their backpacks and the bell is ringing You get 25 scraps of paper with half written thoughts that tell you absolutely nothing about what they actually learned Oh I have lived that nightmare Let me show you what this looked like in my third period ELA class last week We were doing a lesson on making inferences from historical fiction My plan had a fixed 5 minute warm up Then my mini lesson on identifying textual clues had a minus next to it My guided practice had a plus And my exit ticket where they had to write a three sentence inference from a new passage had a giant star and was locked at 8 minutes And let me guess, the warm-up did not take five minutes. Of course not. We got into this whole debate about whether the main character's actions were suspicious or just weird. It took 12 minutes. But instead of panicking, I saw my minus on the mini lesson. I immediately dropped my second model passage. Boom. Saved four minutes. Then, during guided practice, the kids actually grasped the concept super fast. So I didn't need my plus move of extra turn and talks. We went straight to independent work. And at exactly 11.12 a.m., I started that starred eight-minute exit ticket. That is beautiful. You didn't lose the integrity of the learning target and you didn't have to sprint to the finish line. Not at all. The kids felt like the class had this perfectly smooth, intentional flow. Meanwhile, I was just executing a script I'd already written for myself. And that's the real power of flex point planning. It takes the emotional drama out of classroom timing. You aren't failing to finish your lesson plan. You are successfully executing a flexible one. So teachers as you look at your lesson plans for tomorrow ask yourself where are your escape hatches Where is your star Mark them now so you don't have to figure it out at Minute 23 That's our Quick Take for today I'm Renata Salas And I'm Colin Whitfield. Happy planning.