Designing a Well-Crafted Pacing Guide

The school calendar can be a minefield to navigate. Assemblies, testing days, festivals, sports events, and holidays slice and scatter the weeks that are carefully planned out by teachers—especially high school teachers who are delivering complex Advanced Placement (AP) sequences or multiyear courses like the International Baccalaureate (IB) diploma program.

As an experienced history teacher and department head, I’ve developed a school calendar survival tool: my pacing guide.

I understand the common concerns around pacing guides. They can feel overly rigid: difficult to follow when life intervenes and irrelevant when students fall behind. Some teachers worry that pacing guides are another administrative burden.

But a well-crafted pacing guide offers countless benefits, and it’s more flexible than you think. It doesn’t just break units into weeks—it aligns content, skills, standards, and assessments with real-world disruptions. Pacing guides hold up under the unpredictable rhythms of a school year, fostering clarity for students and self-confidence for teachers. Below are the steps I recommend in order to craft a strong pacing guide, mixing in examples from my own classroom scheduling for the upcoming 2025–26 school year.

Count the Days You Actually Have

Before anything else, I figure out how much time I actually have to teach. I identify the first and last teaching days, then subtract:

• Holidays (including longer breaks)
• Half days before longer breaks
• Schoolwide festivals and fairs
• Parent-teacher conferences (especially if they’re asynchronous or virtual)
• Testing days and mock exam periods
• Any day when a lesson block is so truncated that it no longer allows for real instruction

For my 11th-grade IB history students, this typically leaves me with about 109 viable teaching days out of 180, including 97 full-length days across roughly 22 teaching weeks. My 12th-grade IB history students follow a different timeline due to graduation, university deadlines, and an earlier exam schedule. I have separate pacing guides for each grade to ensure that every week is planned out purposefully, without overloading.

Build Your Guide

Next, I create a shared Google Sheet with separate tabs for each term/grading period. Within each tab, I include columns that track the essentials:

• Week number, which serves as an easy reference point.
• Date range for each school week.
• Lesson focus/topic.
• Learning objective.
• Key skills or standards (such as IB command terms).
• Inquiry question, which is intended to cultivate an intellectually robust atmosphere. (An example weekly inquiry question for students: “Is it unfair to judge people and actions in the past by the standards of today?”)
• Assessments.
• Notes, which include teaching reminders.

I color-code some of the columns to remember them more easily—any combination of colors works, as long as that combination is useful to you and colleagues who also refer to the pacing guide.

Plot Out Required Content, Add Thoughtful Layers

Once I’ve set everything up and know the extent of my teaching days, I map out the units I must teach. I use a trusted textbook’s chapters and subchapters to establish major themes and pacing anchors. For my 11th-grade IB history class, I distribute “Rights and Protest,” “Civil Rights Movements in the Americas,” and “Authoritarian States” across three terms. For my 12th-grade IB history class, I plot out Cold War case studies.

To verify at a glance that instruction is progressing logically, I spiral exam skills across the year and make sure all lessons serve a clearly defined learning purpose. A solid pacing guide explicitly connects weekly content with three elements:

Assessment expectations: These are reflected in the “Notes” column of the guide and tie directly to the types of tasks students will eventually encounter. For instance, early in the semester, 11th-grade IB history students practice source analysis aligned with the structure of the course’s first major written exam. A few weeks afterward, instruction shifts to comparative essay writing on civil rights leaders (Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X)—a step toward the more formal comparative writing expected of 12th-grade IB history students.

Instructional planning notes: The “Notes” column also includes reminders and checkpoints related to instructional decisions and teaching strategies, such as when to shift from content acquisition to skill reinforcement.

National or state standards: For my IB history class, weekly instruction is aligned with specific indicators from the C3 Framework for Social Studies. This alignment appears in the “C3 Framework Dimension” column. For example, one of the first weeks of the 11th-grade IB history course emphasizes chronological reasoning. These standards serve as the backbone of the historical thinking skills my students develop over time.

Backward-Design the Assessments

After plotting content, I sketch out midpoint and end-of-unit assessments. I ensure that every assessment matches the format that students will see on exams, builds on core historical thinking skills (comparison, sourcing, argumentation), and feeds into future learnings.

Through this process, I sometimes find that scheduling swaps are necessary. An early draft of my pacing guide had well-placed assessments based on the academic calendar. But I realized that a major assessment was planned at the same time as a schoolwide high school sports day—a much-anticipated event among students. I adjusted the assessment to the following week so that students wouldn’t have to juggle academic review and event preparations. Those sorts of strategic changes ensure that rigorous learning aligns with the rhythms of student life, supporting both academic success and meaningful high school experiences.

Deliver Pacing Guide Tools for Students

I don’t share the full pacing guide with students, but I translate key elements into student-friendly “road maps” and visual posters. The tools listed below help students navigate the course without overwhelming them with back-end planning.

Weekly road maps: Road maps are posted on our class learning management system and printed for display. They contain distilled information from the pacing guide: the week’s objectives, upcoming assessments, and inquiry questions. They exclude internal teacher notes and rationale—just enough to help students understand what they’re learning and why.

Printed visual posters: These posters visualize the progression of units across the semester. I color-code each unit and hang a large-format chart in the classroom so that students can see where we are in the course and what’s coming next.

Study guides linked to weekly goals: Study guides are built from the pacing guide’s week-by-week skill and content objectives. I distribute them ahead of major tasks to help students prepare with purpose and ensure alignment between instruction and assessment.

Help Your Colleagues, Too

As history subject lead, I share my full pacing guide with others teaching the same course. The guide is a mutual compass of sorts; it includes internal planning notes, rationale behind assessment timing, and links to standards—all of which help ensure that no one class lags behind or races ahead. We use the guide during team meetings to calibrate lessons, exchange resources, and troubleshoot gaps in real time. Having a unified pacing tool builds trust, reduces duplication of work, and strengthens the instructional experience across all classrooms.

Want to see the full guide? It’s available for download here.