A year plan is a dependency
problem, not a topic list.

Start from what students should be able to do: Backward design means writing the end capabilities before the units, then working back to what has to be taught to reach them. Put the outcomes on the right of the canvas and build leftwards, and units that serve no outcome become visible immediately, along with outcomes nothing teaches.

Define the scope of each unit, including what it excludes: A unit card should say what it covers and what it deliberately leaves to a later unit. Most over-scoping happens because nobody wrote the second half down, so every unit quietly expands to cover everything adjacent to it.

Map the prerequisites as real connections: Draw a link from each unit to the skills and knowledge it assumes. A backwards arrow along the timeline is a genuine bug in the course, and it is the kind that normally gets discovered by a class in November rather than by a planner in August.

Choose spiral or linear on purpose: Linear sequencing teaches a topic once and moves on, which is cleaner to plan and less forgiving of a class that misses it. Spiral sequencing revisits the same core ideas at increasing depth across the year, which costs weeks but survives forgetting far better. On a canvas you can see a spiral because the same concept appears in three places.

Count actual teaching weeks, not calendar weeks: Subtract the exam windows, the trips, the training days, the assemblies that eat a period, and the week nobody learns anything. What is left is the real budget, and it is always smaller than the one the plan was written against.

Assume you are twenty percent over-scoped: Most year plans are, because writing a unit takes two minutes and teaching it takes four weeks. Decide in advance which unit gets cut or compressed if you fall behind, and mark it on the board. A planned cut is a curriculum decision. An unplanned one is whatever you ran out of time for in May.

Build in review and slack weeks: Put explicit review weeks on the timeline rather than hoping for spare ones. They do double duty: they absorb the slippage that always happens, and spaced review is one of the few things that reliably improves retention months later.

Watch the load distribution: Three demanding units back to back will exhaust a class and a teacher. When the units are cards on a timeline you can see the heavy stretch and interleave something lighter, which is not visible at all when the year is a list of names.

Pin every assessment to the timeline: Place formative checks inside units, where a result still changes what you do next week, and summative assessments after enough practice has happened. Once they are pinned, the assessment that lands before students have practised the skill is obvious rather than discovered by the results.

Check what each assessment actually covers: Draw a link from each assessment back to the units it tests. Content that is taught and never assessed, and assessments that reach into a unit you have not started, both show up as lines that do not make sense.

Space and interleave for retention: Retrieval of a topic weeks after it was taught beats another lesson on it while it is fresh. Mark where each earlier topic gets revisited and where practice is interleaved rather than blocked, so retention is designed into the sequence instead of hoped for.

Leave the assessment window room to move: If a unit slips by a week, the assessment either slips with it or tests something students have not finished. Keeping both on the same board makes that trade explicit at the moment you fall behind.

A first scope and sequence from three facts: Subject, year group, and teaching weeks available is enough for the AI to lay out a full draft of units in an order, with rough durations. It is a starting position to disagree with, which is a much better place to begin than a blank year.

It reads the whole board: Because the AI has the entire canvas as context, you can ask it to check whether any unit assumes something taught later, to suggest where a review week would do the most good, or to propose a way to compress the term when two weeks disappear.

Re-sequence without rebuilding: Move a unit and everything you already wrote on its card moves with it, including the resources and the lesson boards parked underneath. Trying a different order costs a drag rather than a rewrite.