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

Scope is what a course covers and how deeply. Sequence is the order it is covered in. Together they are the two decisions that define a curriculum, and they constrain each other constantly: widening the scope of one unit takes weeks from another, and changing the sequence can make a unit impossible because it now arrives before its prerequisite. A scope and sequence document is usually a table of units with durations and outcomes. Laid out on a canvas instead, with the dependencies drawn between units, the sequence errors are visible rather than inferred.

Scale, and the kind of question each one answers. A lesson plan designs a single class period: the objective, the activities, the materials, and the minutes each stage gets. A curriculum plan designs a term, a year, or a whole course: which units exist, what order they run in, how many weeks each gets, and where the assessments land. A lesson plan is a time budget in minutes. A curriculum plan is a time budget in weeks, plus a dependency graph. Different questions, different tools. Plan the individual lesson in the lesson plan creator and map the year here.

Backward design means starting from what students should be able to do at the end, then deciding how you would know they can do it, and only then designing the teaching. It reverses the common order, where a teacher picks activities first and works out the assessment later. In practice it produces two useful checks. Every outcome should have units that teach it, and every unit should serve an outcome. Anything failing one of those tests is either a gap or filler. On a canvas you can put the outcomes at one end and build back towards the start of the year.

Linear sequencing teaches each topic once, in a defined block, and moves on. It is simpler to plan, easier to pace, and unforgiving: a student who misses the block has missed the topic. Spiral sequencing revisits core ideas several times across the year at increasing depth. It costs teaching weeks and it fights forgetting far more effectively, because retrieval after a delay is what makes learning durable. Most real courses are a hybrid, with a spine of linear units and two or three core ideas that recur. On a canvas a spiral is visible as the same concept appearing in three separate places.

List what each unit assumes students can already do, then draw a connection from the unit to wherever that skill is taught. Once every link is on the board, one rule finds the bugs: every arrow should point forwards along the timeline. An arrow pointing backwards means a unit needs something taught after it, which is the single most common curriculum error and the hardest one to spot in a table. Fix it either by moving the unit or by moving the prerequisite, and check the knock-on links before you commit to the new order.

Start by counting the teaching weeks you really have. Take the calendar weeks, then subtract exam windows, trips, training days, and the weeks that are nominally teaching but functionally are not. That number is the budget. Then assume your first allocation is about twenty percent too ambitious, because writing a unit takes two minutes and teaching one takes four weeks. Rather than shaving a day off everything, decide now which unit is compressed or cut if you fall behind, and mark it. A planned cut is a curriculum decision; an unplanned one is just whatever you ran out of time for.

Formative assessment belongs inside units, early enough that the result can still change the next few lessons. Summative assessment belongs after enough practice has actually happened, which is the placement most often got wrong: an end-of-unit test scheduled the week the skill was introduced tests recall rather than capability. Pin each assessment to the timeline and draw a link back to the units it covers. Content that is taught but never assessed and assessments that reach into unfinished units both become visible as connections that do not line up.

Spacing means revisiting a topic weeks after it was first taught rather than teaching it once in a block. Interleaving means mixing practice of different topics instead of doing thirty problems of one kind. Both feel less efficient in the lesson and both produce better retention months later, which is exactly why they lose out to coverage pressure. The way to protect them is to put them on the map: schedule explicit review points where earlier topics return, and mark the units where practice is deliberately mixed. If they are not on the timeline, they will not survive a term that runs late.

No, on both counts, and we will not pretend otherwise. Storyflow does not integrate with Google Classroom, Canvas, Moodle, Schoology, PowerSchool, or any other LMS or student information system. There is no gradebook, no grading, no attendance, and no student records of any kind. It also has no built-in standards framework and does not automatically check your plan against any national curriculum, state standard, or exam specification. What you can do is put the specification text on the canvas as cards and link each one to the unit that covers it, so the mapping is visible and yours. Storyflow is a planning canvas, nothing more.

It drafts a scope and sequence, which is a different and more useful thing. Give it the subject, the year group, and the teaching weeks available and it lays out units in an order with rough durations. Because it reads the whole board, you can then ask it to check whether any unit assumes a skill taught later, to suggest where a review week would help most, or to propose how to compress the term when two weeks disappear. What it cannot know is your students, your department, or your exam board. Every decision about what actually gets taught stays with you.

Not during early access. Storyflow is paid-only right now, with plans starting at $9.99 a month, and a Free plan launches before the end of 2026. Anyone a paid member invites to a board joins free today, so a department can work on a shared curriculum map without everyone paying. There is no separate education or teacher discount. If you need something free this minute, Google Sheets will hold a scope and sequence table perfectly well. It just will not show you which unit depends on which.