How to review a teaching resource in five minutes

You can review a teaching resource in about five minutes by checking four things in order: whether it matches the curriculum you teach, whether it has errors, whether the difficulty suits your class, and whether students can follow it. Then take the last minute to decide whether to use it, fix it or drop it. A quick review like this tells you whether the resource is fit to hand out. It cannot tell you whether students learned from it; only your teaching and their work can show that.

Why a quick review is worth the time

Resources reach us from everywhere: an AI tool, a colleague’s folder, a website, a publisher’s online extras. Whatever the source, once a page is printed or posted, students treat it as correct. A mistake on a worksheet can take a lesson to undo.

Five minutes before you photocopy is a small cost against that. It also works the same way for every resource, so you are not deciding case by case how much to trust each source. The checks below use a Year 7 science worksheet on separating mixtures as the example, but they work for any subject.

Minute one: does it match what you teach?

Hold the resource next to the content description or unit plan you are working from. Ask whether it covers what you are teaching now, at this year level, in the order you planned.

Look for drift. A Year 7 sheet on filtration and evaporation might add distillation and chromatography, which you planned for later in the unit. Check that it uses the terms and methods your class knows. If your students learned “filtrate” and “residue”, a sheet that says “the liquid” and “the solid” is not wrong, but it will not help them practise the words they need.

Minute two: are there errors?

Work through two or three questions yourself, including the hardest one. Check the answer sheet against your answers, not the other way round.

Then scan for common errors: a wrongly labelled diagram, units that are missing or mixed, a date or fact that is slightly off, American spelling, and instructions that do not match the questions below them. If the resource names a source or a study, check that it exists. AI tools can produce a reference that looks real and is not.

Minute three: is the difficulty right for this class?

Read the first question as your least confident student would. Can they start without help? Then read the last question as your most confident student would. Is there something that makes them think?

A good resource starts where your students are and builds from there. Check the reading load as well as the content. A science sheet with dense paragraphs can turn into a reading test for some students. If students in your class have adjustments, check whether this resource works for them or needs a second version.

Minute four: can students follow it?

Look at the page as a student will see it. Are the instructions short and in the order students will need them? Is there one task at a time, with space to write? Would a replacement teacher understand what to do if you were away?

Clarity problems are the easiest to fix and the easiest to miss, because you already know what the task is asking. Reading it once from the student’s side is usually enough to spot them.

Minute five: use it, fix it or drop it

Now decide. If it passed all four checks, use it. If it has one or two small problems, fix them and note what you changed. If it misses the curriculum or has errors throughout, drop it. Starting again is often faster than repairing a page that was not built for your class.

If you fix a resource, save the corrected copy where your faculty keeps shared materials, with a note on what you checked. That saves a colleague from doing the same five minutes again, and over time it builds a bank of resources your team trusts.

What a quick review cannot tell you

A five-minute review checks the resource. It does not check the learning. A worksheet can be accurate, well aligned, pitched at the right level and clear, and students may still leave the lesson with the same misconception they brought in.

That is why the review is only the first half of the job. The second half happens after the lesson, when you look at what students wrote. Which questions did most students get right? Which wrong answers came up again and again? That evidence tells you whether the resource did its work, and what to change before you use it next year.

Try it this week

Pick one resource you plan to use this week and review it with these four checks before you print it. Time yourself. After the lesson, spend a few minutes with the student work and note one thing to change.

If your faculty wants to make this a shared habit, our help for schools page explains the staff professional development and advice we are taking bookings for, from Term 1 2027, on site in Melbourne or online.