A teaching diary is exactly what it sounds like: a record of what you taught, when, and to which class. In its simplest form, it's a paper planner with your classes written into time slots. In a more developed form, it's a structured record that links each slot to a lesson plan, tracks what was actually covered, and gives you a searchable history of your teaching.
Most teachers use some version of a teaching diary, even if they don't call it that. The question is whether the format they're using is working for them.
What a teaching diary captures
At minimum, a teaching diary records three things: when you teach, which class, and what was planned for each slot. That's the scheduling layer.
A more complete diary adds the lesson layer: what objectives were set, what activities ran, what homework was assigned, and any notes about how the lesson went — a misconception that came up, a student who was absent, something that worked particularly well. This is the record that's valuable to look back at.
The best digital diaries also connect to the unit layer: each diary slot knows which lesson from which unit it belongs to, which means your teaching history is structured by topic and sequence, not just by date.
Why paper diaries fall short
Paper diaries do the scheduling layer well. They fall short on the other two. Searching a paper diary for "the last time I taught persuasive writing to Year 8" requires physically leafing through it. Copying a lesson plan from last October to this March requires rewriting it. And a paper diary has no concept of units — it's a flat calendar, not a structured record.
Paper diaries also have a single point of failure. A lost or damaged planner is an unrecoverable loss of the entire year's record. A digital diary is backed up by default.
The ScholaPlan diary
ScholaPlan's teaching diary shows your week as a grid: your classes as columns, your days as rows, each timetable slot visible as a card. Each card shows the class colour, the lesson title if one has been planned, and links directly to the lesson editor.
From the diary view, you can see at a glance which lessons have been planned and which haven't, bump lessons forward when teaching time is lost, and navigate to any lesson to review or edit its content. The diary is the daily working view; the lesson editor and unit library are the planning tools behind it.
Looking back at your teaching
One underrated feature of a well-maintained digital diary is the retrospective view. If a student asks "when did we cover the passive voice?", you can search. If you're planning next year's scheme of work and want to know what you actually covered in the autumn term versus what you planned to cover, you can look. If a colleague asks you to share your approach to a particular topic, you have a structured record to share from.
None of this is possible from a paper planner without significant manual effort. A digital diary that's been maintained across a year is a professional record worth having.
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