Senior High School Teaching Guides: What SHS Teachers Use in 2026 (and Where to Get Them)
If you teach Grade 11 this school year, you have probably typed “senior high school teaching guides” into Google at least once — then stared at the results, unsure which files are the real ones. Some links point to the old teaching guides from 2016. Others point to new session guides with names you have not seen before. A few point to sites that look official and are not.
The confusion has a reason. In school year 2026-2027, the Philippines is running two senior high school systems at the same time. Grade 11 follows the new Strengthened Senior High School Curriculum under DepEd Order No. 017, s. 2026. Grade 12, in schools that did not pilot the new program, still follows the 2016 curriculum. Each system has its own teaching guides — and using the wrong set means planning lessons from competencies your students are no longer supposed to learn.
This guide sorts it out. You will find what a teaching guide is, which guides exist for each grade this school year, where to download them for free from official DepEd sources, and how to use them without turning your class into a read-aloud session.
Download the free one-page checklist below to keep the split straight: which documents belong to Grade 11, which belong to Grade 12, and the four places to get them. Download the SHS Teaching Guides Checklist (PDF).
Which Guide Do I Need? (Tool)
Pick your grade level and subject, and the finder will tell you which set of guides to download.
What a Senior High School Teaching Guide Actually Is
A teaching guide — TG for short — is DepEd’s lesson-by-lesson companion to the curriculum guide. The curriculum guide tells you what to teach: the content standards, the performance standards, and the learning competencies with their codes. The teaching guide tells you how a week of that subject might actually run: the flow of a lesson, suggested activities, guide questions, and ideas for checking whether students got it.
Think of it this way. The curriculum guide is the map. The teaching guide is one experienced teacher’s suggested route across it. It is not a script you have to read word for word, and DepEd has always been clear about that: teaching guides, learner’s materials, and other resources are meant to be used as resources, not as the curriculum itself. Your class, your students, and your judgment still decide what happens in the room.
A full guide usually opens with a short introduction to the subject — what it is for, how it connects to the other subjects — then moves into lessons arranged by quarter or by module. Each lesson names the competency it covers, the time it should take, the materials you need, and the steps of the activity. The better ones also give you sample assessment items and point out the common mistakes students make on that topic. If you have ever opened a DepEd teacher’s guide for a K to 10 subject, the SHS versions work the same way — only the subjects and the pacing are different.
The Big Change: Two Different SHS Systems in SY 2026-2027
Before you download anything, you need to know which system your grade level is on. This is the single most common mistake teachers make with senior high school teaching guides this year: they grab a file made for the other system.
DepEd Order No. 017, s. 2026 — the Strengthened Senior High School Curriculum — was signed on June 4, 2026. It took effect for incoming Grade 11 learners in school year 2026-2027, which opened on June 8, 2026. Grade 12 learners in schools that did not pilot the new program stay on the 2016 K to 12 SHS curriculum for this school year. A few schools piloted the strengthened program in SY 2025-2026, so their Grade 12 classes are already on the new system — but for most schools, the split is simple: Grade 11 is new, Grade 12 is old.
| Grade 11 (SY 2026-2027) | Grade 12 (SY 2026-2027, non-pilot schools) | |
|---|---|---|
| Curriculum | Strengthened SHS Curriculum (DO 017, s. 2026) | 2016 K to 12 SHS Curriculum |
| Core subjects | 5, down from 15 | 15 core subjects, as before |
| Tracks | 2 — Academic and Technical-Professional | 4 — Academic, TVL, Sports, Arts and Design |
| Calendar | Three terms (Term 1, 2, 3) | Two semesters |
| Guides to use | New session guides, lesson exemplars, activity sheets | Original 2016 teaching guides |
That middle row is the change everyone is talking about. The old curriculum had fifteen core subjects — Oral Communication, Reading and Writing, 21st Century Literature, Media and Information Literacy, and the rest — and every Grade 11 and 12 student took most of them. The strengthened curriculum cuts that to five integrated core subjects, each running 160 hours across the whole of Grade 11. The hours freed up go to electives, which students choose in clusters that match what they want to do after graduation.
So if you teach Grade 11, the file you need is probably not called a “teaching guide” at all. If you teach Grade 12, the old teaching guides are still exactly right. The next two sections take each case in turn.
The New Grade 11 Guides: Session Guides, Lesson Exemplars, and Activity Sheets
Under the strengthened curriculum, DepEd replaced the old single teaching guide per subject with a small set of documents that work together. If you searched for senior high school teaching guides expecting one file per subject, the new system will surprise you — but once you know the names, the set is easy to use. Each document has a clear job.
The five core subjects are the same for every Grade 11 learner, whatever track they are in. Each one runs 160 hours over the school year, and each one has its own set of guides:
| Core subject (Grade 11) | Hours | What guides exist |
|---|---|---|
| Effective Communication / Mabisang Komunikasyon | 160 | Session guide, budget of work, unpacked competencies, lesson exemplars, activity sheets |
| General Mathematics | 160 | Session guide, budget of work, unpacked competencies, lesson exemplars, activity sheets |
| General Science | 160 | Session guide, budget of work, unpacked competencies, lesson exemplars, activity sheets |
| Life and Career Skills | 160 | Session guide, budget of work, unpacked competencies, lesson exemplars, activity sheets |
| Pag-aaral ng Kasaysayan at Lipunang Pilipino | 160 | Session guide, budget of work, unpacked competencies, lesson exemplars, activity sheets |
Start with the session guide. It is the closest thing to the old teaching guide: it walks through the lessons for a subject, with the competencies, the suggested activities, and the pacing. The budget of work (BOW) sits beside it and shows the same plan as a calendar — which competencies fall in which weeks of each term. The unpacked competencies break the official competency statements into smaller, teachable pieces, which is genuinely useful when a competency in the guide reads like a whole chapter in one sentence.
Then come the two documents you will actually open every week. The lesson exemplar (LE) is a ready-to-teach sample lesson for a single competency: objectives, materials, procedure, and assessment, written so you can run it almost as printed. The learning activity sheet (LAS) is the handout that goes with it — the worksheet or task your students work on. DepEd’s materials page for the strengthened program lists these quarter by quarter, so you can pull Term 1 materials now and come back for Term 2 and 3 as the year goes on.
Two details matter for planning. First, all five core subjects are Grade 11 only — they are finished in one year and are not offered again in Grade 12. Second, electives have their own guides too. The Academic track has five elective clusters (Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities; Business and Entrepreneurship; Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics; Sports, Health and Wellness; and Field Experience), and the Technical-Professional track has ten clusters, each tied to a TESDA training regulation. TechPro electives run 320 hours each. DepEd is clear that schools are not required to offer every elective in a cluster, so check which electives your school actually offers before hunting for their guides — some clusters will have no guide in your school because no class is running.
The Old Teaching Guides Grade 12 Still Uses
If you teach Grade 12 in a non-pilot school, nothing about your guides changed this year. You are still on the 2016 curriculum, and the teaching guides written for it are still the right files. The most-used core-subject teaching guides from that set are:
- General Mathematics — functions, business math, logic, and the rest of the Grade 11 core, still taught in the old sequence for Grade 12 classes finishing the program.
- Statistics and Probability — the core subject most Grade 12 teachers ask for, since it feeds directly into research subjects.
- Earth and Life Science and Earth Science — Earth and Life Science for most strands, Earth Science for STEM classes.
- Basic Calculus and Pre-calculus — the STEM mathematics pair.
- Disaster Readiness and Risk Reduction — the applied science core subject, with lesson-by-lesson guidance on hazards, exposure, and community preparedness.
Beyond the core, teaching guides also exist for applied and specialized subjects — General Biology 1 for STEM, for example — and for the old track subjects. The full set is large because the old curriculum was large: fifteen core subjects plus applied and specialized subjects across four tracks. If you are looking for a guide for a specialized subject, search the DepEd Learning Resource Portal by the exact subject name rather than by “SHS teaching guide” in general — the portal lists close to 700 SHS resources, and a general search will bury the one you need.
One warning for Grade 12 teachers: the new session guides will show up in your searches now, because they are the newest files and search engines rank new pages first. A session guide for General Science is not a replacement for the Earth and Life Science teaching guide your Grade 12 class needs. Check the file’s cover page before you print anything — the strengthened-curriculum files say so on the first page.
Where to Download Senior High School Teaching Guides
Every official teaching guide is free. If a site asks you to pay for one, you are on the wrong site. Here are the places to find senior high school teaching guides, in the order that wastes the least of your time.
1. The DepEd Learning Resource Portal. Start at lrmds.deped.gov.ph, DepEd’s official LR Portal. Search by grade level and subject, then filter by resource type — “Teacher’s Guide” for the old files. The portal’s SHS collection runs to nearly 700 resources, with 484 tagged Grade 11 and 215 tagged Grade 12, so the filters are not optional. When you find the right file, download it and keep the original filename; renaming it is how files get mixed up in a shared faculty drive.
2. The Strengthened SHS learning materials page. For the new Grade 11 core subjects, DepEd’s LR Portal also keeps a dedicated page of strengthened SHS program learning materials, organized by subject and quarter, with the lesson exemplars and learning activity sheets as separate downloads. This is the fastest route to the new files, because the main portal still mixes old and new materials together.
3. Your region or division LR portal. Many regions run their own portals — Davao Oriental’s, for example, publishes contextualized Grade 11 and 12 materials including lesson activity sheets and targeted intervention packets. Regional portals are also where you find materials your division produced for local needs, which never appear on the national portal.
4. Your school’s LRMDS coordinator. Every school has one, even if the title is not used out loud. The coordinator can pull the official files, confirm which version your school is supposed to use, and tell you whether your division has printed copies. Asking takes five minutes and has saved more than one teacher from teaching a whole quarter from the wrong guide.
5. Teacher download blogs — with care. Sites like DepEd Tambayan and DepEd Club repost the same official files, and they are often easier to search than the portal. They are fine as a shortcut. What you should not do is treat them as the authority. Before you teach from a file you got from a blog, open the curriculum guide for that subject and check that the competencies match. Blogs repost quickly and correct slowly, and a file labeled for the wrong year can sit uncorrected for months. And if a download page is covered in pop-up ads or asks for your email before showing the file, close it — the same file is on the LR Portal without any of that.
Teaching Guide vs Curriculum Guide vs Lesson Exemplar
Teachers mix these documents up constantly, and the names do not help — a “guide” that tells you what to teach, a “guide” that tells you how to teach it, and an “exemplar” that shows you one lesson. Here is the difference in plain terms.
| Document | Answers | Who writes it | When you open it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Curriculum Guide (CG) | What to teach — standards and competencies | DepEd central office | When planning a quarter or a term |
| Teaching Guide (TG) | How a subject might be taught, lesson by lesson | DepEd, with teacher-writers | When planning a week of lessons |
| Session Guide | How a strengthened-curriculum subject runs, session by session | DepEd, for the new Grade 11 core subjects | When planning under DO 017, s. 2026 |
| Lesson Exemplar (LE) | One complete sample lesson you can teach | DepEd and regional writers | The night before a class |
| Learning Activity Sheet (LAS) | What the student does and hands in | DepEd and regional writers | In class, with the exemplar |
| Daily Lesson Log (DLL) | Your own record of what you actually taught | You | Daily, after class |
The order matters. Start from the curriculum guide, not the teaching guide. The CG is the official statement of what your students must learn; everything else is help in getting there. A teacher who starts from the TG can end up teaching a lovely set of activities that quietly misses a competency. A teacher who starts from the CG and uses the TG as a source of ideas will not. If you are new to the difference between these documents, our guide to DepEd teacher’s guides walks through the full set — CG, TG, DLL, and lesson exemplar — with examples. And for the bigger picture of how senior high fits into the whole reform, the SHS curriculum guide explains the strengthened program’s two tracks and five core subjects, while the K to 10 curriculum guide covers the grades that feed into it.
How to Use a Teaching Guide Without Teaching Straight From It
A teaching guide is most useful when you treat it as a first draft of your week, not a finished one. Here is how experienced SHS teachers actually use theirs.
Check it against the CG first. Open the curriculum guide for your subject and confirm the guide’s lessons cover the competencies for your term. This takes ten minutes and catches the one problem that matters — a guide written for a different year or a different version of the subject.
Keep the structure, change the examples. The sequence of a good teaching guide is usually sound: it introduces an idea, lets students try it, then checks understanding. What goes stale is the examples. Swap in something your students actually know — a local business for a business math problem, a recent news story for a communication task — and the same lesson lands twice as well.
Use the assessment items as a bank, not a test. The questions in a teaching guide show you what “good enough” looks like for that competency. Use them to write your own quiz, or to check whether your own questions are pitched at the right level. Handing out the guide’s items unchanged is how a class ends up memorizing answers a neighboring section already saw.
Pair the guide with the activity sheets. Under the strengthened curriculum especially, the guide and the LAS are built to work together — the exemplar teaches, the sheet practices. Using one without the other means either a lesson with nothing for students to do, or a worksheet with no teaching behind it.
Note what you changed. A short note in your DLL — “used the guide’s activity 2, replaced the example, added a group task” — turns this year’s improvisation into next year’s plan. Teachers who do this for one school year end up with a personal guide that fits their students better than any file DepEd could publish.
Tips for SHS Teachers Starting the New Curriculum
If you are one of the teachers handling Grade 11 under the strengthened curriculum for the first time, a few things are worth knowing before the first term ends.
- Download the whole term, not one week at a time. The session guide, BOW, and exemplars for a term are meant to be read together. Teachers who download week by week keep discovering that an activity in Week 6 assumed a reading from Week 3.
- Watch the hours. Each core subject is 160 hours for the year, and the BOW shows how those hours are spread across the three terms. If you are ahead or behind by more than a week at the end of Term 1, say so in your department meeting — the BOW is a plan, and plans need adjusting out loud.
- Talk to the teacher next door. Effective Communication is assigned to English and Filipino teachers; Life and Career Skills draws on Values, PE, and personal development teachers. The five core subjects were built to connect with each other — a student who writes a position paper in communication class should be able to use the same skill in Kasaysayan. That only happens if the teachers compare notes.
- Keep the old files separate. Make two folders on your drive or your shelf: “SHS 2016 (Grade 12)” and “Strengthened SHS (Grade 11)”. Mixing them is how a Grade 11 class ends up with a 2016 lesson on a subject that no longer exists.
- Keep a master list of the senior high school teaching guides your department actually uses. One shared sheet — subject, grade, file name, where it was downloaded, and the date — stops the yearly ritual of five teachers downloading five different versions of the same file.
- Check the portal again in January. DepEd has been releasing the strengthened materials in waves — Term 1 first, then the rest. If a quarter’s exemplars were missing when you last looked, look again.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where can I download senior high school teaching guides for free?
From the DepEd Learning Resource Portal at lrmds.deped.gov.ph. Search by grade and subject, then filter by the resource type “Teacher’s Guide”. The new Grade 11 materials — session guides, lesson exemplars, and activity sheets — are also collected on the portal’s dedicated Strengthened SHS learning materials page. Everything official is free; never pay for a teaching guide.
Are there teaching guides for the new Grade 11 core subjects?
Yes, but they are not called teaching guides. Under the strengthened curriculum, each of the five core subjects — Effective Communication, General Mathematics, General Science, Life and Career Skills, and Pag-aaral ng Kasaysayan at Lipunang Pilipino — has a session guide, a budget of work, unpacked competencies, lesson exemplars, and learning activity sheets. The session guide is the document that plays the teaching guide’s role.
My school is still on the old curriculum for Grade 12. Which guides do I use?
The original 2016 teaching guides. Grade 12 in non-pilot schools follows the 2016 SHS curriculum for the whole of SY 2026-2027, so the old core-subject teaching guides — General Mathematics, Statistics and Probability, Earth and Life Science, Basic Calculus, Pre-calculus, Disaster Readiness and Risk Reduction, and the rest — are still the right files. Only schools that piloted the strengthened program in SY 2025-2026 use the new materials in Grade 12.
What is the difference between a teaching guide and a session guide?
Mostly the curriculum they belong to. A teaching guide is the lesson-by-lesson companion written for the 2016 SHS curriculum. A session guide is the equivalent document for the strengthened curriculum, written around the new core subjects and the three-term calendar. Both do the same job: they turn the curriculum guide’s competencies into teachable lessons. The name tells you which system the file belongs to.
Can I use teaching guides I find on Facebook groups or download blogs?
You can, but verify them first. Teacher blogs and groups repost the official files, and many are fine. Before you teach from one, check the file’s cover page for the subject and year, and check its competencies against the curriculum guide. Files get mislabeled, and a guide for the wrong year can sit in a group files section for years without anyone noticing.
Do private schools use the same teaching guides?
Yes. The curriculum guides and teaching guides are national documents, and private schools follow the same curriculum — the strengthened program applies to both public and private SHS starting SY 2026-2027. A private school may add its own materials, but the DepEd guides are the common base.
Conclusion
Senior high school teaching guides are easy to find and easy to get wrong this year, because two curriculums are running side by side. The rule is simple: Grade 11 uses the new session guides, lesson exemplars, and activity sheets under DepEd Order No. 017, s. 2026. Grade 12, in schools that did not pilot the new program, uses the original 2016 teaching guides. Get that split right, download from the DepEd Learning Resource Portal, and check every file against the curriculum guide before you teach from it. The guides are there to make your week easier — not to decide it for you.
Sources & References
- Department of Education. DepEd Order No. 017, s. 2026 — Strengthened Senior High School Curriculum (deped.gov.ph).
- Department of Education. Strengthened Senior High School Program: Key Features (deped.gov.ph).
- Department of Education. Learning Resource Portal — Senior High School resources (lrmds.deped.gov.ph).
- Department of Education. LR Portal — Strengthened SHS Program Learning Materials (sites.google.com/deped.gov.ph/deped-lrportal).
- Manila Bulletin. “DepEd to fully implement Strengthened SHS curriculum in SY 2026–2027” (March 2, 2026).
- BusinessMirror. “Aligned pathways, seamless transition from SHS to college championed in enhanced curriculum” (May 23, 2026).
- DepEd Tambayan. “Session Guides, Budget of Works (BOW), Unpacked Competencies for the Strengthened Senior High School Curriculum” (June 2025).
- TeacherPH. “Disaster Readiness and Risk Reduction: Senior High School SHS Teaching Guide” (2017, updated 2019).
