Step 18: Lesson planning

Looking at school calendars, it's easy to assume that teachers (like students) have a remarkable number of days off. On this eve of President's Day, however, let me tell you - tomorrow will be no vacation day. Instead, I plan to spend it lesson planning. Currently I am working on both immediate lessons that I will teach this week (two days of math, a literature circle, and possibly a day of social studies), but also looking ahead to my unit plan for what is called our "two week takeover". During that time, we are expected to not only fully lead the class for two weeks, but also to teach a unit of our own design (more on this in another post). Whether adjusting a lesson that my mentor teacher has previously created, or coming up with them on my own, I am beginning to get into a more natural habit of focusing on objectives, assessment, and then activities. This "backward planning" is proving to be valuable in ways I did not initially imagine. In particular, this style of planning has really helped me to focus on the main goal of my lesson such that, when (inevitably) things do not go exactly according to my plan in class and time flies by too quickly, or I get off track temporarily, I can double back to the objective to make sure that at least that came across clearly. For example, I recently led a math lesson on quadrangles during which I easily could have gotten lost in the weeds discussing the vocabulary of each multi-sided figure. However, I had already established, with the help of my CM, that the most important takeaway for the students was that these shapes can appear in many different forms, but that they can be identified by the number of sides and angles that they have and named by their points. During the lesson, we had some fun playing with shapes and their names (rhombus, parallelogram, etc.), but I made sure to bring it back to these main takeaways such that the vocabulary was not the focus.

Another goal of this style of lesson planning is to avoid what I believe is a stereotypically elementary lesson style of "activity-based" learning. That is, "today we cut out snowflakes, because it's winter...oh and maybe they were also practicing symmetry." This is not to say that students shouldn't get to do fun activities to supplement their learning; however, it is essential that the objective drives the activity, not vice versa. I think I'm becoming better at this process, but gosh it sure takes a lot of time! I can't imagine what it is going to be like to plan for an entire year!