Am I the only one out there who has the hardest time planning effective lessons in a reasonable amount of time? There are so many aspects of teaching that feel like they come very naturally for me: making connections with students, planning out units, writing learning targets, explaining assignments to the whole class, staying organized... so what is it with actually planning the day-to-day activities that baffles me so much? One of my professional goals this year is to have my lessons planned out one week in advance. I would like set aside my Thursday afternoons to stay an hour or two after school and map out five days worth of content for the upcoming week. This goal, which seemed reasonable at first, has proved to be extremely challenging for me to meet, which seemed odd to me at first. After all, I am an organized person. I have a great memory for schedules. I am excellent at categorizing information into simpler, smaller chunks. This skill makes me very good at planning out entire units and breaking content down into learning targets. But when I sit down to write a lesson plan, when it comes to the actual "what will students DO" section, it's like my brain turns off. It sometimes takes me hours to plan a single day's worth of activities. Due to the time crunch of life as a teacher and grad student and girlfriend and athlete and dog mom, I often I fall back on an inquiry style lesson format that I've taught numerous times and feel comfortable with -- essentially, kids explore some information on their own and then process it through writing. However, I am aware that these lessons have not been serving my students that need accommodations and modifications because they are often so writing-heavy. Writing is my go-to form of assessment/information processing, probably because it's something I am good at, but I know that this is not the case for every student. Why is it that I have such a hard time coming up with alternative activities for my science class? I think that part of the problem is that I've never taken the kind of science class that I am trying to teach. In the past, science classes have always been heavily lecture-based with the occasional lab day or writing assignment or test. I hated science class until I got to college and my attention span improved such that I was able to actually pay attention to an entire 50 minute lecture and realize how fascinating the information actually is. Part of my drive to teach is rooted in the desire to show kids how cool science is, and do justice to my past self by creating an engaging, hands-on learning environment for kids to fall in love with science. But since I've never had this kind of science class modeled for me, it can be a real challenge thinking of ideas. In the past, when I do have a good idea or stumble upon a cool activity, the materials required to do these activities require extra trips to the store (which in our small town usually means an obligatory Wal-Mart trip: something I dread) and extra trips to our administrator's office to get reimbursed for the money spent. It all requires a great deal of planning ahead of time, something I am currently struggling with. Due to this lesson planning struggle, I have come up with a new plan for improving my teaching. I have decided I need to learn more PBL and EL classroom protocols that I can implement into my lessons. These protocols would help me by giving me fresh classroom activity ideas, without requiring numerous trips to the dreaded Wal-Mart. I also think that incorporating these strategies into my teaching will decrease behavioral issues, because it will help differentiate the learning. Now, to find time to start researching new strategies...
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Emma BooneFirst year 8th grade PBL math/science teacher and graduate student, wondering a bunch and figuring a few things out here and there. Archives
December 2018
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