Not every lesson goes as planned. In fact, as we near the mid-way mark of the school year, I am starting to encounter more lessons that don't go as planned than do. Most of the time I consider that a great thing, and I like to leave a little wiggle room in my lesson plans to make space for answering the bizarre questions and free styling student's creative ideas to modify the lesson. Usually, the heart of the lesson is centered around an effective instructional strategy that gets the point across, even if it's not in the way I had originally hoped for. However, there have been a few instructional strategies I've used so far this year that have totally backfired in ways I could never have anticipated. One example is from a few weeks ago, when I had the students build weather instruments for measuring temperature, pressure, wind speed and wind direction, based off of a lesson plan left behind to me from last year's teacher. The concept was brilliant -- using just a few basic materials students would create their own instruments to measure and record the day's weather. They would learn about what instruments scientists use to record weather and the atmospheric processes that affect our weather. I thought we could keep using the student-build instruments throughout the unit to record weather conditions in a classroom weather log, and the students would love them because they built them themselves. Sounds great, right? Well, it would have been, if I had done things just little bit differently... Mistake #1: Skimming through the instructions for how to build each instrument instead of reading them in detail. I assumed these instructions would be easy to follow and intuitive enough that I didn't need to read them in detail when I was prepping for the lesson. I was dead wrong. Students were so confused about what to do and what materials they needed and I wasn't much help since I hadn't really read the instructions. Mistake #2: Giving students the instructions in the first place. The science classroom is all about creativity, testing hypotheses and learning from mistakes! I missed out on an awesome opportunity to let the students be creative by giving them instructions. Thinking back on it, I should have given each table an instrument to build and a pile of materials, and let them figure it out on their own. This would have made the lesson way more collaborative and perhaps led to more study buy-in and maybe even better instrument designs. Mistake #3: Not setting a clear purpose for the activity. I thought the activity could speak for itself, but in retrospect I'm not so sure my kids really understand why we were doing it. They were happy to go outside, and left the classroom that day in good spirits, but I think if I interviewed the students afterward about what they learned that day it would probably be something along the lines of, "Building weather instruments is confusing," or "There wasn't any wind outside today." Both are reasonable conclusions -- but neither was the real goal of my lesson! Next year, I probably will do a lesson similar to this, but I will be sure to change a few things. Instead of giving students instructions, I will give them a task and some materials have them problem-solve it. I will make sure that that task is rooted in a strong learning target, and that students can articulate what that learning target is and how they will meet it. And of course I will be sure to include that wiggle room for when things inevitably turn out a little differently than I planned.
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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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