I spent all day yesterday and most of this morning planning for the first week of our new semester, which starts on Monday. I have reviewed, revised, rewritten student objectives, I have developed my lesson plans for the week for my Physical Science and Biology classes, placing them on their respective Google calendars embedded on each class website, and I have written and scheduled each day's class opener in Blogger, using my lesson plans as a guide.For Physical Science, we will be starting our States of Matter Unit, our first chemistry unit that ties in nicely to all of the physics of motion we studied in the first semester. We will be starting with a simple unknowns lab that they will revisit as they work through the videos and smaller activities for each I can statement. Their final assessment will be a more complicated unknowns lab that will force them to use their shiny new knowledge of the states of matter (a level 5 in my scoring system). After having determined that my Biology students did a little too much sitting around last semester and not enough doing, I decided we will start with a problem-based learning unit during our study of cell structure, where students will be designing interactive learning activities and pitching their activities to a representative from a publishing company. Yes, I'm still flipping, but the videos and activities following the videos are a means to an end in my classroom, not the end to the learning.
But all my planning, developing, and scheduling took a much longer time than it normally does; I found myself questioning everything that I was doing. I started asking the most annoying questions of myself while I was working on my plans that made me stop and think about what I was doing, why I was doing it, and if doing what I wanted to do made sense for learning. Some of them are below:
- Why do they need to know this? Is this really necessary for everyone to know to lead a productive life?
- Am I clarifying when I start making lists of requirements for their projects and labs, or am I micromanaging their learning and taking the thinking and mistake-making and screwing-up part of learning right out of it?
- How do I make this relevant to their learning and to their lives? If I can't make it relevant, should it be an objective?
- Shouldn't my activities and videos lead students to discover/uncover concepts by themselves rather than telling them where to find this information?
But the question that always stops me in my tracks while planning is this:
- How are students responsible for doing the learning in this unit?
This question always results in a lot of internal muttering of bad words before I start reviewing and revising all my carefully laid plans, lessons, and objectives I have already written, trying to make them more meaningful, more relevant, more connected to previous learning and trying to foreshadow the learning to come. I try to see where I have overplanned, tried to smooth out the learning bumps, tried to take over student learning to make it "easier" or "more understandable" for them, and then try to build in steps where students learn to carve out their own learning path, putting in a few bumps and blind alleys and dead-ends. I try to put in places where students have to make their own decisions rather asking the teacher, "How do you want me to do this?" I try to create opportunities for students to run wild with their learning, once they stop their incessant quest for right answers when in reality there are only better answers than others, and those better answers can change when time, place, and context changes.
I try. I'm not always successful, but I try. It's hard to try and get students to learn on their own in a system that has taken the ability to learn from them for so many years.
But when I see students (often well after they are in my class) being able to learn on their own, function on their own, plan on their own, make learning decisions on their own, and be their own people, it makes all of the annoying questions and the extra work they lead to worth it.
I have a student teacher this semester, and she will be in my classroom from mid-January to the end of April. I won't be doing a lot of the direct planning this semester, but hopefully, when I sit down and plan with her and my other colleagues during our department planning time, I can pass on some of my annoying questions to her to make her reflect on what she's doing and why she's doing it. I think that's one of the more important things I can teach her about teaching students.
photo credit: cavale via photopin cc
