Now to preface the rest of this post with something very important, I am not a doctor nor do I pretend to be one on TV. While I might not be the smartest guy in the room (all the time) I do spend a great deal of time reading and observing. So what follows are just some ideas and suggestions for how to fill in that template that was discussed yesterday.
Objective: Folks might disagree with me on this one, but in my experiences having an objective is a great way to summarize a lesson. It is a brief statment that students can refer to or the teacher can ask them to refer to in order to keep kids on track. It is also a very easy way to wrap up a lesson.
Drill/Warm-Up/Do Now: An activity to get kids involved immediately in the lesson. It can be a question, discussion, or any other activity that immediately grabs the kids and gets them thinking about the lesson. I used them as the jump off point for almost every lesson. A great idea is to create a discrepant event that challenges the typical way of thinking.
Engagement Activity: I look at this as a continuation of the drill. Keep the ball rolling with what you just had the students doing. Make it as interesting as possible. It can be as simple as continuing a discussion about the drill or as difficult as you want it to be.
Now where there is discrepancy and arguments. For the next portion, the meat of the lesson, people make millions...and MILLIONS of dimes off of this discussion. I don't care how you do this but include some of the following in some type of order:
Teacher Alone, Teacher with Student, Student with Teacher, Student Alone
Exploration activity, Explanation Activity, Extension Activity, Elaboration Activity
Together with You, Together Together, and All by Yourself.
Stop, Collaborate, and Listen
Each of the above is a way to get the the content to the students. Except for the last one, that one is Vanilla Ice; but, it could be the new way to teach. The point is to get the students working. I don't care how you get the involved and working just get them doing something. Try to provide some time for them to work together, work with you, and work alone. But really that is up to you, far be it from me to tell you exactly how to do this as that is the BEST part of the job. This is what makes teaching an ART and SCIENCE.
After the students have been involved with doing work, it is important to SUMMARIZE. Personally, I think the best way to do this is to have the students tell you what they did and how they did it. Ask them if the met the objective and elaborate on how they did or did not. Again, not a doctor, but I would think that this allow the information to go to a different part of the brain; you know short term versus long term.
Finally, it is important to assess the students. Now please note that while I put this at the end, it is only because their needs to be an assessment at the end of EVERY lesson. If one starts with the end in mind, this will be the goal for the lesson. This will be the proof that the students met the objective. I caution you that if this is the only time you assess during your lesson, you will be sorely disappointed in the results. It is imperative that you assess throughout the lesson in order to adjust how you provide instruction and identify students that need more assistance in order to get them to the end point. That is teaching. Doing it all...every day...is teaching at your best.
Keep up the great work that you do every day. #wwmschat questions will be posted soon, thinking about swtiching something up for next week, but need to run it by the team.
Thanks for reading and feel free to leave a comment.
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