Back in Action

Howdy loyal reader(s)!  I am back in action after a two weeks of not putting up a single post.  While I might not have been successful at posting for 30 days straight, I choose to look at that as a lesson learned instead of a failure.  Creating new content on a daily basis is difficult and there are not too many guides or curricula for blogging.  This was a challenge to get back in touch with my teaching roots.  Since becoming an administrator daily planning has been replaced with more large scale and long term planning for the building and students.  While I still have a daily agenda, the process of creating lessons to explain concepts to students was starting to fade from my memory.  The 30 day challenge was my method of bringing myself back in touch with that.  This sounds so bourgeoisie.  I guess it should.  I was loosing touch with the concepts and work that makes the school tick.  The daily grind so to speak.  However, the absence from the blog was due to refocusing on that exact issue.

During the absence, I spent time analyzing data and working with the administrative team to identify root cause and revise our School Progress Plan.  That took the place of the day to day planning for awhile.  It also revitalized my visions, goals, and plans for the school.  I am very excited to get back in the saddle when it comes to teaching, learning and blogging.

And while I am not one to be overly superstitious, I do believe in signs and this was one that hit me right over the head yesterday.  Thank you to www.techsavvyed.net for helping me refocus and be revitalized.

See you again, very soon.  Enjoy your weekend.

Day 25- A much needed break

I have not posted for some time now.  There is a great reason.  Work.  Work is the reason that I am able to post; therefore, when work calls posting must stop.  After the first day of neglecting the blog, I felt bad.  Then came day two and the guilt started.  You need to post, you need to get the information out to people.  The world is a better place with you posting.  The reality is everything is fine.  So if you upset from missing a few days of random musings then I will apologize right now.  But I am willing to bet that you didn't miss me much. 

Daily posting is very time consuming.  While I have found a voice and theme for this blog, I am still working on a level of consistency.  I want this to have the greatest impact possible for the folks that read.  It would not be fair to any reader to put up mindless pieces of prose that have no meaning.  Therefore in a commitment to quality, I will do a better job of putting together quality post that will be worthwhile in reading.

In the meantime, enjoy post season baseball, spend some moments with your families in the beautiful autumn, and keep teaching to the best of your abilities.

Day 22 and 23- Rearranging the furniture and Chat questions

I broke my streak again for posting every day.  However, this time I felt a bit guilty about not posting anything.  And I think that is where the 30 day challenge comes into play.  One must make blogging a habit in order to it to be successful and 30 days is a great amount of time to make something a habit. Through my recent reading it seems that 21 days is what is actually needed to form a habit.  I will see through to 30 then take a slight hiatus to reorganize.

The week has been devoted to lesson planning.  The final step in planning lessons is to create a way to make it easier as it goes along.  For me, my favorite part of teaching was creating new ways for my students to learn the same thing each year.  I would be lying if I said that I recreated each lesson each year.  To me that seemed foolish.  Starting from fresh, while valiant, is very time consuming and tiring.  Plus, if we "throw the baby out with the bath water" each time, we can never narrow down what worked in each lesson and what did not work.  That is what this all boils down to.  Sharpening your lesson planning skills with laser like focus.

I would recommend a few tips:

1. For the first few years of your career be as detailed oriented in your lessons.  At the end of each lesson/period taught AND and the end of the day, take time to reflect on what was successful and what you would do differently.
2. Plan ahead.  Make a unit plan.  Then a monthly plan.  Then a weekly plan.  Then a daily plan.  Start big and then break it down.  Even the tallest mountains will one day be a rolling hill.  It takes time, persistence, and patience to get this right.  Keep plugging away.  It is not easy but as you finish up a few years, you will see your work pay off.
3. Keep assessing.  Assess your students and keep a few responses from lessons to see if you need to make adjustments.  I used to keep one to three assessments from each lesson: a correct response, a somewhat right response, and a different planet response.  I wanted to see where I went right and where I went wrong.
4. If you feel yourself getting comfortable and that you don't need to plan: STOP.  Reassess the situation and challenge yourself in a different way.  One example: If you shoot for 75-80% proficiency on assessments, create a lesson that will have 100% of students on the right track.  Create the challenge.
5. You need to be your toughest critic.  Please do not allow another person to come into your room to tell you things you should already know.  Mentors, administration, and peer observations are great; but, you need to make sure that you have a strong understand of what was and was not successful in your class.

#WMMS CHAT

TOPIC: Lesson Planning

Reminder questions may change and please use #wmmschat in your response. 

We follow Q&A format.

Welcome to #wmmschat, please introduce yourself and state how comfortable you are with planning daily lessons.

Q1) How do you start planning your lessons?  Where do you begin? #wmmschat

Q2) What component of a lesson plan is most important to you?  Why? #wmmschat

Q3) How do you include Ss and their responses in your lesson plan? #wmmschat

Q4) IYO (in your opinion), are lesson plan templates necessary for good instruction? Explain. #wmmschat

Q5) How do you remain flexible to your Ss and their needs during instruction? #wmmschat

Day 21- Designing the Details

I am almost done with the 30 day challenge and hopefully I am starting to make some sense to everyone.  For this string of posts, I have followed a model of lesson planning and I am reaching the last two days of promised posts.  I am hoping that this was about a subtle as a brick through a window.  I developed a plan, set about a framework, and I am now filling in the details.  So four days in a row, soon to be a week, I modeled how to plan out a lesson.

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.

Day 20- Building the Frame

So yesterday and the day prior, my posts were spotty due to poor internet performance.  Today's post shall be much better but hopefully brief.  By better I mean some more resources, by brief I mean short.

As I mentioned yesterday, lesson planning is important.  It allows you as a teacher to create a map of where you want to head with your students.  We can't all just "wing it."  Some teachers can do this a few times over a year and get by; but, if you are really into teaching and learning, it is recommended to be well planned for the kids.

Once you have an idea, how do you put it onto paper.  There are several different models to follow: gradual release, 5-E, lecture and copy, etc.  You know the drill.  Every one has a different model that they prefer to use.  Personally, I don't care what model you use as long as you are writing something down in an understandable format.  Sticky notes could be used, if one places them in a specific order to show how the lesson will flow.  They won't work if you just jot them down and put them on the back of a worksheet.

I have worked at several schools that have asked teachers to use a certain template.  I like that idea.  Being asked to use a template provides a challenge.  Take what you know and show it in a different way so if someone wants to read it they can understand your thinking for the lesson.  I used to grumble, "I am a science teacher and I need to use the 5-E model...blah, blah, blah."  Then I realized that the template I was asked to use could be made into a 5-E model by moving some parts around.  When I asked if I could do that, my principal gave me the go ahead and it worked.  I never looked back.

Planning lessons is important for multiple reasons.  First and foremost, it is fair to the kids that depend on you to give them the knowledge they so yearn for each and every day.  Two: it will help you, the teacher, think things through so when something goes wrong with the lesson you have a way to think through to fix it.  Three: it will keep you the teacher happy.  As you progress from year to year, you will have an encyclopedia of work that you have accumulated and you can easily pull from and change in order to meet your students' needs.  You can then start your own blog and share that information with educators around the globe. :)

For some related articles and resources, I created a Symbaloo webmix.  If you have not tried this tool yet, I recommend you check it out.  It is a great way to organize websites in such a manner that it is easy to access.  It is easy to update and share websites.  We are using it in our school to provide professional development, so why not use it here in the same way.  Think flipping your classroom.

Check it out here:
Lesson Planning Tips and Resources

Thanks for reading. Please feel free to comment.

Day 19- Begin with end in mind

For the second day in a row, I am having difficulty utilizing the internet with my laptop.  It is frustrating.  My other device is currently updating its operating system so I am once again posting from my phone. Again...awesome.  While this is a hiccup at least there is some access. More on that next week.

Today's lesson tip is to begin with the end in mind.  Think about what you want your students to achieve and then work backwards from there.  A teacher can start with the unit assessment, look at state standards, or even create a project.  But in order to get where you want to go it is important to start with a destination.  If not, how will know you got where you wanted.  Mind blown?  Try typing that. ;)

So once you have your destination start planing the best route to get there.  Sometimes the route can be long and have plenty of interesting stops.  Other times the route needs to be short and to the point.  That is the beauty of planing the lesson.  You get to pick the route depending on your students.

Finally, follow the route to reach your destination.  Then start planning for your next adventure.  I am not sure if this is analogy or allegory, but I hope it is easy to understand. Watch your passengers to see if you need to go faster or slower and once you get there... see if they actually came with you and plan form the next stop or figure out short cut to get back to where you need them.

I will find some proof this week. Enjoy your night. BTW: #wmmschat tomorrow

Day 18- Plan the Lesson, Teach the Plan, and then adjust...

As we continue down this road together, I would like to take a moment to thank you for still reading...if you are.  I have repeatedly talked about the purpose of this blog and how I will continue to grow and change this blog.  The next step, as I mentioned, is to dial in on how this blog needs to be run.  The idea behind this blog is not just to cover topics related to education but to also demystify the process of blogging for everyone.  So forgive the rambling at the beginning of most of these posts but I figured explaining the process might in some crazy way help you the reader at some point down the road.

Anyway, I digress.

The focus of this week shall be on lesson planning.  While the twitter chat this week will be about student engagement, what better way to keep the conversation going then by talking about a major factor to that...the lesson plan.

(FYI: Glad I had a plan for this week as my interwebs is throwing fits and I could not get the links posted.  Always have a plan in order to work through any problems.)

Planning a lesson is so much more than opening a guide and jotting down some words in a blue spiral book.  It is more than creating a neat powerpoint or flipchart.  It is bigger than that.  I often look at lesson planning as the most difficult part of the job.  Planning a lesson is taking your thoughts and ideas and putting them onto paper in order to convery those thoughts to a whole bunch of other little people.  It is the idea; the art and science of teaching on paper in a well thought out manner.  Your vision for each day written out.

So this week we will discuss the idea, the concepts, the way to start, the way to end, and most importantly how you like to plan.  One might view it similarly to building a house. :)

Monday- Introduction (Plan the lesson, teach the plan)

Tuesday- Begin with the End in Mind (Using Assessment, guides, and curriculum to plan)

Wednesday- Twitter Chat.  Building the Frame (Types of Lesson Plans)

Thursday- Designing the Details (Filling in Your Template)

Friday- Rearranging your Furniture. (Making adjustment without having to start from scratch.)