The Secret Of Planning

Having started teaching full-time last Tuesday, I found this chapter extremely refreshing and helpful. I am always over-planning; however, I sometimes doubt my effectiveness of my learning objectives and procedures. The first thing that stuck out to me was that teachers should center the entire plan around the objective(s) first. This is something I need to work on. I always have many ideas of what I want to do with my lesson, but I don't always focus first on the objectives. I think if I did this more consciously before writing out my lessons, my students would reach the objectives even more successfully.

Another aspect from the chapter I know I could improve on is the wrap-up of my lessons. Instead of just reminding the students what the homework for the night is, it would be more beneficial for the students to show or tell me what they learned that day from the lesson.

The chapter also provided me with a great way to overplan my lessons. The author suggested having an additional activity that challenged students more than the activity prior. I am teaching a novel in my classes, so we do a lot of in-class reading, both out loud and silently. One way I could create a more challenging activity if some students finish early is to have them go back and circle and write down vocabulary they may be unfamiliar with. They could then try and guess what the word is based on the context and look up the words in a dictionary.

Most importantly, the chapter helped me develop a way to plan my lessons for the 90 minute classes I teach. I am having trouble planning for such a long class period. The book suggested breaking up everything into five minute increments. This makes sense to me because I can predict what would take five minutes more easily than I could predict what would last twenty or thirty minutes. I believe this will help me tremendously when planning my lessons!