Eyes on the Prize

Lesson Plans

There is a problem and it is related to a funny aphorism for stupidity: “Question: What is the definition of stupidity? Answer: Doing the same thing repeatedly, expecting a different outcome.” I’ve been struggling with lesson plans since switching to DI as the dominant model for my classroom. The district push is to go deeper into what we teach instead of flying over the surface in the name of “covering” the curriculum. Well, the good news of creating a student-centered classroom with a differentiated instruction model is that you have to slow down.

When you apply this principle to lesson planning, the paradigm of day to day lesson plans goes out the window. I have been experiencing that and thinking I was doing something wrong because I am not hitting my objectives—not even closely.  Just as middle school teachers should not fight the highly social nature of their students when trying to teach them, and they should instead embrace the energy and redirect it towards learning, so should a teacher who tries to differentiate his lessons embrace the slower pace of his classroom and use it to his advantage. For that reason, my lessons are going to look differently. Instead of daily goals, it makes sense to think about lessons in terms of clusters of days: weeks, cycles, triads and double dates.

When I plan that way, I allow learning to happen authentically. For example, I was able to hit all my objectives for today with my first period class, but the other three morning classes either did not get past sharing their work on fragments from Friday, or  they only finished enough to look at today’s writing reflection question.

Normally, I would be alarmed, but since I am focused on learning and not schedules I was able to look at what happened. Friday’s fragment exercise was formative assessment of the concept. In my period 2, 3, and 4 classes, students showed me that they forgot about linking verbs. This necessitated an “on-the-fly” mini lesson to reinforce that fuzzy concept. Then we applied it to our sentences, when many students took phrase fragments and made even more fragmented sentences by just adding more phrases or clauses, without making sure that the sentences had subjects, or that they demonstrated a complete thought. This caused another mini lesson on the fly. Do you see the time ticking away? If you’re a teacher--- you know this is a doomed lesson when it comes to adhering to schedule, but if you are focused on student learning you see that you responded to teachable moments to scaffold missed learning.

So, tomorrow all my classes will get to the writing prompt and tomorrow I should get to sitting down with at least one group to review their last prompt with them if the formative assessment I am writing up is completed quickly. When I expressed concern that students were only 75% proficient at turning phrase and clause fragments into sentences, and that my benchmark for mastery was 90%, a student made a bet I am following through upon tomorrow. She said most students, if individually tested, would score better than that. So I’m writing up another formative assessment now to test her theory. That’s a bet worth taking, especially when a student expresses that level of confidence in her peers.

Is it a big deal that the marking period ends Friday and we’re not even ready to take the end of the novel test yet? If I am to be ruled by the calendar—yes, be afraid, lose sleep tonight worrying about how to squeeze it in this week. If I am ruled by making sure the students actually learned the skills I am teaching--- no, we can get there by next week.

Paradigms shift and then there is chaos and cognitive dissonance. The old folks used to encouragingly admonish the youth of the next generation (I know it sounds like an oxymoron or at least a paradoxical phrase) “Keep your eyes on the prize.” My prize= real student achievement that can be measured with empirical data. Everything else is noise.

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.