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.
