Frustration and Lesson Planning: How Great Ideas are Born

Lesson planning is a fickle beast. Sometimes brilliant lessons fall into your lap, equipped with modifications and standards, and sometimes it seems like you couldn’t write a lesson if they paid you (which, for now, they still are not).  The practice in itself is actually quite enjoyable, at times, since we begin to set into motion the massive amounts of theory we have been studying over the last few years. But without the context of having our own classroom, students, school resources, or guiding curricula, this task has proven tedious and stressful for me. In contrast, for our ED 330 observations, we have to write a detailed and well-articulated lesson plan that we will actually be teaching, in the coming weeks, to a class full of students we are becoming increasingly familiar with. This context and connection allows us as teachers to understand the needs of our students, find out their interests, strengths, and weaknesses, and cater our teaching around a set of conceptions. Whereas in this exercise, we are teaching a class that is not ours, rather is filled with teachers, not students (well technically, both) who are far more advanced academically (especially in English) than their high school counterparts. This coupled with the fact that the text we are working with is different for every person, meaning none of us have read one another’s play (at least, not for this class). I felt frustrated in lesson planning since these are the types of details that give me my inspiration; I can more easily develop a lesson when I already have a great deal of information about my audience.

Nonetheless, I have learned a great deal from these exercises. I understand the importance of taking a step away from planning to let your mind switch gears. I have found myself getting agitated that I was struggling so hard to come up with good topics despite the fact I am confident in myself and have thoroughly reviewed the material. I had to force myself to go do something, anything, to take my mind off the corner I had backed my thinking into. This allowed me to come back to the planning later with a fresh perspective, which more times than not, led to an idea had not considered before that was much stronger than what I had.

I have also learned the importance of having the strategies and activities, that both Beach and Smagorinsky bring up, in our back pocket, ready to be used in a variety of contexts. Sometimes just seeing the idea in our book will spark an idea or strategy for teaching something that we struggled to come up with on our own. (I understand I keep using “we” here, by which I mean me, but speaking for teachers in general; the royal we, if you will). The ideas, strategies and concepts that I have learned and continue learning about will be things that I rely on when I become a full-time classroom teacher, in order to keep my focus on the student’s learning through a variety of engaging methods.