(Knowing my students) + (Analysis/choice of appropriate delivery and frameworks) + (lesson planning) = (We are on the road to success)

The lesson planning we are doing is both fun and challenging at the same time. The lesson planning is allowing me to practice, to make mistakes, and to learn from my mistakes before I am working directly with students utilizing my own lesson plans. I’ve made more mistakes in this process than I initially expected. I was unclear on an overarching concept from class, which negatively affected my lessons, and now I must go back and tweak some things in a lesson to ensure that I am on the right path. I am not looking at this as a problem. Rather, it is an opportunity to get this right and to become the best teacher that I can be. I am being reflective here and admitting that I have been somewhat faulty in my process – not the best moment for me but a necessary one.

On the upside, I love the process involved in creating a lesson plan. I am learning backward design, which initially felt awkward to me; however, it is growing on me. It makes perfect sense to me to utilize backward design. I just need to put it into practice – a lot – in order to become comfortable with it. I want to get to the point where a backward designed lesson plan feels and fits like a glove.

         I like that we are learning about the different methods of instruction; thus far, we have studied lecture and discussion formats. Of course, there are merits to both methods, depending upon the students, the material, and the goals for the class. I am trying to get my arms around the different frameworks discussed in Beach’s text, “Teaching to Exceed the English Language Arts Common Core State Standards.” As a student, I have experienced all of the frameworks Beach discusses, and I can see how different frameworks will work for different, overarching goals and groups of students. I have not, however, experienced all of the frameworks from a teacher’s vantage point.

I am currently observing in a public high school wherein the ninth graders are experiencing a skills framework. These freshmen are learning how to recognize main ideas, how to annotate, and how to determine meaning via context clues. Despite the school’s obvious intent to engage these students with texts which should be meaningful to them, the students appear to be bored and only a handful are truly engaged in the material, the work, and the processes. I wondered if a literacy practices framework might work for this particular class? (My question must be accompanied by the caveat that I am fully aware of my limitations of knowledge about this particular class in my role as observer, not the class teacher.) Nevertheless, Beach states a literacy practices framework “…focuses on how students are writing or using texts to engage in social practices” (Beach 79). I wondered if the ways in which the students engage in texts are mixed up, the how, that some interest might be brought back into the classroom? Yet Beach also quotes a seasoned teacher who states, “How do I decide what to teach? It depends entirely on who my students are” (Beach 79). It is quite possible that if I posed these questions to the teacher, she would tell me that a literacy practices framework would not work for this particular class for a number of reasons. I do, in fact, strongly believe this would be her response.

So what is my takeaway from all of this?

(Knowing my students) + (Analysis/choice of appropriate delivery and frameworks) + (lesson planning) =  (We are on the road to success). Much analysis goes into proper lesson planning. I must, first and foremost, know my students and know what they are capable of before I can consider which frameworks to utilize and which types of lesson delivery are most appropriate for them. To use my high school freshmen as an example, I may be required to utilize a skills based framework now, in order to teach the basic skills required to develop higher order skills, which could possibly be utilized next year in a literacy practices framework. I don’t think a straight lecture or a straight discussion format would be useful for these students; however, possibly a combination of both formats would be fruitful. Note my equation equals “on the road to success” rather than “success.” I am acutely aware that there is still so much that I do not know or have not mastered yet, thus the recognition that I still have quite a ways to go on this road of my professional development.