Thoughts on Lesson Planning

I find that my introduction to writing lesson plans in EHS 600 will be very useful to me. I am going to use them a lot during my first year of teaching because as a new teacher, I will be nervous and will tend to be disorganized and distracted in front of all my students. I would like to get better at writing lesson plans, especially when it comes to accommodations and assessment. I have struggled to get my objectives, learning activities and assessment to coordinate with one another. I hope that gets better with experience. I plan on making a lesson plan for four of every five days per week in my first year of teaching even if it isn't required. I feel that I can plan for four and not five because I am certain that there will be days where we won't cover as much material as we should have and we fall behind, like most classroom teachers always do.

I also feel that my introduction to the Bloom's Taxonomy Verbs has made writing objectives far easier for me. I feel like I can look at the list of verbs and find a much more specific, measurable way to focus my instruction. One thing I am still finding very difficult is to estimate how long the learning activities will last. I am caught between scheduling far too much than the students can get through in one day, so the class falls behind, or the kids are able to blow through my activities and then have nothing to do. I need practice to make my time estimates accurate, but until then, I would rather not get through everything on a rich list of activities than to have my students waste valuable learning time in class because they have “nothing to do.” These are things I will focus my attention on improving in the future.

June 2011 Teaching Philosophy

The new vision for schools is to better prepare the students for a changing world. The schools have not changed much since the days when they were designed for white males. But with globalization, environmental, financial, and political problems, the pressure is put on schools to adapt in order to produce American citizens who can solve these problems.

Students need an effective and efficient teacher to give them the tools they need. To be effective and efficient, the teacher needs to be prepared yet flexible. It is my philosophy that good teaching requires a constant cycle of self-evaluation followed by actively seeking solutions. Good teachers constantly ask themselves, “How am I doing? Is this working?” and can adjust when their current strategy doesn't work. It is my philosophy that a teacher needs to build an arsenal of strategies that deliver content so that every child in the room has the chance to learn in the style in which they are most comfortable. When things aren't working, it is time to try a new teaching strategy. Instead of working against the skittish attention spans of kids (and adults!) of today, work with them. When kids won't stop talking to each other in class, perhaps it is time to have them work on that project in groups. After all, humans are social animals, and they might even come up with more innovative ideas that way. When they won't put their tech-y devices down, have them “google” the day's focus of the lesson in a Webquest.

Sure, these things are easier said than done. New teachers are the only professionals who are expected to perform on their first day the same duties that an experienced teacher performs. In the business world, people are trained extensively and gradually work up to the responsibilities that the senior level employees have. An electrician or plumber is an apprentice first. A teacher, however, needs to learn his duties and perform them at the same time. The job of a teacher is difficult and there is nothing a single college or university class can do to prepare us completely for our first year of teaching. But as teachers, we need to take the initiative to educate ourselves and seek ways to improve the delivery of our content to better suit our students.

It is my philosophy that teachers must be able to improve and change to adapt to our students. When a teacher finds that he or she doesn't have an alternative strategy to try in order to reach a particular student, it is his or her job to be able to adapt the classroom to the students and the surrounding world. In order to successfully prepare our students for a changing world, mustn't we teachers must learn how to adapt, too?