A Flaw in the Plan
WEEK 1
Georgia tried to look positive. “So, how do you think your lessons have been going so far?”
Her headache heightened as she listened to his justification of the train wreck. The glaring problem of disorganized and underdeveloped lesson plans didn’t come up.
“I think the top thing we can be focusing on right now is your lesson planning.” She opened his logbook to the lesson plan that day and pointed to the most obvious flaw: Do practice problems on the board.
“Did you decide beforehand which practice problems you were going to do?”
“Well, I know the content, so it’s easy to come up with on the spot.
It might’ve been easy, Georgia thought, but it removed the opportunity for strategic chunking and scaffolding of concepts. “Next time, I’d like you to try fleshing out your lesson plan a bit. Think about what you learned in your Curriculum and Instruction class.”
During a series of observations, Georgia struggles to get her student teacher, Carlos, to understand the significance of lesson planning.
WEEK 2
The night before their next observation, Georgia received a lesson plan from Carlos—a rambling monologue with practice problems and explanations, and no structure to speak of. The lesson the following day went as poorly as could be expected.
Georgia took an opportunity to chat with the classroom teacher, Ms. Vlad, while Carlos assisted the crowd of confused students. “He’s been showing you his lesson plans before each lesson?”
“Of course,” Ms. Vlad said. “He’s been very good about getting them finished on time. And he’s trying so hard.”
“I think if we coached him in planning his lessons more effectively—”
“He just needs to get a better sense of what confuses students. I mean, teaching is different in practice. The lesson plans I write are skeletons compared to what the university expects him to do.”
The debrief with Carlos didn’t go much better.
As Georgia left the school, she heard him venting to Ms. Vlad. “All she ever does it look at my lesson plans and harp on them! She’s impossible to please!”
She pulled out of the parking lot, frowning over the steering wheel. Was she just harping on his lesson plans? “Yes, I am,” she muttered to herself. “Because they are so flawed that they affect his teaching.” Perhaps her 20 years as a teacher, five years as a UC, and two years as a university professor had given her a pretty good idea of what to harp on.
She released a sharp breath and willfully loosened her tight grip on the steering wheel.
She needed to make him see that lesson planning [was just] a way to envision the lesson…a way to enhance [his ability] to chunk instruction in a way that [would] work with [his] students. It wasn’t a pointless assignment she was making him do because the university said so.
Georgia
University Consultant
Carlos
Grade 8
Haridon Fine Arts School
Major : Social Studies Ed
UC : Georgia
WEEK 3
Georgia didn’t even look at the lesson plan. She got out a blank piece of paper and a pen. Then she watched.
During debrief, she asked, “What skills did you teach the students today?”
“Dividing fractions.”
“Can you be more specific? Break it down for me.”
He couldn’t. Which was the point.
Georgia showed him her piece of paper. “This is the question you modelled on the board. You used it to show that when you divide fractions, you multiply by the reciprocal. That’s one skill.”
“Yes. Mrs. Vlad told me to teach dividing fractions today…”
“Okay, but would you agree that to do this, students need to know how to multiply fractions and how to find the reciprocal of a fraction? That’s three different skills so far.” She pointed these out on her piece of paper. “You also showed the trick of cancelling factors to reduce before multiplying, which assumes that students know how to reduce fractions. We’re up to five skills now.”
“But most of those are review,” Carlos said. “Multiplying fractions. Reciprocals. Reducing. We taught those already.”
“I agree,” Georgia said. “So perhaps you could’ve taken a few minutes at the beginning of class to activate these concepts by doing a couple review questions. That way you know that students understand before introducing the new concepts. What questions would you have used?”
Carlos suggested a few, and Georgia recorded them and gave them a heading: Review Background Skills.
“Good. And what was the new skill that you taught today?”
“Division of fractions.”
“Does division always include reducing fractions?”
“Not necessarily.”
“Then let’s teach it in its simplest form, where it isn’t necessary to reduce the answer. Can you come up with some example questions for that?” Georgia recorded them in a new section: Teach New Skill.
“Now what’s left?”
Carlos leaned forward. “Reducing the factors. But we should probably remind them about how to reduce the answer before introducing the shortcut.”
Georgia wanted to cheer. Finally!
“Excellent,” she said firmly. “And maybe your class would be comfortable enough with the content to learn the shortcut in the same day, but maybe they need another day of practice first and that’s okay.” She wrote Extension/If Time on the page, and they added another practice problem.
“Now, what if this had been your lesson plan?” Georgia asked. “This scrap of paper with practice problems from off the top of your head, but ordered strategically…Do you think your lesson today would’ve gone differently?”