For this blog, I have interviewed two Spanish teachers; one teaches at Union High School and the other teaches at Grand Valley State University. I thought it would be interesting to see the differences in planning styles based on the very different schools, and how I believe I will use these techniques in the future.
With Union High School being somewhat chaotic in the classroom, planning is essential, but often times does not go as planned. The teacher at Union High School, Ms. C, really tries to plan a week in advance for all of the lessons. She says that many times, however, she will only plan one to two days in advance because the students do not get to everything that she had originally planned. She decides what to do based on the curriculum, textbook material, weekly objectives she has made, and most importantly, student abilities. She writes down all of her objectives, and checks them regularly to make sure that her students have clear objectives every day. Ms. C has a lesson plan notebook that she uses to quickly plan out what she is going to do on a given day. She also uses the lesson planning notebook for ideas and organization. At Union, however, they do not need to submit lesson plans, so she does not create anything formal. She uses the lesson plans she made as notes for herself during the class. The objectives are on the board not just for the students, but also for the teacher. She constantly checks her notes throughout class and believes this is a good skill to model for her students. After classes, she likes to reflect on what she did that day and journal.
The atmosphere at Grand Valley is very different than at Union because the students genuinely want to learn. For Mrs. G's classes, she usually prepares a semester or summer ahead of time, and then prepares specific assignments that she would like to do based on the type of class. For other courses, however, she already has a general sense of what she's doing, so she will just plan a few days ahead of time. For literature classes, she tries to divide the readings up so students have enough time to finish the material, and then in class students discuss what they had difficulties with in the readings. Mrs. G does not write down her objectives, but she keeps them in mind throughout her lessons. She doesn't have notes exactly, but she does have an outline of what she is going to do for each class. To stay organized, she uses powerpoints and also uses notes that she has already collected from the in-class texts. She always plans her own lessons unlike Ms. C, and doesn't really like to use teacher manuals. At the university level, the administration is less strict with the lesson planning, and there is much more freedom academically. In addition to the powerpoints, Mrs. G also uses index cards to take notes on the texts. During the lesson, though, she does not look at the notes with much frequency aside from the notes in her textbook or on the powerpoints. After the lesson, this teacher does not reflect so much on paper as she does mentally. She usually keeps all of her notes in a folder, and then just updates them as needed for the next classes she will teach.
Overall, I expected a lot more planning from both teachers. We always talk about how important it is to have a concise plan ready for the students, but with the chaotic life of a teacher, it is not always that easy to achieve a beautiful plan for every class. I have always been more for "winging it" in academics, and I feel that I may do the same during classes. At first, my planning will have to be day-by-day, but as the years go on, I can build off of my already planned material to make it better. I believe that the students are an important part of planning, and every class cannot be the same, so I will definitely take that into account when teaching in the future. I think that it is crucial to at least have some sort of notes ready for the class in case of a difficult student question or a misinterpretation of the material. I also like how Ms. C reflects after each day, that way she can go back and see how the lesson went and what things she needs to change. As I said before, I love to teach on the fly and build upon student interests, which may just completely destroy my original plan. However, I think that this is a good technique for getting students interested in learning.
Hey Brad!
ReplyDeleteGood post about lesson planning and it was interesting to hear what both a Grand Valley Professor and a High School teacher had to say about it. I had a similar experience when I interviewed another GV professor, and my CT. When I interviewed the GV professor, he gave me similar responses to what you received; typically he plans a semester ahead of time, but because of his experience he already has a general layout of how the course will run. In addition to that, he told me it depends a lot on the students as well, as he sometimes finds he must adjust his lesson plans to fit student needs. He also talked to me about the backward design theory, and told me that while in theory, it would be great to use for every single lesson, in reality it cannot always be done, so I would be interested to hear what your professor would have to say in regards to that.
I think what we both have in common is that that idea of “winging it.” I know for example just last week, I had an entire lesson plan typed up for the hour and ready to go, but once things actually got under way, I had to eliminate different parts of it, and add others to fit the student’s needs. During I can see myself writing weekly lesson plans and adhering to those as best as I can, but as I grow more experienced, I think I will have more of an understanding of how to run things, and won’t always have to rely to going back to the plans. I really liked Ms. C’s idea of reflecting and journaling each day, I think that would be a useful tool to find out what exactly in lessons works, and what doesn’t.
Hola Bradford,
ReplyDeleteI'm glad you interviewed both a High School teacher and a college professor. As I keep reading all of our teacher interviews about lesson plans, I read more and more about how teachers don't write formal lessons plans. From the responses for Ms. C and Mrs. G, it seems as the years go by, they stop relying on lessons plans and start relying more on experience with the content. Going through this semester of student teaching has made me really change my view on lesson planning. After reading your reports from your interview, and also from my own, I think it's safe to say that most teachers are not actually writing formal lesson plans. Why do you think that is? I'm really curious as to what the effectiveness of the teacher would be like if they truly sat down and wrote, specific and measurable objectives and detailed lesson plans for every class would be? I know that there are a lot of reasons why it is easy to say that we should sit back and "wing it", but I think we should challenge ourselves to go above and beyond how "most" foreign language teachers are approaching lesson planning. I think we have been taught at Grand Valley to value good, thought out, and effective lesson planning that enables us to become effective foreign language teachers. Having been told by veteran teachers, our first years will be our toughest, but I believe that if we work hard, and try to plan, asses, reflect and adapt our lesson plans as best as we can, we will learn the art of great lesson planning. This way, by the time we become experienced teachers, we don't have to "wing it", we can write an effective lesson plan within a reasonable amount of time because we've been practicing. I have been leading the Spanish three class that I'm teacher assisting in right now, just administering the lessons and activities of my CT and I have yet to see any written lesson plan or objectives! This has resulted in a lot of confusion for the students and I both, my CT has many years experience as a FL teacher, but I still believe that lesson plans are your road maps to learning, without them you don't know where to go.
I agree that as teachers, we will have a lot of work to do and not a lot of time to do it, and there will be times where the lesson will completely change and have to go into another direction based on our students needs, but I feel that if we put our effort into creating and providing quality lesson plans, then our students will put more effort into engaging in our classrooms.