Preparedness is Key

              With the quick passing of fall break, I have come to fully recognize how ridiculously difficult my schedule is. I feel as if I come to this blog each Wednesday wanting to complain about how much harder that particular week has been than the last. Each week has provided its fair share of late nights in the library, coffee reliance and growing to-do lists. I went into the break with the mindset that regardless of how long that list had gotten, I was going to get at least seven hours of sleep each night. While that goal was met with flying colors, I spent the majority of my waking hours doing assigned readings, math problems and stressing over all that I wouldn’t be able to start until I got back to school today. I wish I could say that this stress could be reduced by prioritizing and working ahead. Sadly, being a student athlete and a double major, I am doing all that I can to finish the work load on time.

              Today’s class began with discussion on the importance of our blog posts and maintaining them in a timely fashion. On the board was the entire class’s blog tracker with spots highlighted from where something was incomplete or missing. At this point, I realized that although I had completed last week’s blog a few hours before the deadline, I had forgotten to attach the link to the tracker. While not adding the link is not as big of a deal as not doing it altogether, seeing the yellow block in my section of the spreadsheet sent me into panic mode. By this point, I had also already worried myself to death over my “four” year plan and many probability theory assignments. This incident sent me over the edge as I lost sight of the bigger picture and went into a small downward spiral.

              However, this led into a much greater conversation about how we as teachers must always be on top of our game. Our principals and supervisors are going to expect lots from us. Although they may be empathetic, excuses of how tough our life currently is aren’t going to cut it. Even after long, hard weeks, we will be expected to continue our high performance at all times and respond appropriately. This preparedness also crosses over into the classroom and how we must perform in front of our students.

We spent the majority of the class period talking about how to be well rounded in our lesson planning. While we are already familiar with the form of the 6-point lesson plan and have been working to apply it to our content areas, today’s discussion focused on the importance of assessment within the plan. The class quickly identified that diagnostic testing should be done first, formative assessment within the lesson and summative assessment at the end. Dr. Parker and Dr. Clark introduced the idea that lesson planning should not be completed from top to bottom, straight through the six steps. Instead, planning assessment locations should be done prior to structuring the last five points.

When I first heard this, it threw me completely through a loop. As I initially wrote my lesson on function transformations, I attacked it head on with the mindset that I needed to do it straight through. For this reason, I found myself struggling to find different ways to assess what the students were learning without drilling them with the same kinds of problems over and over. Keeping Dr. Clark and Dr. Parker’s method in mind, I can now see how planning what they must know for their summative assessment and breaking that down into different sections for formative assessment would have aided my overall planning process. If you plan spots for assessment of the different parts of a concept, it will make it much easier to prepare where the teacher needs to do some prompting as well as what method of assessment would best fit the content. Having the end result in mind is highly influential to preparing the right questions to ask when you are in front of the class.

As Stephanie reflected on today’s activity, being in front of a classroom can lead to feeling as if the students are in charge of the teacher rather than vice versa. Especially in the high school setting, this can be extremely dangerous. If at any point we show that we are not ready to handle a situation at hand, high schoolers will sense this and may manipulate the entire setting to where none of the lesson goes as planned. This is where a teacher’s ability to fulfill NCTCS Standard I becomes crucial. Not only must the teacher create activities throughout their lesson to keep the students engaged and facilitate learning, but they must also have back-up plans ready for when the class period does not follow the cookie cutter structure of their 6-point lesson plan. They must demonstrate both their knowledge of the content as well as how to approach it from various angles.