I used to plan to the minute, but now I don’t.
Lesson planning is an integral part of teaching, but a strong plan does not always translate into a strong lesson. It’s taken me a long time to embrace that fact. Over the last 10 years of my 17 year career as an educator, my focus on planning down to the minute has evolved into a much lighter structure. No aspect of my past planning or instruction reveals this transition more than my evolving relationship with the glowing smartboard in my room and the interactive SMARTNotebook software that comes with it.
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Planning for the screen
My first year in the classroom, 17 years ago, I taught in the suburbs of Connecticut and I used a chalkboard. I cleaned erasers and smudged chalk on myself. After my first year, I was upgraded to a whiteboard and those expo markers that I can still kind of smell.
But, after my fifth year of teaching, I moved to New York City and I was hired by a new charter school. When I toured through the renovated building in West Harlem, every room had one! A smartboard! A bright flashy smartboard! It was about to revolutionize my instruction for the next three years and I was convinced my use of the SMARTboard would make me a more capable and effective teacher.
I eagerly attended training on how to use my new wonder device and the SMARTNotebook software. There were timers and screen shades and animated dice and games and graph paper and little pens. Oh, I loved it all. At the moment, I thought this was the key to student engagement. This tool was the educational breakthrough I never thought I’d be able to reach, and oh did I reach it.
Loaded with my trusty lesson plan templates, submitted for review every two weeks (as per the school rules), and my new smartboard skills, I was ready to thoroughly teach my students.
I can remember the structure so clearly. Each lesson included a short and applicable Do Now, a quick mini-lesson followed by a variety of independent work approaches that I rotated through each unit. This “you do” (Pearson & Gallagher, 1983) part of each lesson included well-known approaches such as: independent work time in notebooks, think-pair-share with a partner, peer-editing during writing, station work, read-pause-sketch… the list went on. Each strategy had a bright, tidy slide saved to my SMARTNotebook gallery. A few quick drag and clicks and my lesson was complete. I had developed a quick equation for designing lessons and plowed my way through my weekly planning. I felt confident and determined. The work was hard, but I had a clear focus. I received positive feedback from my administration. I thought that was the goal.
But, for the next few years, the smartboard ran the class. Not me. I watched the timers, not the kids. I sometimes advanced to the next slide, surprised at what was next. I was structured, prepared and using standards to drive my instruction. Yet, I was also disconnected from my class. I was planning with student objectives in mind, but not with actual student feedback. I was using current research to design my lessons, but I forgot to listen to my class, adjust on the fly, revise and reevaluate.
Let’s talk it out: The mixed messages that teachers receive
After working in NYC for five years, I moved back to the suburbs and continued to dazzle my colleagues with my use of technology. “‘Wow’, the tech integrator at one school said, ‘I didn’t know you used SMARTNotebook. I thought only math teachers used that’”. At first, I was borderline smug and proud of my work. I knew that I was a strong planner, I just neglected the fact that those plans often limited my response to my students in the classroom.
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Over the last two years, I’ve continued to reflect on why my smartboard obsession and precise lesson plans became such a dominant focus of my classroom and why I decided to change it.
Throughout most of my career, I’ve taught in a world where department chairs and districts have the option to purchase pre-packaged units, scripted lesson plans and templates for their staff. I’m teaching during a time when standardized tests have set the learning pace and objectives for each grade and the education companies at the helm market their own test-rooted curriculum to ambitious schools. I have listened during professional development sessions to department heads and principals extol different program packages and share units, complete with daily lesson plans, with staff as an option to best reach their students. In this environment, my own intense concentration on planning seemed justified. If companies were selling binders of units and scripted lesson plans, I should work on developing my planning to meet the expectations of Common Core and my school’s teacher evaluation process. Planning must be the key to teaching.
The use of my Smartboard can serve as a metaphor for some of the other ways that I have, over the years, relinquished control in my classroom. The onus on plans and technology, I realized was holding my instruction back. From here, it seems like a simple realization, but it took me years to find my balance.
Planning for the kids
In the last few years, I’ve continued to relinquish control of the classroom, but instead of the SMARTboard or my perfectly formatted plans, I refocused on my students. This transition began when I started to confer with small groups of students. The conferring process (add a few researchers), threw me at first. I loved talking to my students, but when conferring, I had to let the majority of my class work independently. I wasn’t sure if that could work. After a year of false starts, conferring took off in my classroom and the process of meeting with small groups of students on a regular basis exposed the varied needs of my students. I found that during each conferring session, there was never enough time to discuss all of the ideas my students had. I was no longer ready to march on to the next day’s lesson. We had to sit together more, pause, reread and reflect.
The conferring process forced me to listen not to my own expectations or to the standards placed on my grade-level, but earnestly to people who spent time in my class.
We’ve all heard, at some point or another, that we “teach students” and not curriculum, but in practice, it’s harder than it sounds. It was for me. So, today, I plan day to day, sometimes changing my plan in the middle of the day or even in the middle of a class period. I adjust my lessons based on student interaction, on confused expressions, on requests for more (or less) time. A balance I could achieve. When I left the intense planning cycle behind me, I thought I would flounder, but that would come later.
Planning for #teachingduringCOVID19
During my tumultuous elearning experience, filled with new energy, but no footing, I struggled. Teaching during COVID 19 and the elearning process, threatened to throw me off the student-centered tracks I had worked so hard to establish.
Colleagues suggested lists of resources. I used most of them. The synchronous, the asynchronous. The flashy, the simple. The clear, the confusing. My team of 8th grade Language Arts teachers was amazing.We shared planning responsibilities, some of my peers planning weeks in advance and easily posting to our shared GoogleClassroom.
But, the dialogue I now rely on is stifled. I’m trying small discussion groups through GoogleSlides to discuss student choice reading. My students and I share work on Jamboard, Padlet and Zoom. But, I’m not getting everything I got in the classroom and I’m definitely not getting everyone. Many students have opted out of discussion, an option that is not present in the live classroom. I’ve been including weekly feedback options where my students share their thoughts about the structures I chose throughout the week through GoogleForms, but the feedback is brief.
A few years ago, I would have pushed through with my calendar and standards. My lessons would be posted weeks in advance. I would have felt prepared and productive.
Today I feel lost, but not discouraged.
Planning for continued growth
It is in this elearning moment that I realize how much my approach has changed over time. It is no longer easy to live only in the planning, I need my students. Teaching is a give and take. A conversation and, in the best moments, a relationship. Today, from behind my laptop, my instruction feels limited when five years ago, I would have felt empowered. Yet, I don’t wish to return to planning for the screen. Lesson planning is a skill, but teaching is a craft. We may get stuck or distracted from time to time. but teachers never stay in one place for long.
MC Walker 