How Much Can I Plan Ahead?

Since your summer vacation is winding to a close, let's think about planning for the school year ahead like planning for a vacation. (Hopefully your year will flow sooo smoothly it will feel like one at times...)

When you plan for a vacation you typically need to know the following:

1. Where you're going.
2. How you're going to get there.
   
3. Where you're going to stay.
   
4. What you're going to eat.
   
5. How much the adventure will cost.
   
6. How long the trip will take.
   

The greatest vacation memories rarely reside in the planning phase. And the snapshots you cherish from your trips are usually of the spontaneous unplanned moments that happen along the way. But a plan still helps.

Without a plan you're more likely to run into problems. You might run out of money, fail to find a hotel with vacancy, get lost, or miss the exciting sights you could have seen on your journey.

However, even with a plan, you have to be flexible in anticipation of the unexpected things that might pop up: a flat tire, a detour, finding a spot you like enough to stay an extra day, etc.

If you think about planning for the school year ahead in terms of planning for a vacation you should be in pretty good shape. You need to know the basic outline of your trip - but you keep yourself open to the possible challenges and opportunities that are likely to occur.

When you're planning for your classes, think of each unit as a journey and plan for it in terms of these questions:

1. Where are you going? - What do you want students to know or be able to do by the end of this unit of study?
   
2. How are you going to get there? - What processes will your students be using to learn the material in this unit?
   
3. Where are you going to stay? - Just as each night of a trip needs a roof and a bed, where are the logical breaks in teaching this unit, what piece should you attempt to get through each day?
   
4. What are you going to eat? - Hungry travelers can be ornery travelers. Your students probably don't eat in class but they still need nourishment of another sort. They need to be engaged! What are you going to do to keep them engaged as they move through this unit?
   
5. How much will this adventure cost? - Think ahead about what materials you'll need to teach this unit, perhaps all you need is a novel, but what if you're doing science experiments? Do you have all your supplies? How can you order them?
   
6. How long will the trip take? - Is this a week-long unit? A month-long unit? Longer? Answering questions 1-5 will give you a good idea of what you have to get through and your final departure and arrival dates.

Once you create your plan be gentle with yourself and remember that the learning takes place as much in the journey as it does in the destination. If it ends up taking 4 weeks instead of 3 that probably means you found some interesting detours and kept the students well fed on engagement. If it finishes up a week early that means you hit a highway somewhere along the route and went 80 when you'd anticipated going 60... that's okay! Hopefully you started planning your next journey and can start that one early!

A plan keeps you from spinning your wheels and gives you the confidence to move forward and know where you've been, but it should be allowed to prevent the magical spontaneity that is a mainstay of true Inspired Teaching.

What's an "essential" question?

"Questions that probe for deeper meaning and set the stage for further questioning foster the development of critical thinking skills and higher order capabilities such as problem-solving and understanding complex systems. A good essential question is the principle component of designing inquiry-based learning."
~ Math Star

"Essential Questions develop foundational understandings. They provide the fundamental organizing principles that bound an inquiry and guide the development of meaningful, authentic tasks." ~ Galileo Educational Network

As you craft your long-term-plan for the year ahead it is easy to follow the guides in your book and teach according to a predetermined sequence of topics like: short stories in September, plays in October, non-fiction in November, memoirs in December, etc... and your assessment of whether each section was understood and taught correctly will probably align with end-of-chapter tests that measure vocabulary retention and reading comprehension. But what life skills will your students learn from this process?

Imagine that yours is the last class your students will ever take. Will they learn things from these units of study that prepare them for the world post-school? They could, and they should, but planning for that kind of learning is more complicated than simply following the guide in a text book. This is where essential questions come in.

Think about what you want your students to really take away from what you are teaching and turn that into a question. For example - if you want them to learn that words are a tool for creating social change your question might be: "How can words impact history?" And then, your unit on non-fiction literature should involve stories and articles whose findings have caused major shifts in policy - the content you teach opens students up to myriad answers to the essential question.

Essential questions are not secreted away in your plan book, they're on your bulletin board, on the chalkboard, in your students' notes. They are a public declaration of the fact that it's okay not to know all the answers - but it's essential to learn how to find them. They guide your instruction and they show students that there is a connectivity between things they are learning.

Some schools and teachers develop a single essential question that guides instruction throughout the entire year. Our question above could fit that bill. In a literature class all the texts - stories, poems, plays, etc. - could be analyzed from the perspective of their potential or actual impact on history.

The older your students get, the more aware they become of the connections or lack thereof between what they learn in school and the "real world." At times you may find they even challenge you on the purpose of learning specific subject matter at all. This happens especially often if the content is difficult to learn. Essential questions guide you in making sure there's always a purpose to what you teach and they empower students to become actively engaged in the process of seeking answers rather than passively waiting for them to be spoon-fed.

Being YOU in the Classroom

When faced with a class full of strangers and the fear of losing control - it's easy to put on a mask and pretend to be someone else... but being yourself may be the better option. This is an excerpt from an essay I wrote several years ago after my second year of teaching in rural North Carolina:

When you go into teaching everyone says, “the kids don’t have to like you, they just have to learn from you.” And in the aftermath of horrible conferences we comfort ourselves with the notion that the same must also be said of parents. Still, there are many nights when we secretly lie awake wishing someone out there would say one kind word, or at very least stop being negative. And if we’re honest, we even wish the kids would like us because then this incredibly difficult job wouldn’t seem quite so hard.

In the quest for such things I’ve tried many tactics in my two years. I’ve tried the “so you hate me, fine, I don’t care,” approach, which really only makes kids hate you for real. I’ve tried the “how about a sucker for every time you don’t curse in class,” and that only makes for hyper-active-foul-mouths. I’ve tried the silent, super-sweet, totally patient, really condescending, completely fed-up, and I-can’t-hear-you treatments . . . I do not recommend a one. I’ve even tried the “yes, you’ve finally done it, you made the new-teacher cry,” approach, (well, you don’t really try that one, you sort of get forced into it.) But at the end of the day the most successful strategy I’ve used, is simply being who I am.

So, with brief interruptions from my education-class-alter-ego, I have basically just been me in the classroom. And now I understand why they advise against this method in education classes. When you give your students the real thing every day, you basically dish yourself out 100% on daily basis. It’s exhausting, and leaves you little to work with on a personal level.

But your students like you, they trust you, and because of this they are willing to take the intellectual risks you ask them to take every day. It took me awhile to learn this, to trust myself to be me in the classroom. Ultimately I learned to hold myself to the same standards I had for my students. We cannot become who we are meant to be by pretending to be someone else.

Butterflies in Your Stomach

Summer is here, complete with sunny skies, people-filled parks, afternoon thunderstorms, fireflies, watermelon… and, oh yeah, education classes.

For those of you who will go into the classroom for the first time this fall, your moments of summertime relaxation are undoubtedly punctuated by moments when the butterflies in your stomach remind you of the adventure ahead.

For those of you who will begin your second year as teachers this fall, you’re probably loading up on the sleep you lost but still feeling a little nervous about how the year ahead might be different from the year gone by.

And the classes you’re taking are probably making the butterflies flutter a little bit more. You may be thinking “I have to know all about child development and teaching Biology?” “I have to learn how to set up authentic assessments and set up my classroom?” “I have to come up with questions for my students that scale Bloom’s Taxonomy in addition to finding answers to my own questions about being a teacher?”

It can all be a little overwhelming but the Inspired AQUE blog and Center for Inspired Teaching are here to help. We can make this resource as useful as you want it to be. This week we’d love to hear:

• your questions
• your musings
• your concerns
• your curiosities

We’ll take what you offer to inform the blogs we write in the weeks ahead.

Send us your comments! We’ll post them and respond as quickly as possible. Together we can make this an open and rich dialogue.

Among the many things you feel when you become a teacher – from butterflies to bliss to the blues – we will do our best to always be a resource that keeps you from feeling alone.