Example Planning
I am a very logical and systematic person. Any of my friends or family could give you countless examples as to how that is true. There may not be any example more clear than the way in which I plan my teaching. Obviously, my planning experience consists of exactly one 10-day unit and random lessons here and there. One of my goals during methods was to figure out the best way to plan my units and lessons. Here is what I came up with.
I’m a huge fan of technology and the move toward paperless. My ideal situation would result in zero paper handling and 100% digital document management. However, I have found that the crucial brainstorming and organizing steps of planning lessons is something I can do much better on paper. For example, here are the steps I went through for a generic lesson during my mass media unit:
- Spend time researching the topic and jotting down main ideas on paper.
- On legal pad, write down objectives of lesson (most commonly in the form of questions)
- Brainstorm possible lesson activities on legal pad.
- Look for connections between content and brainstormed activities.
- Go through research and write down rough structure of lecture notes.
- Create rough structure of chronological order of lesson
Why Paper?
What’s the point of using paper during this stage of the planning process? First, paper allows me to brainstorm and structure my thoughts in a much more organic way. I can draw arrows, put words in boxes, and just generally get my thoughts recorded with no worry about formatting. Tied to that, using paper is much quicker than any type of word processing software. When I am first starting to plan a lesson, I need to get my ideas down as quickly as possible without having to think about the process. I need my focus to be on creating connections between content and activities, between my objectives and the information. Paper allows me to focus on what is important with as little interference as possible.
However, There Is a Problem
This process takes forever. FOREVER. A large part of it is that I am obviously brand new at this. The more I get the hang of planning, the quicker it will go in the future. However, it takes anywhere from 2-4 hours for me to research and plan a 43 minute lesson. Most of this time that doesn’t even include the time needed to create any supporting documents needed for the lesson. For now, I’m not going to concern myself too much with how long it takes me to plan and just focus on creating strong lessons. Like anything else, I’m hoping the more I practice the more efficient I will become at it. Whether or not that will include the current stage of using paper remains to be seen. More than likely, paper is here to stay in my planning process.
