Stop Learning One Does Not

Well… Monday didn’t quite go as I originally planned. I came up with so many things to make the lesson interesting all of which I never got to. I’ve taught before but something about being timed threw me off my game. This ended up being one of my worst teaching performances. Have you ever practiced for something and your keep repeating to yourself “whatever you do don’t…” and you practice so you won’t do whatever you said you weren’t gonna do but as soon as you go to do it for real you do it anyways. That’s exactly what happened to me on Monday. I had made the lesson out to be discussion based teaching which worked out a little bit until half way through. About half way through you look at the clock and realize that, according to your original plan, you’re way behind and you don’t do it on purpose but you switch to autopilot mode. You get so consumed with covering everything in the lesson plan that you don’t stop to make sure the students understand any of what you’re saying. There’s a saying “everyone has a plan until they get hit” well I guess to an extent that can be applied to teaching as well. I had a plan until I got in front of the class and all my plans went out the window. There is something I learned from all of this though: it’s not the end of the world if you don’t finish your lesson plan, it’s more important that the students understand the material.

            Today I learned something interesting, well interesting to me anyways, about planning a class lesson. I’ve never wanted to cover just the basics of American history; skimming over it to make sure I cover all U.S. history at the expense of going more in-depth with my students. I learned about something called a flipped classroom where part of the learning happens outside of the classroom. Where you can post videos about the lesson for the next day online, the lesson on the video covers the next day’s lesson broadly. This allows for the teacher to go more in-depth over the topics covered in the video. This allows the class to spend more time in discussion and more importantly make sure the student’s understand. A high school in Michigan was in the 5% worst schools in the state but when they switched it over to a flipped classroom it became one of the best in the state. It allows teachers more time to help students understand the material and to have discussion, in class activities, or time to do homework with the teacher there for help.