Effective teachers are clear, organized, warm.
In my Ed. Psych. notes from Spring of 2012, this is written several times. I’m beginning to see that if I want to be clear, organized, and warm, I need to stop thinking about lesson planning, teaching, and learning as a linear process. Understanding by Design encourages us to to think about acceptable evidence of learning, and make objectives from there. This week our conversations about questions made me think about answers. Designing questions needs to happen around the kind of answers I want. As Dr.Horwitz pretty explicitly said, designing questions also needs to happen divorced from the linear presentation of Bloom’s Taxonomy. There is a time and a place for every level of question, and I don’t have to start the day with knowledge level questions and work my way up to the evaluation ones.
Laura and I did some lesson planning together on Tuesday afternoon to plan for a lesson we taught on Wednesday (stay tuned for that blog post!). I found myself starting off with knowledge and recall level questions, saving the evaluation question for later. But then we caught ourselves! We revamped our plan, and there was an evaluation question in the prompt we used for the hook.
As I’m writing this, I realize that the answer we were looking for with all our questions was really well aligned with our objectives and our assessment, which was an exit ticket. So, one: yay! But two: questions, answers, objectives and assessments should all be linked, and I don’t think I’ve ever really thought about that before. They all need to be well connected to best support student learning. Something to keep in mind if I’m going to be that clear, organized, warm teacher I want to be!
Hi Colleen,
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed your blog post for this week because you finally put a name to what I was seeing! I noticed this first with Kim, Bob, and Buddy and then later when we were lesson planning. We were always jumping back and forth between the parts of the lesson plan. We would create a question, go back and check to make sure it lined up with our objective and learning target for the lesson, then go check it against the previous section. It wasn’t just a fill the paperwork out from top to bottom and then you’re done! type of thing. Non-linear thinking is exactly what it is! You have to check and recheck all the parts and you’re jumping around the papers making sure it all lines up and in the end you feel like you have been all over the place but in reality, you have made a great lesson.
Colleen, I loved reading your blog because it was like I could see the lightbulb go off. Thanks for sharing. I tend to get caught up in linear thinking myself. I definitely follow the lesson plans top to bottom and often find myself frustrated. Why didn't I realize this when we talked about the concept of backwards design? I'm so used to there being a structured method and when there isn't, I make one. Many times as a teacher we are required to step out of the box to be effective. You definitely sparked my thinking here. Thank you!
ReplyDeleteThank you! It really clicked in my mind when you explained that the lesson planning process is non-linear. I am a very linear thinker and I keep getting jumbled up with "what comes next" and "how do these two things directly connect". Much like Michele, I get frustrated and confused. Your blog has me thinking about how to think outside of my normal linear trail!
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