Teaching advice part 2 - Procrastinate
See the first post in this series for background.
2. Don’t write daily lesson plans in advance
It seems like a great idea - do all that preparation work during the summer so that you have less stress while teaching. Unfortunately, it’s been my experience that this is one of those rare times where procrastination really pays off.
The problem with planning ahead is that all new teachers, no matter how cynical, have only a theoretical idea of how their classroom will run on a day to day basis. In their minds, classroom procedures will work as planned, resources needed for a lesson will be available, and students will actually be captivated by ‘interesting’ lesson hooks.
The reality of meeting students will always change that mental model. In the first few weeks on the job, a new teacher will change classroom routines to figure out what works. It’s also extremely difficult for new teachers to predict the amount of material that students can learn in a single day. Later lessons that build on a particular lesson will always have to be rewritten to account for unmastered skills.
Before the first day of school, I created roughly three weeks of very detailed lesson plans, each with a detailed agenda, fleshed out lesson activities, and ‘interesting’ hook to engage students. Of these, I ended up using only two without modification. The rest I either threw out completely, or rewrote heavily to take into account the daily changes in my classroom. The days that I spent planning during the summer seemed a giant waste of time.
In an ideal world with infinite time to prepare for the first day of teaching, I’d be a huge proponent of planning lesson in advance. Although those lessons would get rewritten later on, it’s good practice for new teachers and helps clarify problems in classroom organization. For most TFA teachers, however, the few weeks of free time between training and beginning school are all about choosing priorities. A new teacher can either spend a few days planning detailed lessons, or setting up a classroom organization theme.
In my view, the most important planning is not daily lessons, but a long term plan. By this I just mean a basic outline of all of the objectives that you plan to teach in the course of a school year. If you teach a skills based course like math or science, then it’s also important that you have a definite ordering for all of these objectives. Having a sense of where your classroom is heading is essential for linking lessons together and providing your students with connections between topics.
As a new teacher, you gain so much insight and experience in those first few weeks on the job. By procrastinating on daily lessons, your plans become so much better by incorporating all that knowledge. Waiting until the weekend before (or even the night before) allows you to spend the upfront time on the important tasks, like long term planning, or brainstorming classroom motivation rather than writing plans that would just have to be rewritten anyways.
