Something that really helped me and the kids in the 1st grade classroom I taught in was to know what needed to happen over the course of the day. This is a list that I began to make on the board so I would pace the day better based on an evaluation by my advisor from The College of Idaho. She mentioned that the behaviors I was seeing might not happen as much if students and myself improved our pacing for the different tasked we had over the course of the day. This written and visually cued list helped all of us remember what was going to be happening over the course of the day.
|
Something I feel is critical to planning is remaining flexible. It's important to spend a lot of time thinking about what you are going to do, and when you hope to do it, but to make changes as school scheduling and the children in your classroom need it. The image of this week of planning is a great demonstration of the changes that frequently take place in the course of a week. Assemblies, testing, and the critical extra time students need for a new concept can take a lesson planned for Tuesday morning to afternoon in order to accommodate a variety of needs. Awareness of this is critical for effective teachers.
|
One way to prepare for classes and help students grow is to provide them with information about what the intentions for the lesson are and how we will meet those intentions during the course of the lesson. As part of the reading lessons I was doing this with my class, but not with the math lessons. After being observed and receiving feedback about the possibility of including these intentions I took the opportunity to create a slide of the 3rd quarter to review with the students before the lesson begins. Unlike the reading goals I failed to include how we will meet these goals, but as we went through the lesson we talked about what learning goal we were reaching on that activity which really helped to increase student engagement in the math review section and lessons.
|