I attended the University of Central Florida for my undergraduate degree, and am currently right back at UCF attaining my masters degree in elementary education. While studying at UCF, one thing I have done time and time again is create lesson plans, some hypothetical, some actually useful for the classroom. Yet I have noticed a huge difference between the lesson plans your professors require you to format and turn in versus the lesson plans you actually write with a team at work. Lesson plans for college grades tend to require tremendous amounts of information, whereas lesson plans for work merely state an objective, description, and page number of the book where an activity can be found. In fact, a whole week's full of lesson plans for math, reading, language arts, science, and social studies can all be written out onto just 2 pages. So why do we create 12 page lesson plans for just one activity for one subject while we're in college?
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It wasn't until I was actually working in the classroom during an internship that I experienced what actual lesson planing is like. I was shocked to find that I din't need to write 12 page papers for each lesson that I taught. What I had learned from my college classes was quite different from what I practiced as a teacher. I sat and thought, "Why force us to write out step by step procedures of what I will say to my students, and exactly what my students will do every 5 minutes during the lesson if we don't actually write lessons plans this way as working teachers?" This seemed very tedious and ludicrous.
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It wasn't until I had been teaching for about a year that I realized most likely why we had to write out our procedures, materials, and extensions to go along with our topic, standards, and objectives. My thoughts now are that professors were trying to train our planning methods by having us write our each step so that we could anticipate exactly what we wanted our students to do, and exactly what we needed to include in our lesson to do so. All I can say now is that I am extememely relieved that career lesson plans are far less detailed complex than college lesson plans. Would you agree?
-Lisa Costello
Lisa,
ReplyDeleteThis is an interesting topic that you wrote about. I have always wondered the same thing. While I agree with your point about professors wanting us to be fully prepared with procedures, I think it would have been nice to have more practice with creating "teacher" lesson plans.
At the beginning of this year, I spent hours trying to get a format that I liked for my lesson plans. It would have been beneficial if I could have worked on this during my undergraduate. I could have then perfected it as a I started teaching.
Like you said though, I am very happy we don't have to do the full lesson plans that we created during our college courses!
Allyson
Allyson,
DeleteYou bring up an interesting idea. I completely agree that we should have practiced using a teacher-style lesson plan according to a common format. This would have been beneficial to me as well.
-Lisa
Lisa,
ReplyDeleteAlthough the short-hand lessons are definitely more convenient, I worry that many teachers do not spend enough time thinking about what they want students to learn and do. Rather, they look at the curriculum guide and copy page numbers and standards. In my opinion, this is not planning. As teachers, we should be more motivated to go beyond the curriculum guide (whenever possible) to extend activities and differentiate for learners.
This is not to say that all short lessons are bad lessons. Journeymen teachers who have a deep understanding of their class needs do not need to write out every step and plan, but I think everyone, students and teachers, could benefit from a bit more thought and preparation for daily lessons.
Perhaps if teachers are given more autonomy (like the district claims will happen after Common Core) we may see more in depth and well thought out planning that focuses more on depth than width.
Cindy
Cindy,
DeleteI do agree that teachers should plan their lessons out appropriately, however, I don't feel they need to write out every step. I'm not saying that writing out lesson plans in a brief format means planning weak or short lessons. You can plan amazing hands-on activities that develop critical thinkers without writing a 10 page paper explaining your lesson.
-Lisa
I absolutely love your post! I always joke with my colleagues who attended UCF with me for undergrad that we were taught how to over think every little detail in our plans, and like you stated, very thankful we do not need to this otherwise. I think the issue is if you live breathe and die by that sheet of paper than, yes, it should be more detailed and descriptive, but, if you are like me, I spend a lot of time planning that doesn't actually go into the little tiny box where I type up my plans (I actually fit my entire week onto 1 page!). I don't feel that just because your piece of paper is straightforward and to the point means that you aren't putting the forethought into what you are doing. My lesson plans are more like a schedule then actual plans. It also helps, that my team as developed very detailed subject plans for each thing that we teach. This allows most of my "lesson planning" to be simply a reference of these more detailed plans.
ReplyDeleteThanks for such a great post! I'm glad i'm not alone on this issue :)
Delete-Lisa
Lisa said: "My thoughts now are that professors were trying to train our planning methods by having us write our each step so that we could anticipate exactly what we wanted our students to do, and exactly what we needed to include in our lesson to do so."
ReplyDeleteYes, I think that generally this is the reason why most coursework/assigned lesson plans are so much more robust than those lesson plans created in the field. Additionally, when you're looking for evidence of thinking/planning/"getting it" with regard to lesson design, this is much more easily accomplished if the lesson plan is "long form, so to speak, than if it is a barebones summary. Finally, some times (as in the online culminating project for EME5050), a "full" lesson plan isn't for the person who wrote it, it is for those others who will come along afterwards to use it (i.e., educators who might want to understand how to use the wiki-based curriculum page supporting a digital storytelling project).
Good thinking.
Kelvin