Sunday, October 29, 2006

Good Teaching Day

I redeemed myself yesterday. At the end of last week we picked projects and had a general idea of what the projects would do. The women finished an hour earlier than I had planned on them finishing. I dove straight into the next lesson which was to think of every little thing that we needed to do to get the project done. I call these little pieces of work "activities". I hadn't prepared to teach that lesson on that particular day. I just dove in, explaining that now we needed to decide exactly what we were going to do to complete our project. I received ten blank stares - the kind that could have either meant "That's a good question. I am in deep contemplation about it" or "I have no idea what the heck you are talking about, but I am not about to be the first one to admit it." Unfortunately, it soon became clear that it was the latter. I spent the next fifty-five minutes trying to explain what I seemed to think was a fairly simple concept but to no avail. By the end of the workshop they were just confused and I was just frustrated.
 
I biked home disappointed in myself. Anytime that my students don't understand something I always assume it is my fault. It's hard to blame someone who doesn't know something for not knowing it. Any teacher who gets angry at students for their ignorance is just a bad teacher. A teacher's job is to figure out what students know, what they don't know, what they need to know, and figure out a way to get teach them the things they need to know that they don't know. I hadn't done my job as a teacher, and I'd gotten frustrated with the situation. I am a perfectionist with pretty much everything I do (except making my bed) so I was upset the whole weekend. The more I thought about what I was trying to teach, the more I saw how complex it was and all the steps that I could have taken to explain planning more clearly. I took a few hours to make a new lesson plan that started from the beginning and walked them step by step through the process.
 
They say that teaching is the best way to learn. I agree one hundred percent. While writing this lesson plan, I gained a much clearer understanding of how to think of all the little things you have to do to get a project done, which is NOT nearly as easy as I had thought it was. From my experience, when you are writing a good lesson plan, you know it's a good lesson plan. Everything fits together perfectly. Each step is clear, and there are checks along the way to make sure that everyone is understanding what you are talking about.
 
I went into the workshops yesterday knowing that I had a much better lesson plan. And sure enough - it worked. In less than an hour, they were listing off all the little pieces of work that will need to get done in order to do the project. They were thinking of pieces of work that I hadn't even considered yet. This part of the planning process is crucial. If the project was like the Frankenstein monster, we would currently be creating all the internal organs. It would be pretty terrible if we patched it up and set it off without kidneys or a pancreas or vocal chords. It wouldn't get very far.

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