It's always more interesting to discuss what has not been going so smoothly, however. Tuesday was the first day all summer where we didn't finish what we were scheduled to in class. Our objective was to summarize a story about a patient's journey with HIV/AIDS. For you non-teachers out there, a good lesson goes through an entire "lesson cycle," which includes five steps:
 |
| My easel with a typical agenda showing the lesson cycle. |
1. Opening. You communicate the importance of the day’s objective and thereby engage the students.
2. Introduction to New Material. You model the new skill. This is abbreviated in my agenda as "I do."
3. Guided Practice. The students have an opportunity to practice the new skill in groups or pairs while I monitor their progress and provide feedback. Abbreviated as "We do."
4. Independent Practice. Students practice their new skill on their own so I will know if they have mastered the day’s objective. Abbreviated as "You do."
5. Closing. In my health literacy class, this usually takes the form of a journal entry reflecting on what we learned.
This way of planning a lesson was drilled into my head during my time with Teach For America, and I still use it for every one of my health literacy classes! Like some would say, I drank the Teach For America Kool-Aid. But like I mentioned, unfortunately, we didn't make it through all five steps of the lesson cycle on Tuesday. First of all, we didn't start class until 10 minutes into our allotted 45 minute time slot. Then the objective (summarizing a story) was just way too hard to fit into one class. We only got through the Guided Practice, and some people did not even finish that.
I never have been very good at pacing my classes so that what I have planned takes exactly the right amount of time. Usually, I err on the side of planning too much for one class (which I think is still better than the opposite situation, where you finish early and then don't know what to do with the students for the end of class). I'll never forget how I felt on my very first day in a classroom, in June 2007, at Scarborough High School in Houston. I was teaching ninth grade algebra in summer school, to students who already had an entire year of algebra but had failed their class. For my first lesson, I planned on reviewing how to solve one step algebraic equations (such as x+ 6=10). Imagine the horror I felt when I went through several examples, and was getting blank, confused stares back from the students. I tried to break it down as much as I could, explaining that to solve x+6=10, you had to first subtract 6 from both sides, but even that didn't make sense to them. That first day, I ended up having to teach them things that should be intuitive to ninth graders, like how a number minus itself equals zero. Needless to say, we didn't come close to getting through the lesson I had planned that day.
So here I am, more than three years later, and I still have not mastered the art of pacing a lesson. However, I'd like to think I've improved since my very first day as a teacher. I just need to remind myself what is and is not feasible to accomplish in a 45 minute period. Luckily, I've already planned on reviewing summary a couple more times, so all is not lost. The patients here will learn to summarize by the end of the summer!
What do you like about the TFA organization strategy? What do you feel it offers that makes it worth the initial bureaucratic investment at the beginning of class?
ReplyDeleteI ask because I do the opposite. I try to tell a story. I try to make things flow smoothly, as much as I can, in a reasonable manner. I try as hard as I can to connect everything I say with reasonable flow of logic. I would argue that "storytelling" is the most effective way to teach...we remember stories because they have a flow, a context. The notions in liberation theology have a following because it has a complete arc, a complete story. The notions of a purely free-market system have a following because it tells a story from beginning to end. I like storytelling because it's how people naturally talk to one another.
But storytelling has major prices. It does not lend itself to prioritizing. If you stop paying attention to the story briefly, you may miss pivotal details. The entire story has to be told well, or the important parts might get missed. It seems like the TFA model makes up for that heavily: if you tell people THIS IS THE IMPORTANT POINT OF THE LECTURE, over and over, in an organizational chart, it's harder for people to walk away missing the point. Managed, organized flowcharts represent more what professional writing and serious debate is like, and have those advantages, in my mind. But it does at the expense of being "unnatural."
I would be curious to hear your thoughts on this. I often worry that my attempts to "tell a story" sacrifices simplicity for interest. Stories are interesting, but one may miss the point.
Not that this is necessarily applicable in your case, but I always shoot to be a day ahead of the "official" syllabus. It's so hard to anticipate what a certain group of people will find hard (for example, I am shocked beyond belief that my students found Hess's law straightforward, but resonance is the weirdest most screwed up thing in the world to them). I feel like this degree of freedom is necessary to have the flexibility to slow down at times.
Dancing_Scientist, can you clarify what you mean by "initial bureaucratic investment"? The theory behind the TFA model is that you gradually release the students from your guidance. That's what I like about it. Keep in mind that both when I taught high school and now, the people I teach are generally not going to go home and study what they have learned. This is in contrast to your students, I assume, who are in college where there is a degree of independent learning and reinforcement of concepts. All of the learning needs to happen in the short time that they are with me, so repetition is key. I can totally see where the storytelling method makes more sense for learners with high levels of cognitive functioning. Similar to you, I have a "buffer" day scheduled for my last day of class, so that I have flexibility if I need to re-teach something. Thanks for your comment!
ReplyDelete