Skip to main content

The Best Laid Plans...

This is a tale of a project that didn't work quite the way I wanted.  For the last weeks of school I turned my classroom over to the students and allowed them to plan and teach the lessons.  It was kind of a mess.  So, I guess they did teach me something and maybe next year I can turn this failure of a project into a success.

The beginning of June came (as it thankfully always does). I had one unit left to teach and 140 7th graders to keep focused until June 28. I had a great idea.  Assign standards to the students, teach them about planning a class and let them teach the classes until the end of the year.  Perfect! They would learn the new material and practice talking in front of the class. I would sit with the class and participate in the lessons like any other student.  I gave them 3 days to plan in class and then we were off (well, sort of - June is full of PD days, meetings, days when the kids are not in school and a 3 day trip I planned).

As you may have guessed from the title, things were not as perfect as I had planned.  Far from it.  I don't think I would call it a complete failure but it has been a hot mess.

Here are the big problems I've encountered: (1) Sometimes the students that are teaching don't know enough about the topic to explain things clearly or explicitly enough so that other students understand the topic (2) the content they are presenting to the class is too hard or too easy (3) the activities are more fun than rigorous (so many useless word searches) (4) the students that are not teaching are not super respectful or attentive. I keeping trying to tell myself that they are learning a lesson in how crappy it feels when you talk when the teacher is talking or how hard it is to do well at something when you are not fully prepared.  And maybe for a few of them, this is happening.  But, for the vast majority of them....not so much.

So, what to do? I definitely want to do this project again or at least have them teach as a final product. Here's what I have come up with:

  • DON'T do this again at the end of the year.  At the end of June I can barely hold their attention.  A group of their peers is going to have an even harder time.
  • I have to review their lessons more carefully before they teach.  Word searches cannot be a thing.
  • The students have to held more accountable for what they are learning.
  • Don't do this at the end of June.  I know I said that one before but it's a big one.
  • Have them teach about something they are more familiar with. Maybe doing this with a completely new unit wasn't the best idea.
I love having the students stand in my shoes for a few days but the next time I do it, it's definitely going to have to happen with better planning....and not in June.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Teacher or an Educator?

I hope that I am an educator and not a teacher. Let me go back a few steps.   This past week I watched a very good friend of mine give her first TEDx talk on her experiences throwing out grades (and she rocked it!). This event also featured several student speakers.   All the students were fantastic – well spoken, poised and passionate in their delivery. They had a lot of great things to say but two of those things stood out for me.   One student talked about the experiences of students working hard to create projects that only the teacher sees.   This has sparked in me a tiny revolution but I am going to go into that further in another post.   This post focuses on the talk of a young man named Timmy, a senior in high school, who counted off the number of teachers he’d had over the years that he considered educators and not just teachers. As he went on to elaborate about what made a teacher an educator, I just kept thinking, “I wonder if he would call me an educator and not a teac
1 comment
Read more

Musings about Rubrics

If you are reading this you probably know what a rubric is. If you don't, here's the quick and dirty. A rubric is a grading guide that is available to students. It tells them how their work is going to be evaluated and allows them to evaluate themselves. Rubrics can take many forms. Here is one I recently used with my students: A rubric I used for a project. What I wrote in the 4 column is definitely a work in progress. As a science department we are struggling with what mastery with excellence really means. In our school, as of this year, we grade on mastery grading system. There are 4 "grades" a student can get: Mastery with Excellence = you understand it so well you can teach it to others Mastery = you get it exactly as well as you should Approaching Mastery = you are almost at mastery but not quite there Not Yet Mastered = New to a skill or no where near mastering it Now, I don't know if this is the case with all mastery schools, but in
2 comments
Read more

Your Potential is Infinite

To my students, Life is all about choices. Who you are and will be has not been decided. YOU choose who you want to be. Yes, there are some things about you that you cannot change: your race, sex, sexuality. But there are so many things you can change. And if you don’t like them, change them. But keep in mind, being a complete person takes a life time. Don’t beat yourself up if you are not yet the person you want to be. Your journey has just begun. Who you are today is not who you will be a few years from now. You will change in countless ways.   And you can control the direction of those changes. When I was in middle school, I was shy and very awkward. I wasn’t cool at all . And sometimes that really sucked. I was sensitive, I cried a lot. I was overweight and had super frizzy hair, both of which were pointed out to me and thrown at me as weapons on a regular basis. I had friends but I was by no means popular. This continued for me through college. Fina
1 comment
Read more