Thursday, November 17, 2016

Lesson Gone Wrong: Try Try Again

I put a lot of effort into a lesson that didn't go well yesterday so I went home and reworked the lesson which is reflected in this post.

Our new shared model of teaching gives me the chance to teach each lesson multiple times. I really like that since each time I teach the lesson, it gets better. It's so much better for quality teaching than just teaching each lesson once. Also because our schedule is different every day, I'm often not teaching the same class the first cut of the lesson. That means everyone gets a fairly equal share of the lesson quality progression.

Lessons don't always go well. And when that happens you have to go back and rework the lesson. Even though I improved this lesson. I can still see many ways to do an even better job and I'll likely work on that as I improve my Magnificent Math website which is the collection of my favorite links and activities for each math topic and standard.

As I present lessons to students, I openly share my lesson design thinking. I welcome their thoughts and ideas too. Teaching well is not a static activity. Instead it is an ongoing effort that profits from reflection, redesign, and review.