Tuesday, January 23, 2018

The Day Ahead: Ever Changing Teaching/Learning Landscape

Teaching and learning changes daily. What happens one day affects the next. For example, last  night I reviewed a large number of computation assessments. I noticed several trends in learning that I want to discuss with students today, and then I want to give students a chance to review and redo their work with greater organization, attention to detail, space, and checking. While learning and knowing math is not all about precision and organization, we know that precision and organization matter when it comes to math success and development. Therefor that will be a focus of today's class, a focus I didn't expect until I looked over the students' efforts from yesterday.

I'll also spend considerable time prepping for tomorrow's science lab--the lab is mostly organized on paper, and now it's time for the legwork to organize the materials so students can enjoy learning about mixtures and solutions with a number of hands-on explorations.

I'm ready to input almost all the progress report data, and I'll likely do that tomorrow since we have an early release day which gives me time to start that work, work I'll finish in the evening tomorrow.

Finally I'll review students' long term science project and allow students to work on that during their study time today. I'll be available to help too.

Every day of teaching is a busy, varied day. While the writing is highly detailed, it serves to energize and forward my efforts.

Also, I think it's important for those outside of education to recognize how much effort and time goes into good teaching, and in knowing that, how we might support education landscapes that better support good teaching and learning too.