trust the teaching schedule and teach on!

it's workshop wednesday...

when first handed the box for the units of study from our principal, we admit thumbing through pages and feeling completely overwhelmed.  looking at one lesson and seeing multiple teaching points was confusing and left us wondering, "how can we do this?'

when we sat down and dug in and looked all of the big ideas in one lesson, our first instinct was to break the whole thing apart into multiple days worth of lessons. sometimes after teaching the lesson some teachers felt like they needed to go rogue and teach their own lesson to really drive home the concepts being taught. our takeaway...DON'T.

keep with the plan. keep moving! 

we have become obsessed with attending the teachers college fall and spring reunions held in new york 2 times a year! for those who have never been… add it to your bucket list. when we explain the reunions to newbies and rookies we always liken the experience to  "disneyland"  for educators. there is a mad rush of teachers and the crowd size is unbelievable.  you choose which speakers and topics you want to attend and then just like in the "magic kingdom" you rush from ride to ride (or speaker to speaker) hoping to beat the line or the rush. at one such reunion, we had the pleasure of attending a seminar on how to get started with the units of study.


 at this seminar, they talked about the pace of the units and how best to plan and use your instruction. we too have fallen victim to feeling the lesson was too long or that the kids needed a follow up lesson so that more children would grasp the lesson ideas. we too have felt lucy can be wordy (sorry lucy) and decided to skip parts of her lessons YIKES!  the big takeaway from this seminar however allowed us to shift our thinking and helped us to realize that even when you think you haven’t reached all the kids…keep with the plan. keep moving,  trust the schedule, and teach on!

at the conference a comparison was made to children on a playground. can you imagine if a child was learning to cross the monkey bars. if this task was new and hard, would they want to spend their entire recess on the monkey bars? furthermore, would we make them stay on the monkey bars until they successfully made it across? NO WAY! kids spend a few minutes on hard and new tasks, then they move onto things that they already know how to do and things that they can do with confidence. after multiple trials and short practices a child will finally be ready to master the monkey bars. however, just like concepts of reading and writing, they are not all ready at the same time.

remember the playground

 so…when you think about re-teaching a lesson, or breaking a lesson up into multiple lessons and days, remember the playground! not everyone is ready at the same time. the lesson you teach will be retaught in a similar way later in the year or the following year. allow them to try out the new idea (like the monkey bars) and don’t expect them all to master it YET! they are still learning, they are still growing, and your job is to introduce them to the monkey bars.

let them enjoy the playground!

jessica & laura & melissa