Two Weeks Ahead

Published: 2023-11-03 10:05 AM

Category: Teaching | Tags: organization, planning, scheduling, challenge

My biggest weakness, by far, is not planning far enough ahead in teaching. I know generally where I want to be on a given day, but I often don't finalize what I'm doing until the day before (or even the morning of in some cases). This, by the way, is not a good thing. It means I'm feeling rushed or flustered more often than not. I know the content but I need to get better at knowing in what order and when I'm teaching the content.

I took some of my own advice and got in touch with our instructional coach. My department is great but they've all been teaching the same courses for years and I'm just returning to the classroom after several years of coaching myself. I felt like I needed a good, grounded conversation with a third person to get some solid plans in place.

I have to say - it was wonderful. I can only hope my interactions as a coach were as thorough, as supportive, and as non-judgemental as my talk was yesterday. She challenged me to do two things:

1. Think ahead two weeks. That's a good span of time to vet what I've planned and to make adjustments if anything needs to be changed based on student skills or assessment results. More than two weeks is overkill because it may all be changed eventually and two weeks is digestible. The other benefit is to have copies ready one week ahead so at that point, I'm locked in.
2. Put together a master binder for the semester. Unit by unit, activity by activity. Including all of the planned notes, both blank and filled in. This gives me a paper copy I can flip through in one spot so I'm not hunting for files or presentations in my drive. Making notes on those pages will give me a single source of truth for locations and any edits that need to be made year over year.

Thinking back, my student teaching didn't really prep me to think this way. My mentor was wonderful in every way, but she also flew a little loose. So, I stared using the same methods, but I think that has hurt me in the long run. Over the next several weeks, I'm going to really push to have solid plans two weeks ahead. The beginning will be hard because I need to plan two weeks form now as well as two weeks out, so almost a month in advance. That will let me get on to a good roatation by the winter break and be ready to head into the second semester.

Baby steps...