EDUC 4291
Student Teaching

This experience has much to do with lesson planning and the importance of lesson planning as a propaedeutic for classroom instruction.

One dimension of lesson planning involves carefully preparing the instructional content to be communicated during a fixed period of time, normally called a "class period."  Instructional content includes, among other things: the vocabulary, concepts, and intellectual exercises comprising a lesson.  But, as the harsh realities of classroom experience is teaching you, instructional content that is comprehensible to the teacher isn't always comprehensible for the students.

Each day during your student teaching experience, consider attacking this dimension of lesson planning by sitting down at a table or desk and spreading out the textbooks and ancillary resources you want to use for lesson planning.  Then, take a blank sheet of paper and visually divide it into three sections, one for each area identified in the previous paragraph.  Referring to the textbooks and other resources sitting there in front of you, fill in each section with the appropriate materials, for example, definitions, explanations, and figures representing the material.  When you've completed this task, review the page.  Note that it provides a fairly comprehensive overview of the lesson's instructional content.  More importantly, however, the process of preparing this page focuses you explicitly upon what you intend to communicate in class.

Now, you're now just about a quarter of the way there.

Take the page and edit it so that the vocabulary, concepts and intellectual exercises are stated in the simplest of terms, terminology so simple (it seems to you) that any moron should be able to understand these matters.  Be careful, however. The purpose for editing the page is not to "dumb it down."  Instead, use the "KISS" principle, that is, "keep it short and sweet" to assess your masterpiece.  If you are to accomplish this task effectively, you need to leave yourself and your ideals, aspirations, rationalizations, and self-justifications behind.  Instead, you need to enter into your students' minds, to see matters as they see them, to think about things as they think, to talk as they talk (assuming civility, of course), to reason as they reason, and to experience their limits and levels of frustration tolerance. Ask yourself: "Just how much can a shrinking cup hold?"

These insights will provide the criteria for assessing your lesson plan and editing it so that you will be well prepared to communicate the instructional content successfully.  The assumption implicit in all of this is, of course, that expert teachers communicate instructional content in ways that their students know it and understand it because the students can express the content in their own words.

While the task of preparing what you intend to teach might appear rather rudimentary (and perhaps, boring), it is absolutely critical for expert teaching.  A teacher must never enter a classroom without knowing clearly and explicitly what one will communicate during the class period.  Failure in this regard—and the temptation not to prepare for class can be great, especially when there are other more interesting things transpiring in your life—is an affront to your students (you are wasting their time), to your colleagues (you are setting the lowest standard of professional conduct), and to yourself (you are violating the vision that motivated you to select this profession in the first place).  So, even though this first dimension of lesson planning might feel unsatisfying, mundane, boring, or even a waste of your valuable time, spend it profitably by identifying the vocabulary, concepts, and intellectual exercises that will comprise each of your lessons.  Then, tailor these materials according to the students you will be working with.  As a matter of fact, you might need to tailor several plans from the original, depending upon the students you will be working with and the period of the school day when you will be teaching these materials.

Don't fret if, at this point, you find yourself spending what appears to be an inordinate amount of time preparing to communicate instructional content...the false assumption being, of course, that teaching is easy and the best teachers simply walk into their classrooms and engage their students in learning!  There's a downside, too: the efforts you put into lesson planing provide no guarantee that your instructional content will be interesting for your students.  It does guarantee, however, that you will be prepared to communicate important matters.  This is the foundation upon which you will construct "interesting" lessons in the future.

How you will make instructional content "interesting" to your students is a second dimension of lesson planning, one that will take more time, experience, and interest as well as loads of humility to learn—a topic to be covered later in your student teaching experience.  At this early point in your professional career, it is more important to focus upon what you will teach than how you will teach it.

As you begin teaching, you will experience yourself focusing on "timing" as you plan lessons and as they unfold in the classroom.  As you first learn to plan for instruction, you will find yourself wondering whether you're including too much or too little instructional content.  The big fear, of course, is that if you do not prepare enough material, you will have nothing to fill the "time vacuum" with.  On the other hand, you don't want to prepare too much material so that you find yourself pushing the students beyond their capacity to learn (the "shrinking cup" phenomenon described earlier).  One rule of thumb is: it is better to over-prepare than to under-prepare for class.  The idea is that you can always use what you've prepared tomorrow, but it is not helpful to the educational process to waste valuable instructional time.

"It's all in the timing" any professional will tell you, whether it concerns the golf swing, a reverse lay up, a slapshot into the net, or teaching.  Knowing what you want to accomplish and setting up the situation so that you accomplish your objective—important as these are—will work in actual practice only to the degree that your timing is accurate.  Initiating the downswing too fast, pivoting a little too slow, slapping the puck a moment too late, or coming up short with instructional content translates all of the knowledge and preparation into failure...if you do not have good timing.

When novice teachers begin teaching, they will find students rather well-behaved and actively engaged in learning in one or more periods.  Then, for some inexplicable reason, the students in another period are misbehaving and unwilling to engage in any learning whatsoever.  Likewise, one group of students can be very cooperative and well-behaved one day and totally uncooperative and misbehaved the next day.

To the novice, teaching seems so unpredictable and inexplicable.

One temptation novice teachers may succumb to is to conclude that their students' behavior and engagement in learning (positive or negative) has to do with the teacher.  That is, novices direct their focus on themselves not their students, thinking "if I was good at this, the student's wouldn't be behaving this way."

In contrast to novices who are attempting to understand how to work with groups of students, expert teachers recognize that they work with individual human beings.  These teachers understand that their students are growing and developing at warp speeds that they don't comprehend.  The students' feelings, attitudes, interests, and dispositions change from one moment to the next.  There's no stability in their lives, even though students believe they are stable!  To verify this for yourself, as you walk through the corridor, compare the difference that two years makes in students.  Just when did all of that growth and development transpire?

Expert teachers know that there are multiple biological, social, emotional, and spiritual changes that teachers need to be attentive to—in addition to their lesson plans—because the nature of student growth and development is dynamic not static.  Any (or all) of these changes will impact how students and groups of students approach learning at any given moment on any given day.

To get a sense of what's transpiring before your very eyes, recall your days in elementary and secondary school...it wasn't all that long ago!  Don't recall idealized visions of what you wish had transpired; recall what really happened.  Do you remember:

• How much you hated a certain class, teacher, or classmate and how this distorted your thoughts during class?
• Flunking a test during the previous class and wondering if the same thing was going to happen in the next class?
• Something erupted at home and you couldn't concentrate all day in school?
• Thinking you were the only person with hormones?
• How a teacher knew that you didn't know something you were supposed to know and is waiting to ask you about what you didn't know?
• The way a student (or group of students) behaved outside of class that makes it impossible to concentrate in class?
• When you lied to avoid hurting a friend's feelings and knew your friend just found out?
• How infatuation—your first true love—made it impossible to focus on the lesson?
• When you didn't understand something and thought you were the only one who didn't?

The students seated before you today are very much like you were yesterday.  They are influenced by human factors that no teacher can control.  Expert teachers do know, however, that students can learn and these teachers challenge their students to learn despite all of these distractions.  Expert teachers know how to get students to move outside and beyond their self-centered confines and to focus on the instructional content.

There is no one way for every teacher to learn how to accomplish this outcome. But, one way to begin developing this capacity is to take some time to get to know your students less formally. During the school day, consider taking some time to relax with your students. In the corridors, cafeteria, or library, engage your students in discussion about the topics that interest them. (Sports, hobbies, and school-related events provide nonthreatening and noncoercive content to spur these discussions.) Remember, however: you are not a peer and your students do not believe that you could possibly understand them. (Did you really think that your teachers could possibly understand what it was like to be you?) But, they will take everything you say seriously, even if they "dis" you. Your goal, then, is not to intrude on your students and their lives.  Instead, your goal is to demonstrate your interest in your students and to share your ideas and experiences with them as a means to get them more interested in and involved in learning.

To reiterate an earlier warning: Do not become involved with a student in any way other than that which is strictly professional.  Though students may share their problems and difficulties with you (and this is good), remember that you are not a licensed therapist. Refer students with difficulties to the professionals who are trained and in schools precisely to deal with these students. Be very careful not to lend support to judgments that students make about people, especially your colleagues, for an innocent comment may be redacted in a way that impugns your character. A good rule of thumb to judge how best to respond in any situation is to ask yourself: Do I want what I am about to say broadcast throughout the school? And, if you believe a relationship with a particular student or group of students may be or has the potential of breaching professional boundaries, speak with your cooperating educator or University supervisor.