Tuesday, June 3, 2008

Chapter 13: Flexible and Integrated Planning

by April

The first thing I connected with in this chapter was the idea of balancing planning and flexibility. I liked the last night of page 478, "So plans are NOT made to be broken - but sometimes they need to be bent a bit." I really think that how much you plan and how much space you make in your day is something that changes from year to year and you really just have to get to know the dynamic of your particular classroom. My second year of teaching I left a lot of room open in the day. I had several key things planned but didn't overwhelm myself with a multitude of lesson elements. My third year I looked back and thought, "I wonder if some of my behavior issues stemmed from some boredom and perhaps more structured learning activities would help?" So for everyday I planned more than could be fit in a day. I'd have multiple art stations set up so kids could do one or both. I'd have a variety of other learning center type activities available for kids along with just the general classroom set up of books, manipulatives, computers, dramatic play, etc... Well that year we had just as many behavior issues but I was a lot more stressed out because I had too much going on. Thankfully, I learned to reflect and evaluate in the middle of the year and started toning down my plans and leaving more room for spontaneity. So, I think you have to constantly be reflecting and making choices and changes to find the way your class, in that particular year, finds the most success.

On page 485 it talks about integrated planning. I've been thinking a lot about this lately especially thinking about authentic tasks. Students don't just learn reading during "reading time," they learn during social studies and science and math and so on. It is the same with writing. I could incorporate reading, social studies and writing by having students read a primary text, perhaps a journal written by an early settler in the West. Then students could respond by thinking about what it would have been like to be in that person's family and then write their own "journal" from that perspective. You could even bring in math by talking about trading and forms of money used and then have students act that out. You could present the perspective of the settlers and the Native Americans at the time and even point out the differences in what was used for money (I remember studying a tribe that used a type of beads as their form of money) and then have different groups in the class take on different roles and figure out how trading could have taken place between people who speak different languages and have a different system of money. I really like this idea of authentic tasks and integrated learning. I'm curious how much flexibility I'll find for this in the school I end up working in.

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