Tag Archives: lesson plan
Six Ways to Make a Classroom Lecture Interesting
Back in the day, when I was a beginning teacher, I was convinced that my students would love my three-class-period Shakespeare lecture as much as I did. My students quickly let me know that three days of note taking, no matter what the subject or how interesting the details, was way too much for them.
Over the years, my students have taught me how much lecture they can tolerate and what holds their attention the best. Continue reading
The Homework Question: Use Class Time or Not?
Among teachers, you’ll find two camps: those who believe that students should complete homework exclusively at home and those who give students some class time to begin working on assignments. I’ve been a member of both camps, so I know the arguments for both.
Camp 1: Homework is for home. When our high school moved to the block schedule, my colleagues grumbled about the lost instructional time. Even though the classes were longer, the actual minutes for instruction decreased by two weeks. Teachers who taught three novels each semester found themselves choosing between the Odyssey and Animal Farm. Instead of spending three weeks on Shakespeare, they crammed five acts into two weeks. Teachers were concerned about how reducing the curriculum would affect students’ test scores. After all, the tests’ scope hadn’t decreased just because the high school’s bell schedule changed.
Four Online Resources for Classroom Images
May means a lot of things. It’s the unofficial field trip month: just try reserving a school bus in May and you’ll find out just how many field trips occur in your district. May is test month. Students take state standardized tests and AP tests in May. They’re stressed until the middle of the month. May is senior month with another senior activity every other day: the senior banquet, the senior field trip, the senior graduation practice, the seniors’ last baseball game or track meet. It’s concert season, it’s the rainy season, and kids are squirrely. You’re packing up, tearing down, collecting, cataloging, figuring grades, and making sure your seniors are on track for passing your class.
May is also project month. We have just weeks left of school; no one wants to lecture students who squirm in their seats and watch the clock. Better to keep them engaged with the content and let them direct their own learning with a project. Continue reading
The Pros and Cons of Rubrics
I read on Professor Maryellen Weimer’s excellent higher education teaching blog, The Teaching Professor, a post about a discussion college teachers were having about the pros and cons of using rubrics to grade student products.
It’s an interesting discussion and probably something you and your teaching colleagues have discussed before: do rubrics guide both teacher and student or do they limit student creativity and independent thinking? Continue reading
Classroom Management: Always Have a Plan B
Yes, the unpredictable happens, but we can at least predict which types of events might occur. Fire drills, lock downs, drug dogs, power failures, tornado drills, bomb threats, hallway incidents, and an out-of-control student all unpredictable disruptions to your class. Even predictable disruptions like Homecoming events, assemblies, and club photo days can cause classroom chaos. How are you expected to teach when the power is out or half the class is in the yearbook room mugging for the camera? Continue reading
Study Finds that Students Are the Digital Advance Team
If you’ve ever had a technology failure in your classroom, you know that your best resources can be your students. When the DVD player spins and blinks, but doesn’t play, a half dozen students will volunteer to fix it. If your presentation file becomes corrupted, chances are you have a guru sitting in the front row who can open it and save your lesson plan.
Students as technology guides. The latest research proves what you already know: our students are digital experts. Project Tomorrow’s Speak Up National Research Project has interviewed 281,000 K12 students in all 50 states for its latest report “Speak Up 2008 for Students, Teachers, Parents and Administrators.” The researchers call our students the Digital Advance Team. These students are an asset to adults, especially those whose job is to plan these kids’ education and prepare them for 21st century jobs. Continue reading
Federal Budget Lesson Plan: Online Interactive Game Lets Students Make Federal Budget Decisions
Minnesota Public Radio and American Public Media have created Budget Hero, an engaging online game that challenges users to balance the federal budget (http://minnesota.publicradio.org/projects/2008/05/budget_hero/). The game relies on numbers and budget forecasts from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and offers users options for balancing the budget like cutting aid to foreign governments or increasing the retirement age to 67. Continue reading
Pearl Harbor Lesson Plan
Most of your students can tell you where they were on 9/11, just as a generation ago people could remember where they were when President John F. Kennedy died. Each generation has its pivotal moment; for the WWII generation, that event was Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941.
National Geographic has captured Pearl Harbor’s events in a multi-media timeline and map that would work well as a history mini-unit, stretching over one or two class periods. http://plasma.nationalgeographic.com/pearlharbor/ax/map.html The site’s interactive timeline pulls up maps of the Hawaiian Islands with ship and aircraft movements. Clicking on Full Story reveals a paragraph about each event on the timeline, photos from the moment, and sometimes first-person testimonials about the event. Continue reading
