Planning effectively prior to instruction is an important aspect of being a teacher. You need to ensure that you are making appropriate accommodations for the students within your classroom. These accommodations involve their learning style, their interests, their culture, their funds of knowledge, their readiness level, etc. (Tomlinson, 2005) The list can go on, and this is why planning is essential. As a pre-service teacher, I am able get a lot of feedback on my lesson plans I create before I actually teach them. Through these conferences I am able to develop my lessons to include proper accommodations for my students. When I am a teacher with my own set of students, I plan on incorporating many “getting to know you” kind of activities during the sharing portion of my morning meetings (Kriete, 2002). This will enable me to get to know the students in my class and be able to make lessons and activities more engaging and enjoyable for them. Additionally, observing students throughout lessons and reflecting on their reactions to the strategies that were used is a great way to gain information. If you are able to it is wise to try and talk to the teachers that students had before to gain information on them.

I am a big advocate for making lessons engaging by using student interest rather than just teaching from a textbook. However, when not using a textbook, you have to ensure that the lessons that you are making should be aligned to the state standards. Looking at these standards is a good way to gauge what a students general background knowledge of a topic is because they should have learned the year before. Additionally, the standards that have been set in place have considered the developmental level in which it is appropriate to introduce such material. Readiness and developmental level is a big part of deciding on how and what to teach.

Being able to be a reflective practitioner is another vital aspect of being a teacher. As a teacher, you need to be able to look at what you’ve taught and analyze how your students comprehended the information and what you should do from there. There may be a time when your students don’t understand a concept so you will have to go back and teach them this concept in another manner instead of just moving on. If you were to just move on, it could create a large gap in their foundational knowledge for material that is connected to that concept later down the road. In order to reflect, you must have something to reflect on, maybe it was observations of the students reactions or thinking, maybe it was a formative assessment, or even a summative assessment (Dana & Yendol-Hoppey, 2009). All of this data is part of this practice of being a reflective practitioner and a teacher. Without the reflecting, you might as well just be video that doesn’t take into concept being rewinded when something is missed, slowing down, having any kind of differentiation, etc. As a teacher there is a lot of responsibility that comes with the job, so being cognizant of this key aspect is important.

 

References:

Dana, N. F., & Yendol-Hoppey, D. (2009). Facilitator’s guide: The reflective educator’s guide to classroom research: Learning to teach and teaching to learn through practitioner inquiry (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

Kriete, R. (2002). The morning meeting book. Thunder Falls, MA: Northeast Foundation, Inc.

Tomlinson, C. A. (2005). How to differentiate instruction in mixed-ability classrooms (2nd ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson education.