As a teacher, we spend a lot of time thinking of and preparing lessons to best meet the needs of our students. Yesterday I found myself in a quandary. I had created a technology project for my students that tied into my lesson for modeling real life situations in a graph. The problem was that we only have 5 days before Christmas break. Would this be possible for students to successfully complete the entire unit with understanding? Or would I be better off just planning some direct instruction lessons with practice problems and some class discussion to help them "move their thinking"?
I went to my students for the answer. I was surprised by their responses. In one class it was almost half and half with the larger half leaning toward the technology project. The next class was the exact opposite...more wanting the direct instruction. By my third class, only a handful wanted to do the technology project and my last class, EVERYONE wanted the technology project.
What to do? What to do?
What would be the easiest? What could we finish in time? But it really just boiled down to, what is the best for my students?
That's when I decided to do both! Students could choose their learning method, knowing the goals for understanding the concept, and proceed from there.
Definitely not the easiest for the teacher though. I had to create and organize all the materials not just for one lesson now but two! I'm excited though to see how the different approaches do indeed affect student learning. I'll try to keep ya posted...
Moving forward is a good thing. If you don't move, you become stagnant. If you become stagnant, you smell. (I'm going with a creek bed analogy here...stay with me). "It Is What It Is" helps us to keep our sanity as we try new things, but at the same time we should never settle for "what it is". We should constantly reflect and learn to move our teaching and our student's learning to higher levels so the classroom doesn't turn stale.
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