Tweak tweak tweak

It's hard to understand all the nuances of someone else's job, to understand exactly what they do day in and day out, teaching included. My friends and family see me grading and understand that, they can see me building something or buying things for my classroom and understand the need for that. Yet one of the hardest things for non-teachers to understand seems to be lesson planning. 

"But you've been teaching awhile, can't you just do the same thing as last year?"

"If you know the material, why do you have to write down how you'll lecture?"

"Didn't you do that lab last year? Why change it?"

One of the great misunderstandings of teaching is that while repeatable, it is rarely the same from year to year. There are some activities I have done every year while teaching the same course, there are some I did once and never again. Even the ones that are a "staple" in my curriculum have gone through many, many iterations. Some changes are "copy edits," a typo here, a font size change there, or adding "continue to the other side" on tests that students don't always flip over. Sometimes you add questions you asked orally that deserved to be formally added to the review sheet, or remove one that confuses them every.single.year. 

It can be frustrating when you find a "copy edit" you wanted to make last year and now have to suffer through another year. I felt that frequently in my second year, so I started saving files differently. I was changing my digital files each year in the beginning, saving "Torque Lab 2007" in 2006. After I completed an activity, I would make all the changes I wish I had before, and save a new copy with the next year's date. Then when I went to the folder for that unit or lab, I would see the newest copy with all my changes ready to go. 

Often that wasn't enough though, I also needed to document the changes for myself. Everyone plans out their curriculum differently. Some still like the feel of paper and pencil on planners but I prefer a digital file. I started a digital calendar in a word doc many years ago and developed a format that works for me. I start with a Monday-Friday calendar, which looks like the one you would hang on the wall. I have a row for my daily warm-up question, the main portion of the class and another for homework. I can hyperlink to the files for each activity, and add notes about what I need for each one. But the notes to myself about what to change have proved vital. I love color coding so I tend to use purple italics for reminders and red italics for "Don't forget!!!" kind of reminders. Below is a sample picture of my plans last year for AP Physics:

Even with all these notes, I can make mistakes by moving an activity so that it no longer makes cognitive sense. This week, my physics classes worked on analyzing some position-time graphs based on stories of different objects moving. This set of four graphs is randomly distributed and students find a partner with the same graph to work together and analyze the graphs. I moved this activity to the day that students were introduced to position-time graphs when in the past it was later due to a rally. It wasn't until students got started on the activity that I realized they had not yet taken notes or read a section of their textbook about instantaneous vs average velocity. Most students could reason through those questions but ideally they were introduced to new vocabulary before asked to use it. 

So even when I "know" my own activities I can still make adjustments in order or pacing that doesn't quite work. Figuring out what order to introduce curriculum is only half the battle of lesson planning. The other is pacing, scheduling and making it all fit in the finite time we've been given. It's like being given a jigsaw puzzle that has multiple possible arrangements but still must provide the same picture.

The take-away: tweak responsibly and document everything.