Planning Planning Planning

Planning is a big theme when it comes to teacher education. Year plans, unit plans, lesson plans, lab plans, project plans, assessment plans and individualized education plans – just to name a few. I absolutely love a good plan (I’ve been told as a virgo this is quite common), but sometimes I wonder how much planning can be done before you have to be ready to adapt and be flexible. How much planning is for us as a teacher, versus how much is for the student experience?

A lesson plan is a teacher tool – we use it to create a framework of what concepts we want to teach in that lesson, what our estimated timing will be throughout the lesson, and what activities we will be using to help students conceptualize. Sounds like a great recipe. Learning plans on the other hand, are student-oriented: how are we going to measure learning on both a short term and longterm scale? A learning plan has goals, individualized learning for diverse learners, and a way to gage students capacity.

Like I said, I really like a lesson plan. Close to a minute-by-minute plan of how you are going to teach a concept, slides are ready, activity is ready, now you just have to do it. I’ve been reflecting on some pros and cons of lesson plans, you can see them here:

Pros	Cons
You are prepared. All of the material, links, worksheets, are in one place. You understand your class and what their attention span is, so you’ve only scheduled 12 minutes for the worksheet rather than 20. And if all goes smoothly, tomorrow you can roll into tomorrow’s lesson plan that picks up right where you left off.	Is based on your classroom being at baseline (behaviour, energy, attendance, comprehension time) where this is not always the case! Sometimes a Monday is more sleepy than usual, so running a complex dilution and concentration lab on that day is not ideal. Can we pivot?
There is structure for the students. We are humans and we recognize pattern. Your students know what to expect in terms of your activities, labs, and lectures. There is predictability.	Not all learners are the same. Expecting that a cookie-cutter lesson plan you’ve drawn up will work for all of your students may be naive. However, it may work for the majority of them! But how do we accamodate for the few that this won’t?

When we think learning plan, we zoom out from individual lessons, I think of a hybrid of teacher-led and student-led learning. How do we team up and ignite a spark amongst learners to be passionate? What does a learning plan look like?

• Student centred
• Empowering learners to :
  • Ask question
  • Find problems
  • Discover solutions
  • Make mistakes and fail
  • Search for the mistakes
• Goal-oriented learning
• Individual learning strategies

I came across this ted talk, where Dr. Tucker dives into how we sometimes deprive kids of learning by keeping them in a structured environment we deem a good place to learn. However, maybe giving them the recipe and all of the ingredients is the key. Which in reality, is the goal of a learning plan.

“The person doing the work, is the person doing the learning.” – Dr Catlin Tucker