Teaching Tip #123

Teacherscribe’s Teaching Tip #123

Here is a very interesting read from one of my favorite bloggers (Life of an Educator) - 10 Pieces of Advice for new Teachers.

Here are the ten pieces of advice -

5.  Plan for more and prepare for more than you think you need.

For my money, this is the best advice on this list.  The worst thing - especially for a young teacher - is to have extra time.

It wasn’t so bad when I taught my first year at LHS, for we weren’t yet on the block schedule.  So in a 50 minute class, if I ran out of stuff with 15 minutes to go, it wasn’t the end of the world. I remember having some days where it was a review session and we spent the 50 minutes going over questions from earlier in the week.  I didn’t have to have extra prepared to fill those 50 minutes.

But with 80 minutes classes, I can’t go in without plenty to do.  It’s just too much time wasted.

One trick I learned early on that helped me with this (and it’s something I still do to this day) is list our classroom objectives (learning targets) up on the board.  I always put too much up there to get through in one block.  That way if a few of the objectives are met quickly, I still have several to go.  And if it all goes according to schedule, I get to be the hero by saying, “well, we won’t get to the final three objectives, so I’ll save those for tomorrow.”  Kids are happy that I didn’t pile it on as homework.  They don’t need to know that I didn’t really plan on getting to those objectives anyway!!!