From a good teacher has all the lesson details planned ahead of time and sticks to the plan…
To a good teacher plans well but also flexes well in order to adapt to student needs
Being truly responsive to student ideas means that a one-size-fits-all lesson plan is impossible. Anticipating student thinking, planning for adaptability, and being flexible is important as we shift our classrooms to support engaging in the Practices.
Sometimes we plan lessons or learning sequences and forget to consider the lenses our students might be approaching the content through. By being prepared to be flexible we can adjust to the differences in learning that are part of our classrooms.
This does not mean good teachers don’t plan! It means teachers include in their planning an expectation that students may respond in unique ways and seek to anticipate some of those but be open to others. Being responsive to the range of things students may need to experience, see, or think about in order to push learning can create a richer learning environment.
The work of Costa and Garmston (2002) identifies five energy sources for group development (our classes are groups of learners) and one of those is flexibility. Planning to be flexible sets us up to more effectively respond to the kinds of thinking, intellectual challenges, and dynamics of our classrooms.
We have found that engaging students in the Practices requires flexibility because we are learning something new, too. The Practices open the classroom to exploration and more creative thinking. When we plan to be flexible we experience less frustration when students bring up alternative ideas or ones we did not expect. We have learned to find this invigorating as teachers instead of seeing these kinds of things as diversions.
Plan ahead to better understand the big ideas in the content and how they relate to prior and related content. This becomes especially important when we invite divergent thinking from our students. Students often make connections to prior or related learning that the teacher did not anticipate.
1. Collaboration with colleagues can help us anticipate more of the connections and conceptions students may have!
2. While planning, anticipate as much as you can about student thinking. Questions to ask ourselves:
A. What do we want kids to understand (not just do)? And in what ways might we have them show their understanding?
B. How might they understand it (correctly, incorrectly, or partially) now?
C. What preconceptions and misconceptions are they likely to have?
D. What prior learning might they use to help them make sense of the question (understand)?
E. What question or visual would help them revise their thinking?
3. As you plan, think about how you might respond in the moment.
A. How might you respond to a student who is still struggling to grasp the basic concept?
B. How might you respond to the student who has a more sophisticated understanding of the concepts?
C. Try to think up a “menu of options” you can use to tailor your responses to individual needs. The goal is to push all students forward in their thinking, not just the “average” student.
Take notes to help you remember what students said/thought from one year to the next! It gets easier over time to figure out how to respond to a variety of student ideas.