Breaking and Remaking Lesson Plans

November 1, 2016

I just had an interesting lab session with a school district we’re working with this year. The teachers (K-2) want to extend the scope and dynamics of their lesson plans, and make sure they challenge their students. But the teachers also don’t have much free time, are, in many cases, new to the curriculum, and also feel that they need to be in alignment with the curriculum, for various administrative reasons. (Although the expectation from admin is that the curriculum will be supplemented. But still.)

The implications for me were that rather than demo one of my favorite Math for Love games or lessons, I wanted to model how one might break and remake a lesson plan. I wanted a process that would be quick and dirty, so teachers could implement ideas quickly; after all, they might have only a short time to review a lesson plan from the curriculum before teaching it.

The lesson that was given to me to demo was flawed in some pretty intense ways. For one thing, it was a lesson for 1st graders that was meant to be teacher-led instruction for a full hour. (Let that sink in.) The goal of the lesson was to have students connect story problems and subtraction equations. It included, in the middle, almost as an afterthought, the instruction to let students come up with a few of their own ideas for story problems, which the teacher would transcribe on the board and solve altogether.

Here’s the process I wrote down, which I think does a pretty good job of imitating the sieve I pass lesson plans through in my own mind.

I thought this was a pretty good draft, and a good introduction to breaking and refashioning lesson plans to fit your classroom better. I’d appreciate feedback, especially if you have some favorite strategies my list is missing.

For this particular lesson, I launched with a related warmup (Target Number), and built an example story problem with the class. In fifteen minutes, we had accomplished what the lesson had said should take forty minutes, and then I released the kids for what we decided should be the main event: writing and solving their own story problems, and challenging each other with the ones they’d written. By launching quickly and letting the students generate their own work, we’d also succeeded in raising the ceiling of the task, and many of the students showed that they were comfortable with much larger numbers than the class had explored up to that point, adhering, as it had, to the curriculum.

And more than that, it was fun. The students were proud of their work, and stayed engaged, even though the material, without their input, wouldn’t necessarily have held their interest. Here are some of the student’s problems.

After 15-20 minutes of students dreaming up and solving their own problems, we had plenty of time to wrap up and pose even more difficult problems, involving one-digit numbers everyone was comfortable with, but more complicated stories, involving addition AND subtraction.

Many teachers don’t have the time, expertise, or permission to go too far outside their curriculum. But the good news is that most lesson plans in your curriculum are built around some good idea, even if it’s only a kernel at the center. But there’s a filter you can put these lessons through that accentuates the good while straining out the bad.

You’ve seen my draft above. Try it out, and let me know how it works for you, and if there are changes that should be made to it.

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