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Planning Ahead

Last week we working with 7 amazing teachers from our program to write curriculum. This always leads me to thinking about planning for the classroom and how the work we are doing affects this task. Now I am not currently planning for a classroom of students as my planning involves my work with teachers, but this process somehow seems mystical for many.

When I was starting in my own classroom many years ago, I was lucky enough to have many mentors helping me through some of this work especially as I transitioned to the world of education and alternative curriculum. Over time, my process evolved as I moved to different places and had to adapt to the expectations of each.

The most recent version went something like this... explore the standards for the bimester (the 2 month grading periods we had in Mexico) and find the main themes. Explore both my own collection of resources as well as those found through blogs and websites for material for a unit project. Design the unit project and unit overview sheet including standards to share. Plan an outline of ideas for daily lessons. This was all the pre new unit work.

Then came the hard work of the weekly & daily plans. The best laid plans must be flexible and willing to change based on the needs of the students and this may even look different in each period of the class. My weekly short checkin quizzes often gave me knowledge that an idea had not been understood and needed some revisiting. This idea of planning and flexibility is a constant challenge. Even I, many times, wanted to stick to the plan and get to where I "needed" to be. The time needed for students to explore ideas and fully understand is always at the pressure of the time needed to cover everything that is in the prescribed curriculum.
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