Devil's in the details

I did my second mini-lesson today, also for language arts. My first one was for writing and this one was for reading: using a book mark as a prompt to do the reader's job of thinking about settings, characters, problems and changes in the beginning, middle and end of books we read.

When I first met Ms. Lee, she told me that she's not a big elaborate planner, she prefers to have the idea, "do it and then reflect on what worked and what didn't." This is not my usual style, but I recognize she's been doing this a long time and I need to go with the flow here, and I might even learn a different way of doing this. Still, there was a bit of anxiety, since as an undergraduate the lesson-plan format of the 1990s had been drilled into us good and hard, and, well, I tend to like to write things down and plan for contingencies.

Turns out the wing-it-and-reflect model can be a pretty sensible way to do it, too (although having ten years' experience helps a lot), and Ms. Lee is also very easygoing when things don't go quite right (for instance, we had a fire drill today that ruined our science-observation lesson: Oh well! Try again tomorrow).

During my first lesson last week, which my advisor observed, I used the ELMO and Ms. Lee couldn't really help me prepare because she had never used one- she wanted to learn from me how to use it. My big gaffe that day was trying to teach from behind the projector- doesn't really work! But she didn't make a big deal about it, and now I am kind of obsessed with positioning in the classroom, mine and students'. This is probably a good thing, especially since *tomorrow* I am teaching a mini-lesson on the compass rose and how to read maps. We will become human GPS units.... not.

But anyway. My current impression of teaching is that the devil is in the details. It's not hard to decide what to do or what students should get out of a lesson: the goals, the skills, and so forth. What IS hard is knowing what questions to ask, what language they know, what sorts of questions they are used to answering, how to challenge them but not stump them, and when to use what kinds of interactive activities to keep them engaged and to help you see if they are all learning.

This may be the trickiest part. The same kids raise their hands all the time, and it's hard to keep an eye on the ones who may wander mentally, who are not naturally "oh! oh! oh! I know, pick me!" and think of things to bring them back, draw them in, on the fly. You can have some ideas for ways to do this, but if you don't know how exactly they will each respond, it's hard to have a specific plan. This is this is the craft and the art of it, I suppose.