Professional Development

Planning

8 Comments

After this week, students will take final exams. Graduation is on the 12th (we are a Jewish school, so we don’t hold events on Fridays or Saturdays in order to avoid conflicting with Shabbat).

My schedule for next year is firming up, and believe it or not, I’m already looking forward to next year. I want to spend time this summer really planning for next year. What I want to do is take a look at the curriculum and at least get my units sketched out à la UbD. I want to make sure that my road map for the year is plotted. I did plot out the first month or so, and my lessons went great. I should have done more planning, but the craziness of the year set in and yadda, yadda, yadda, I didn’t keep it up.

Of course, I plan to make time for the final Harry Potter book and fifth Harry Potter movie, as well as genealogy research, but I usually find myself looking for stuff to do over the summer, and I may as well do some solid work on my lesson plans.

Do you plan over the summer at all?

[tags]education, lesson plans, summer[/tags]

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8 thoughts on “Planning”

  1. I do! I've already started, to be honest. I'm a huge geek, I know. I think I would've done so last year, but I taught summer school and I was still working on the yearbook (last year's was a fall delivery, so it didn't even get done until late July) and that pretty much ate up the entire summer. This year we've already received and distributed the book, and the district is using correspondence courses for summer school, so I'll probably be hitting the books.

    PS: Do you actually know how to use UbD?

  3. Er, I now realize you were asking about planning out courses, not about general summer plans. Answer for me: Yes, but I almost never start earlier than one month before school starts back unless, like my textbook-less Modern Algebra class this fall, there's a lot of original and tricky prep involved. If I start earlier than that, I find that I'm not as able to make on-the-fly adjustments to my students when their backgrounds and learning styles don't match my strategy for teaching.

  4. Not so directly — at least not during June. I like to use the summer to learn something new for myself. For example, last year I took a certification exam from Microsoft. The experience wound up being directly applicable to class when I taught a computer technician certification course.

    My personal learning this summer will happen in and around NECC here in Atlanta. Of course, that'll have a huge impact on my classroom.

    So, it's not like I'm putting together lesson plans, but I generally DO spend my summers thinking about school.

  5. I was out last Thursday and have made a good dent on the THREE new courses I will teach in the fall. I plan to work steadily over the summer, between a couple conferences and my own schoolwork, in order to have a firm plan and roadmap created. I know my teaching and the students' learning suffer when it gets to be late semester. I, like you, planned the first month or so well, but then other things get in the way and it all falls down. So this summer, I have made a commitment to myself to get as much done beforehand as possible. Drop on by and see my new post (thanks for the spark!) and let me know what you think!

  6. I'm a PE and Science teacher, going back into teaching 8th grade Language Arts. I recently received all of the teaching material for the course. There's so much, I could bench press it.

    I started teaching in 1981, and feel very comfortable with the material, but I fear Language Arts is a much more hefty subject than it used to be when I could easily do Reader's and Writer's workshops very casually. Students loved to read.

    Do they still? So, yes. I'm preparing for the courses, and I'm trying to get a handle on YA lit. I love to read, so this won't be a problem for me.

  7. I plan in the summer, and I think it's responsible, not geeky. As a school director, I started inservices in July to get the juices flowing. Now, back in the classroom, planning is my creative outlet. The warning I have, is that though I have good ideas for plan revision, I don't have enough distance on the year yet. It still feels like a continuation, not a revision. My advice- go play.

  8. I plan to plan over the summer. However, with only a vague idea (one of 3 places) of where I'll be employed and with NO idea of what I'll be teaching, I haven't thought much past that yet.

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