Tales from the science classroom

I have struggled with lesson planning my entire career. I know I talk about this a lot and I know to some it may seem rather trivial, but this is huge for me. I was never taught how to properly lesson plan in my teacher education program. I had to create a lesson plan. I was shown interesting things to do with lessons. But creating a system of teaching a topic, putting it in an orderly fashion, and creating daily plans for doing that was never taught to me. I'm the type of person who needs to be shown step by step and be able to ask questions. How is this done? What if this happens? How do I handle this? I never had that. I was taught all about educational theorists. I was taught to do action research. I spent a lot of time learning things that literally never cross my mind now. But the stuff I really needed; how to create lesson plans, how to plan a day, a week, a month, a school year, how to handle the massive amounts of paperwork that being a teacher generates; I was taught no...

As I was preparing to type this, I was thinking about the people who are so confident in what they are doing. They get a planner and say they are going to use it this way and set it up that way and boom. They do it. I'm not sure if there is the struggle beforehand that I go through (see previous posts) But I am not that confident and generally waffle before deciding on something. I guess I just like to consider all options and look at all sides of something before just jumping in. Aw, well, that's me. Anyway, the point of this post is my school planner. This has been sitting here for almost 2 weeks and I have hardly touched it. I've been trying to decide how I want to lay it out and I think I figured it out. There are 7 columns in this planner and my initial thought was to label each one with a class; chemistry, biology, AP chem, and AP bio; and the remaining 3 columns with notes, to-do, copy, prep or some combination of those things. But the more I thought about it t...

I'm stuck. And I'm not sure how to figure this out. I teach AP Biology. Last year was my first year and I just picked up someone's curriculum and taught it. Well, this summer I'm trying to be more mindful in my teaching and so I'm planning ahead. One of the projects is to create an AP Biology curriculum that is mine. The problem I'm running into is the sequence. Last year I taught macro to micro, so evolution first and then we worked our way down to cells, interactions, etc. That is definitely one way to go and lots of teachers do it that way. The other way to go, and what I thought I would do this year, is start with chemistry. Give them a basis for what is going on then move into what is happening with evolution and all that stuff. Now both ways are legitimate and teachers do it both ways, I just can't decide what is best for me. One one hand I feel that giving them the big picture and then explaining why it happens (evolution first) makes more sense be...

I am a planner freak. I believe that it has to do with the fact that I always feel so unorganized and that by having a planner, I get some semblance of organization.  I have also found that being a teacher requires a level of organization I just do not possess naturally. Therefore, a planner is essential to my maintaining my sanity. Over the years, I have used a lot of different planners in a lot of different ways. I used Passion Planners for about 3 years. I used one for my personal planner and one for a school planner. The Passion Planner is great but very limited. I spent a lot of time each week altering the layout to fit my needs both at home and at school. Loved this planner, mainly the outside. But I used it an entire year and it worked well for me. I used a Purple Trail planner for both school and home.   I really liked this planner and it took much less altering than the Passion Planner did every week. But it still wasn't quite right. Also, these are...

I have to keep reminding myself that I'm doing this so that next year will run smoothly. I have completed my first unit in chemistry. It was slow going and took me 2 weeks, but I kept changing what I was doing. I was doing it on chalk.com. I was doing it in a notebook. I was including details. I was not including details. I kept switching things up and ended up with a giant mess. So now I have Unit 1 all laid out with details. Everything is printed out and in my binder and all I need is a unit test and Unit 1 is done. I feel immense relief that I not only figured out a format I can live with but have one unit under my belt.  I have no doubt the next unit will go much, much quicker. This also leaves me open to adding things that would be interesting. For example, I have activities and worksheets for everything in Unit 1, but if I come across something better, I can replace something. If I don't, it's okay because I have something planned. I really like this a whole lot and...

Once I started to implement my brilliant idea from the previous post , I realized that it was not so brilliant at all. First, I ran into the problem of not knowing what my schedule will be and therefore not being able to set up specific days. So for example, I could not set up the first day of school, August 1, because I don't know what classes I will be having on that day.  So then I thought I'd set up the classes by days of teaching. So I know I have chemistry, so Day 1 of chemistry, Day 2 of chemistry, etc. But that was really working out well either. I tried a few more iterations but nothing seemed to work out well. Then I realized that I would have handouts and things and I would need a separate binder for those and quickly it started to become unwieldy. So I have abandoned that idea and am back to my original plan.  So here's what I'm doing. I have my curriculum map laid out. I am then taking the essential questions and determining either how many days I need ...

The ongoing theme of this blog has been organization. I've been teaching for 9 years, but I haven't found a way to organize my stuff that works really, really well for me. Every single year, I struggle finding things I know I have or recreating the wheel because I've forgotten I have something. So I've been working really, really hard to get organized once and for all with a system that works for me. I know that I need to have things written/printed and at my fingertips in order to make good use of them. If I have to go online and look it up it won't happen. I've played around with binders and didn't really use them after I set them up. The last 2 years I did find great success with planners. I would divide the day up into my classes - 4 each day - and jot notes on what was to happen that day. That worked great!! As long as I planned ahead. Too many days I would get to school and the planner was blank. That left me scrambling to figure out what I'm t...