Updated on March 8, 2013 Saffron23 moreContact Author You know the feeling: you had a brilliant idea for a lesson for your students. It combines a fun activity with several points you want to teach and sets them up perfectly for the next big project you\u2019re planning. You devote hours to gathering class materials, writing up your lesson plan, and drafting follow-up homework assignments. When Sunday night rolls around, you\u2019re fully prepared and are excited to get started. But come Monday morning, for whatever reason, things don\u2019t go as planned. Your students don\u2019t jump in as readily as you had hoped, or perhaps they finish much earlier than you expected. Either way, you\u2019re left with a large chunk of class time that needs to be filled, and you\u2019d like to fill it with something other than \u201cOkay, you can work on homework.\u201d What to do? Luckily, there are a few ways to deal with this stumbling block that can help you minimize\u2014or completely avoid\u2014the damage. Changing gears in the middle of a lesson is much easier if you have a back-up plan.<\/p>\n
When you\u2019re putting together the outline of your next class, add in a few activities to fall back on in case things don\u2019t go as well as you expect. For example, you might want your students to work on an in-class writing activity for thirty minutes. But what if the majority of them finish in fifteen? Most students work at different speeds and it\u2019s unfair to leave faster workers sitting bored in the classroom while the slower workers finish up. Plan a follow-up activity for those who finish early, or in case everyone finishes early. Maybe they can swap papers and critique each other. Maybe they can do another written assignment, like writing a counter-argument to their own argument. Depending on what you\u2019ve planned, the options vary, but it helps to have a few fillers in case things don\u2019t go as well as you\u2019d hoped. When I first started teaching, a lot of my lesson plans didn\u2019t work out so well.<\/p>\n
I would come prepared with a fun activity that was meant to take up an hour of class time, but my students would finish each step in a few short minutes and then stare at me in disinterest. At first, I thought it had to be my lesson plans. Perhaps they were too easy or too boring. But then I started looking more closely at what my students had actually accomplished when they claimed to have finished. Sure, they\u2019d completed the assignment, but they hadn\u2019t been as thorough and imaginative as they could have been. This was especially a problem in my writing classes, where students would often jot down a few brief sentences without delving too deeply into their subject. So, instead of accepting it immediately when a student said, \u201cI\u2019m finished\u201d I would look more carefully at what they\u2019d done. Had they truly made their best effort? If not, I would point out areas where they could improve and ask them to try again.<\/p>\n
Eventually, they learned they couldn\u2019t get away with skimming through the assignment and started putting more effort into class work. One way to fill extra time (and still stay on topic) is to pull ideas from your next lesson to supplement your current one. Presumably, each of your classes acts as a preparation of some kind for the next, so if you find yourself in search of a filler try moving on to an activity you were saving for your following class. If you don\u2019t have the materials you need for what you have planned, just use the time as a way to introduce next week and to further prepare your class. There are no easy rules to follow when it comes to this particular technique, but it\u2019s something that all teachers need to learn to do eventually. If you\u2019re good at thinking on your feet, you\u2019re less likely to get tripped up when your perfectly arranged Power Point doesn\u2019t work or when your students aren\u2019t as fascinated by iambic pentameter as you are.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Updated on March 8, 2013 Saffron23 moreContact Author You know the feeling: you had a brilliant idea for a lesson for your students. It combines a fun activity with several points you want to teach and sets them up perfectly Read More …<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[11,13],"class_list":["post-429256","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-essay-paper-writing","tag-assignment-writing-service","tag-essay-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.benedictsol.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/429256","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.benedictsol.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.benedictsol.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.benedictsol.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.benedictsol.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=429256"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.benedictsol.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/429256\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.benedictsol.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=429256"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.benedictsol.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=429256"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.benedictsol.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=429256"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}