Maintaining Sanity, Reviewing Priorities

I’ve had a really busy year. I’ve always said at the start of the school year that I’m going to say ‘no’ more frequently in as politely a way as possible. I’ve said I’d be more honest about priorities. Instead of spending time writing code for something that might be really cool as part of a lesson next week, I need to get tests graded today. I’ve had more preps this year than ever before. I have big scale planning to do relative to my IB classes and their two year sequence of lessons, labs, and assessments. In a small school like ours, it’s difficult to avoid being on multiple committees that all want to meet on the same day.

Probably the hardest part has been figuring out what my true classroom priorities are. I’d love to look at every student’s homework, but I don’t have time. I’d love to make videos of all of my direct instruction, but I don’t have time. I’d love to curate a full collection of existing resources for every learning standard in my courses, but despite designing my own system to do this, I haven’t had time.

Over the course of the year, however, I’ve found that the set of goals I have for every class can be boiled down to three big ones:

Give short SBG assessments as frequently as possible.

These need to be looked at and given back in the course of a class period, or they lose their effectiveness for students and for my own course correction when needed.

Provide more time for students to work during class. Use the remaining time to give direct instruction only as needed, and only to those that really need it.

Time I spend talking is unnecessary for the students who get concepts, and doesn’t help the students that do not. If I’m going to spend time doing this, it needs to be worth it. This also means that I may not know what we need to review until during the class, so forget having full detailed lesson plans created a week at a time. I think I’ve accepted that I’m better at correcting errors along the way than I am at creating a solid, clear presentation of material from start to finish, at least given time constraints.

It has been more efficient for me to give students a set of problems and see how they approach them than tell them what to do from the start. There are all sorts of reasons why this is also educationally better for everyone involved.

Focus planning time on creating or finding interesting mathematical tasks, not on presentation.

I’ve always thought this, but a tweet from Michael Pershan made it really clear:

@Anderson02B @DataDiva @ddmeyer I *do* spend lots of time asking myself "How do I make sure my kids have important things to think about?"

— Michael Pershan (@mpershan) May 20, 2015

What I teach comes from the learning standards that I either create or am given. Maximizing opportunities for students to do the heavy cognitive lifting also maximizes the time these ideas spend simmering in their heads. This rarely occurs as a result of a solid presentation of material. It doesn’t necessarily (or even usually) happen by watching a perfect video crafted by an expert. When you have a variety of mental situations in which to place your students and see how they react, you understand their needs and can provide support only when necessary. Anything can be turned into a puzzle. Finding the way to do that pays significant dividends over spending an extra ten minutes perfecting a video.

Going back to these three questions has helped me move forward when I am overwhelmed. How might I assess students working independently? What do I really need to show them how to do? What can I have my students think about today that will build a need for content, allow them to engage in mathematical practice, or be genuinely interesting for them to ponder?

What are your priorities?