Day NINE

Today has been great for me. I was hanging on to every word during the first session. I really found Dr. Huang's session on Engaging Your Students: Principals & Techniques so relevant to me. Writing lesson plans has been such a struggle for me. I have so new to teaching and I do not have anyone else in my content area to work with and get ideas from that I have been feeling like I'm lost. Every time I turn in lesson plans it's a battle of trying to figure out what I'm teaching, how I'm going to teach it, what I'm supposed to put in the lesson plans, and I get so bogged down with all the factors that I spend far to much time planning. I work on plans and then get to school not knowing what I'm doing. I do things and don't know what the big idea is. So learning about backwards design and going through the steps of backwards design really helped give me straight guidelines and simplified everything so I could see purpose.
I also saw how easy it is for me to expect my students to know things when I went over it, but I haven't given them a chance to really learn. I liked Dr. Huang's example of the Chess Board Memory. When the pieces made sense with the game, the Grand Master could remember a lot, but if it didn't have any order to it, the Grand Master and the Novice did just as bad. I saw that I need to help my students see the purpose for what they are learning so it is more meaningful and therefore easier for them to learn and retain.