I hate it when students enter my classroom and ask, “What are we doing today?” Even worse is the dreaded, “Are we doing anything fun today?” I used to get some variety of those questions almost every day. But after I discovered the trick I’m about to share with you, students never asked me that again.<\/p>\n
About a year ago I went to a teacher inservice featuring Sandy LaBelle<\/a>, author of Teaching Smarter<\/em><\/a> and Teaching Smarter II<\/em><\/a>. Sandy specializes in helping teachers ease the stress and burden of paperwork, classroom procedures and grading. She covered a lot of ground during that inservice, and she was such a good speaker that when it was all over I plunked down $40 of my own money for two of her books!<\/p>\n I incorporated many of her ideas into my classroom routine last year, but the tip that made the biggest impact was the idea of putting a lesson outline on the overhead each day so students could see what we were going to be doing. Here’s an example an outline for a typical day:<\/p>\n Welcome to Literature <\/strong><\/p>\n Date:<\/strong> 9\/15\/2006<\/p>\n Early Work: <\/strong><\/p>\n Paraphrase the following quote: “Reading without writing is like cooking without eating” Tom Romano<\/p>\n Schedule:<\/strong><\/p>\n I made an overhead for each class, and filled it in every day. It worked miracles. Now when students asked me what we were doing in class, I could point to the overhead. After about two weeks they stopped asking.<\/p>\n The outline also gave students a structure around which they could organize their notes. And at the end of class I turned the overhead on again so they could copy the homework assignment into their notebooks.<\/p>\n When I first began to use the outline I wondered if it would take too long to write each day, but that turned out to be no problem. First, I printed a template on an overhead transparency with the main headings: Welcome, Date, Early Work and Schedule. That way I didn’t have to rewrite the whole thing. Second, I made it a point never to put more than four or five bullets under the schedule. My lesson plans were more detailed than the outline, but students just needed a general roadmap. There were days when I quickly filled out the transparency just seconds before the students arrived for class, and some days I filled it out as they took their seats.<\/p>\n I was surprised at how much my students loved these outlines. But everyone likes to know where they’re going. That’s why students ask that question every day.<\/p>\n The thing that surprised me most, however, was how much the outlines helped me to clarify my goals for the day. The outline actually helped me to streamline my lesson-planning process. And what’s more, students could see that I was organized, something that’s not always apparent to them. Even if I made a last-minute change to the lesson, it still looked well-planned because it was on the schedule.<\/p>\n Sandy LaBelle’s tip was a great help, and it took almost no effort to implement. Give it a try this year, and be sure to check out Teaching Smarter<\/em><\/a> and Teaching Smarter II<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I hate it when students enter my classroom and ask, “What are we doing today?” Even worse is the dreaded, “Are we doing anything fun today?” I used to get some variety of those...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":true,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9],"tags":[287,169,170],"class_list":["post-65","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-teaching","tag-classroom-management","tag-sandy-labelle","tag-teaching-smarter"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pPveS-13","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.nicksenger.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.nicksenger.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.nicksenger.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.nicksenger.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.nicksenger.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=65"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.nicksenger.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":642,"href":"http:\/\/www.nicksenger.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65\/revisions\/642"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.nicksenger.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=65"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.nicksenger.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=65"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.nicksenger.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=65"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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