Monday, June 6, 2011

How I plan

When I sit down to plan for the year, I try and gather all the infromation I can.  I look at standadized tests, ask collegues, consult the book, and use prior experience to prepare my yearly schedule.  Once I establish my yearly schedule I being breaking the lessons.  I am typically a one lesson - one day schedule, but have found through experience that some lesson just can not be taught in one day.  These days I doucument, and will make alternative problems for the students to discuss.

My planning is not very detailed, with the student participation leading discussions.  I have a couple key points that I want students to explore through out the lesson, but how we get there can be very different between each classes. 

When I started planning for AP Calculus this year I did not take the same approach.  I did not have any previous experience to help guide me through, and I recieved no assistance with material, I was a man on an island and had to make sure that my kids could swim.  I used the book heavily to plan these lessons, I still used students questions to guide the lesson but made sure to hit on specific concepts that the book considered important. 

Next year I will play on my experience of both seeing the AP test along with where my students this year struggled.  I feel that planning always needs to be revisitited and revised

2 comments:

  1. What aspects of planning (or plans) will change in a 2nd year situation like this? Will you go through topics at same pace, or linger on trouble areas/key areas?

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  2. I feel that my pace I set forth was good. I will spend more time in some specific areas, but as a whole I feel it was a good strong pace for the students. I used 2 days per lesson, the first they had to explore and then we would discuss in class, then the following day they were asked to expand. I did very little introduction, and I feel this next year I will introduce a little more. Each year the program will get stronger, I just hope it has the chance to grow.

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