Ahh the best way to stay alive in the classroom.  Have a plan.  Teaching is kind of like any other journey, and how can you get where you’re going if you don’t know where you are going to end up or how you are going to get there!  So when you decide to go on a trip you make a plan.  And really it’s no different in the classroom, a plan to get from where you are to where you want to be.

Isn’t that what we do when we plan a lesson.  We have a goal, and we try to figure out the most interesting and engaging way to get our students there.  And of course our plan is based on where we (or rather our students are starting).   Unfortunately your plan is dependent on the other 20 something people in the room.  And if life has taught us anything, its other can really put a kink in our plans.

So the solution is you really need to be adaptive – be able to change your lesson mid-stream (mid-sentence sometimes) and fit what you are teaching to your students; while still trying to get your point across.

This is why we can’t just plan a lesson and use it from year to year.  We have to almost re-do every lesson based on where the class that we are teaching is.  Sometimes we have to do that for different classes in the same grade in the same year.

It does come more easily the longer you have been teaching – you definately learn from your mistakes.  But ahh that is another post!