Mayday! Mayday! My Lesson is Crashing!

Whether you are a first year teacher, or an experienced educator, at one point or more than one point a lesson may not go quite as you planned.  You may have the most thought out, engaging lesson that you believe will rock the world of your students and when you truly begin your delivery, things go array. So the question is, what do you do when your lesson takes a left at Albuquerque?  I am going to address this purely from my own experience and my hopes are that at some point in this blog, you can find ONE thing to relate to when teaching, 

1. You are not a failure

This one really hits home for me.  I always feel like I need to be a perfectionist when it comes to creating my lessons.  I want everything to flow smoothly with minimal downtime to keep students from losing interest or let alone exhibit disruptive behavior.  I have had a few lessons in my 18 years of teaching that did not go quite as I planned it to go.  The students either didn’t understand what I was trying to get them to do or they lost interest.  The lesson just went horribly wrong.  I coach myself and state that I wasn’t a failure.  There are facets of my lesson that I either needed to tweak to allow my students to better understand the concepts or tasks I wanted them to accomplish or perhaps shorten or lengthen the activities to gain and keep their attention. 

2. Give yourself props

The fact that you tried something new is incredible.  Give yourself a self five! This year alone, I have tried three new units and for the most part they went incredibly well.  I sure did put myself on a pedestal for stepping outside of my comfort zone and trying some new things with my students that they really did enjoy!

3. Student input

Within the past month of the school year, I have had some portions of my lessons that just didn’t seem to click.  I took that opportunity to flip the script and ask my student for input on what could be done to make it better or to change it up to make it more interesting.  I did an activity with paddlezlam where I wanted them to be able to demonstrate a particular shot on demand and in the end they ended up giving me some great ideas to implement the next time we do the activity.

4. Adapt your lesson 

If you are fortunate enough to have back to back classes of the same level, you can do a quick reflection to adapt your lesson for the next class.  If you find something that just didn’t quite work then change it or tweak it for the next class.  I jot down notes in the speaker section of my presentations to help me remember to make changes to see if it helped make the lesson better the next go round. 

This microblog post was a featured post in #slowchathealth’s #microblogmonth event. You can search for all of the featured posts here. Please do follow each of the outstanding contributors on social media (including LaDonda Porter, the author of this post) and consider writing a microblog post of your own to be shared with the global audience of slowchathealth.com

Pair this blog post with the following:

Teach Your Students How to Fail by Patrick Noel

Meeting Them (Almost) Where They’re At by Michelle Ireland

Advice to a New Teacher by Renee Reedhardt

A Day in the Life….of a K-12 PE and Health Teacher by Shelby Hosmer

Have you read the latest Book of the Month recommendation?