Interesting Training

  Yesterday, we had a very interesting training after school.  Just a bit of background first.  The super decided to transform our school from one principal and one assistant to two principals.  He divided the school into elementary with one and middle/high with the other.

So yesterday, the soon to be middle school/high school principal ran a training on what he wants in his lesson plans.

He is the first person in all the time I've taught at this school to do that. He even modeled it which was great.  He wanted to do this so we'd know what to expect when we got back.  So here it is:

1.  Write a simple objective.  It doesn't have to be anything fancy but it has to be able to be assessed so you know if you met the objective. 

2.  This is where you teach the main lesson.  No student should be talking and it shouldn't be longer than say 11 to 15 min at most.

3. This is where you check for understanding through discussion or centers.  You are expected to wander around checking and making sure they are on task.  If they are engaged, let them talk longer.

4.  This is where you have students talk in a think, pair, share, or give each person in a pair a different problem that they do and then teach the other one.  Keep them busy.

5. Only after you know the student knows how to do the work, do you give them the assignment which will be graded. 

6.  The final step is providing closure.  Provide the answer of when and where this will be used in the village or in real life.  Unfortunately, for math it gets a bit harder because we only have a once a week newspaper with few graphs and few sports results.  I know there are two stop signs but no children at play or yield signs.

He also said that we needed to put the lesson plan in the classroom where he can get to it easily and check to see if we are doing Tuesday's lesson on Tuesday rather than Thursday but that tends to happen out here a lot. 

The best news of all is that I finally got my iPads so now I can set up my google classroom, and other things.  The bad thing is they haven't put all the apps I've requested so I don't know if they will do that over holidays.

I'm off, have a great day.