Quick Planning and Organization
There is the yearlong planning, the unit planning, and then the "today" plan- ning. Here we focus on the here and now: what are you going to do today? For a moment, forget about all the great and wonderful things you want to teach. Your job is actually about learning, not teaching. Powerful presentation skills require asking the right questions before you even go into the classroom. What will the learners' mind-set be? What do they already know? What do they bring to this topic? What are their biases, beliefs, and prejudices? What will the circumstances be? What two or three things do you want to make sure your students learn? What resources do you have at hand? How much time is allotted? The more questions you ask, and the better the quality of questions, the greater the likelihood that you'll discover what you really need to know in order to achieve success. Let's review the six daily questions (also known as the 6 Qs:
1 What do your students already know about this topic? (content)
2. What do they need to have learned by the end of the lesson? (objectives)
3. What is their mind-set and their readiness? their emotional state that you'll need to work with)
4. How will you do that? (teaching processes)
5. How will you know it when they understand the content? (evidence demonstrated)
6. What resources will you need to pull this off? (planning required)
If you've already matched the long-term planning with the curriculum standards, then the daily planning process is simple. Now you simply need to designate the specifics for the day. Use the 6 Qs as the source for your daily plan in the start, make copies of your master template for daily plan. Use the one Figure 14.2, or customize your own (there are countless on the Internet). You just need a quick visual organizer.