Learning Forecast

My spring break is filled with little jobs I like to accomplish. One of those jobs is switching over the garage from winter to summer. See in Wisconsin, we truly have 4 seasons. Every year there is around a 100 degree difference between our coldest winter weather to our warmest summer weather. We get feet of snow in the winter and dew points above 70 in the summer. Every spring break, I am excited for the great garage switch over. The snowblower gets packed up and put in the back and the lawn mower gets pulled out an put in the front. The problem is though, the grass is never ready to be mowed over spring break and many times we haven’t seen the last of the snow for the year. This year we got several inches of snow shortly after the break so I had to undo my work just to get the snowblower out. Yet, I still find myself sticking to this yearly plan despite the fact that the weather doesn’t comply with my plan.

A few years ago during a technology refresher for our school gradebook, a teacher was very excited to share out something. It was the ability to copy all the assignments from the previous year and the grading program would adjust the due dates to this year automatically. There was a teacher I used to work closely with who would pull out his daily planner book from the previous year an put it next to his planner from the new year on the teacher workdays before school started. In the new planner, he would fill in the days we had off and then begin copying in the daily plans for the first months.

When I began my student teaching, we were expected to write up lesson plans for an entire unit of what we were teaching. We would start with an overview of every day in the unit and then write out detailed plans for every day. We would start by crafting the path and then detail what every step along that path would look like.

It’s interesting to look back and think about what that very first column always was in my daily lesson plans. It was time. The time it would take complete a task was the things we saw ourselves as controlling. Our goal as educators should not be time managers. It should be learning managers.

Every year the weather around spring break in Wisconsin will be different. I need to be able to adjust my methods to meet the environment I am in. Every year, the learners in my classroom will be different, I need to adjust my plans to meet the learners. Within a semester of instruction, the only true deadline is the end of the course. Every other due date is set by the teacher. The question is are these due dates determined by the learning that occurred in the past or by the learning that the teacher is seeing in his or her classroom and the learners that are in it right now.

When I would design those daily lesson plans down to 5 minute intervals and plan out what I expected the learning to look like over the course of the week, it was simply a prediction. Yes, a seasoned educator will have more evidence to base a learning forecast on. But, how willing are we to throw our best laid plans to the side when our forecast is inaccurate. Would you be willing to cancel your plans to go to the beach if it rained. Would you be willing to scrap your plans for a summative assessment if your students said they weren’t ready for it? Are you willing to let your best laid plans fall apart in the name of learning?  Are your students taking the time until a due date you’ve set or the time until they’ve achieved mastery of an outcome?

As I am building a new curriculum for the new year, I’m going to be faced with this challenge. I hope to spend some time in my next posts to do some more reflecting on how I can plan to build on learning instead of due dates.