What is a Good Lesson for Me?

My world of lesson planning has obviously only just started as I begin my second year of actually being in classrooms and it definitely hasn’t been easy. I’ve had lessons that I felt like I knocked out of the park, and other days where I left the classroom wondering if I should even go into teaching, and that’s something that is hard to deal with, but it happens and I’m sure it happens to everyone. That’s the whole point of being a reflective practitioner, isn’t it?

So, what makes a good lesson for me? Well, from my experience, it starts with making sure that I actually like what I am teaching. When I first starting doing lessons in middle school, I started with teaching punctuation and learning about grammar is definitely something that I never found interesting in middle school. But, what was important was that I find a way to make it fun in order for these students to actually remember what we taught, so we made it into a jeopardy game, something that was engaging and competitive for the students to learn. So, although it was something I wasn’t exactly passionate about, it was fun to make it into something where students felt comfortable in having fun while learning some new material and I had fun becoming Alex Trebek for an hour.

Other times, I’ve had content that I was super passionate about, like Number the Stars by Lois Lowry, but the students were totally not into it. It became a question of “how can I fix this so they’re having a little more real for them?” Well to start the students had no idea what the Holocaust even was, so how were they supposed to know the cultural impact that that book could have and the comparisons that they could draw to it to the current state of America. I knew that I could definitely find ways to teach about social justice with content on the Holocaust so I thought it would be easy. Unfortunately, the students did not even have an idea of what the Holocaust was so I had to devote time to actually teaching them about that. However, I remember one specific moment where one of my students actually brought up the comparison how some police officers in the novels had stopped the main characters and it had reminded her of some of the stories she had heard in the news about racial violence and police brutality and blew my mind to hear that comparison without even prompting it. I think we would have gotten there eventually, but to hear that a student had come to that comparison alone was fantastic. It made me feel like the rest of my lesson that day could not have gone any better. Overall, I think that my lessons on subjects that I may not be as passionate about need to be told in the most fun way possible in order for me to be just as involved as the students and when its the opposite, I want to make sure that the students are able to draw comparisons at least to the larger world around them so they can feel like the content is not that far away from them.