My first year teaching was 2007. This coming August I find myself transitioning to another new job. I will be Technology Director for Independence Local Schools. This position has remained vacant for several years in the district and I am tasked with creating momentum, growth and reshaping teaching and learning. It is a successful district with a fair amount of technology (already), the ambition to try innovative teaching with that technology and the desire to place a device in the hand of every student. I am excited. Very excited. This district is asking me to come and inspire change. To be a leader. To do all of the things myself, Garth and Travis have tried so hard to do for students.
I know there will be administrative duties and responsibilities. I also know that there will be failures and set backs and agnst. My career goal has never changed, even in the face of oppression and opposition. I have changed philosophies, updated my own beliefs and evolved as a human being over the last eight years.
One concept that has always elluded me is "The Lesson Plan". I have filled out 100s of lesson plan templates, toyed with the SAMR model and fudged in adjectives to sentencs to reach those different levels of Bloom (you know you have to). I was just reading an article by Trevor Shaw about problems with the SAMR model. I agree with his points, but I do not think he took it far enough. You see the problem with all these models is the "Big Word" dilema. Everyone wants to coin a phrase, create an accryonm, sound smarter than they need to sound. Why? I think most just want to be able to charge $10,000 a day to talk about their models and big words. Others might think by using a thesaurs to change some words that have been used for a century that they are somehow leaving their mark on education. Still others are just so damn smart they can't relate to teachers in the classroom.
So below is my "working model" of the future of lesson planning. This template isn't about cliches, catch words, technology, blended learning, flipped learning or any of that stuff. I want to create a simple template that puts learning first, kids second and teachers third. I want anyone to be able to understand how Garth, Travis and mysel think when we are creating lessons. It can be used for PD (just change some names) or just use it for Tuesday's lesson.
What I really want is to work in some crowd-sourced improvments. The only stipulation is that it has to say simple and generic. It must be approachable, free to use and easy to share. Oh yeah, don't try and make an acronym out of this. It isn't supose to be ironed onto shirts or made into flip cards.
*If this does become famous, this blog post is my copyright so I can become rich and famous and go around ranting on a national level about how I have solved education and no one will listen..or sell it to Pearson and buy a small island ;)
I know there will be administrative duties and responsibilities. I also know that there will be failures and set backs and agnst. My career goal has never changed, even in the face of oppression and opposition. I have changed philosophies, updated my own beliefs and evolved as a human being over the last eight years.
One concept that has always elluded me is "The Lesson Plan". I have filled out 100s of lesson plan templates, toyed with the SAMR model and fudged in adjectives to sentencs to reach those different levels of Bloom (you know you have to). I was just reading an article by Trevor Shaw about problems with the SAMR model. I agree with his points, but I do not think he took it far enough. You see the problem with all these models is the "Big Word" dilema. Everyone wants to coin a phrase, create an accryonm, sound smarter than they need to sound. Why? I think most just want to be able to charge $10,000 a day to talk about their models and big words. Others might think by using a thesaurs to change some words that have been used for a century that they are somehow leaving their mark on education. Still others are just so damn smart they can't relate to teachers in the classroom.
So below is my "working model" of the future of lesson planning. This template isn't about cliches, catch words, technology, blended learning, flipped learning or any of that stuff. I want to create a simple template that puts learning first, kids second and teachers third. I want anyone to be able to understand how Garth, Travis and mysel think when we are creating lessons. It can be used for PD (just change some names) or just use it for Tuesday's lesson.
What I really want is to work in some crowd-sourced improvments. The only stipulation is that it has to say simple and generic. It must be approachable, free to use and easy to share. Oh yeah, don't try and make an acronym out of this. It isn't supose to be ironed onto shirts or made into flip cards.
*If this does become famous, this blog post is my copyright so I can become rich and famous and go around ranting on a national level about how I have solved education and no one will listen..or sell it to Pearson and buy a small island ;)
"THE Lesson Plan Template" by Mike Pennington (4-28-15)
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