Getting a lesson under your belt is an important milestone for any teacher. Today was my first opportunity to plan my own lesson and to implement it with two different classes. The first class served as a great learning experience for the concept that “less is often more”. As beginning educators we over plan, over focus and over emphasize too many things and all we are really doing is overloading the students with unnecessary information that makes it more difficult for students to get to the nitty gritty of what we want to focus on at the core of our lesson.
In my case I had the students focusing on too many questions, during a read aloud activity. The value of teaching a lesson twice is that after the first lesson you can adapt, and change the lesson to make it better. The second lesson went way better! I ended up taking one lesson and teaching for well over 100 minutes over the course of both lessons. BUT must importantly I enjoyed it and so did the students! If anyone else can take away from my experience try and focus on a key concept, sometimes one question is more powerful than more questions.
With that in mind I leave you with one question: How do ideas spread?
