The teacher will tell us the answer

There was a recurring theme in so many of our readings this week.  I felt inspired a few times to start my BLOG before my brain became a bit too overloaded and mushy.  I wish I had.  Luckily my texts are still strewn about my office floor with messy highlighting and scrawled notes in the margins.  I was able to piece together at least this much.

In Tovani we read about students who did not feel they needed to read the text or even pay much attention to the discussion.  If there was a question that no one answered, the teacher would simply give up and tell everyone what it was.  In the reading regarding Improving the Quality of Discourse in Mathematics Classrooms we read that "teachers are often too quick to answer their own questions when no one chimes in."  We discussed the outdated approach in Science lessons of providing all the details of a concept and then performing an experiment to confirm what you already know.  Recognizing these issues is just the start.  Implementing solutions is hard!  Designing lesson plans that will be engaging takes creativity and depth of knowledge and TIME.  Determining how much wait time is productive and when you are beginning to lose your students take constant attentiveness.  And it's not just one lesson for one student, it is figuring out a way to reach each and every one of them and help them move forward with every bit of content that you teach.

I have spent more than 10 hours today reading, researching, and planning just so that I feel prepared for the lessons that I will be teaching TOMORROW.  And, I'm not done.  I realize that in the future I will not be balancing my own homework and the looming edTPA, but I can't help but think that there will be other challenges that replace them.  As I work to provide engaging instruction for my group of 2nd graders in only 3 of the content areas that we will cover tomorrow, my hat goes off to those teachers who seem so calm, controlled, have classrooms full of excited learners, and seem to float through amazing integrated lessons with ease.  Every day I gain more respect for what truly great teachers do for their students and realize that this is just the beginning of my learning.