Hey, Baby! What's Your Sign? Getting Metacognitive About Lesson Planning with Grad Students

We're approaching the last few miles of the semester (and having taught a content area literacy class for 7 years, I can predict the obstacles that stand in the way of pre-service teachers for designing lesson plans with the intent of best practices in literacy instruction).

They have the knowledge. They have the models. They have the interviews. They have their lived experiences. What they don't have, however, is a lot of experience with the lesson plan genre, especially with pacing out a lesson with students (and this is before announcements, interruptions, bathroom passes, lost homework, parental calls, and coffee spilling all over the plans).

I've become more and more strategic in my backwards planning so that the final product is much more beneficial to them and their student teaching (now in the era of EdTPA). Each year, I'm able to pull parts of the final project into earlier work so that they are building a foundation for their learning:  first with interviewing adolescents, 2nd with genre analysis of a reading, writing, creating, or speaking experience in their field, and tonight - Crandall's model lesson: one to be deconstructed after it occurs.

I have science, math, Spanish, Italian, English, elementary, and History in-practice and pre-service teachers in the class. The reading from Smagorinsky's Content-Area Literacy describes a shift to semiotics and teaching the deconstruction of how words signify.

Signs. Signs. Everywhere there's signs.

I had to get humorous, so am doing a lesson on the validity of Zodiac signs. I found 3 NY Times articles, one we will read together, one they will read in small groups, and 1 they will read solo. We will implement a strategy from Beers & Probst Reading NonFiction. Then, after the instruction, I will hand them a EdTPA lesson plan template where I filled out all the parts with the lesson.

It's a lesson on teaching a lesson on preparing a lesson for the EdTPA lesson plan forma (while hitting instructional practices we read from the research this semester).

Dang. I am thinking about their thinking about the other's thinking, so that I can prepare their thinking in preparation of the future thinking that will happen in their classrooms.

If I was a Warners Bros. cartoon, my eyes would be hanging by my feet, with my brain spinning underneath coo-coo birds.

That's what's happening tonight in my neck of the woods. What about you?