WORKING SMARTER, NOT HARDER
stations on food, music, literature, language, and gender roles. Finding the resources for all the stations and tailoring them for his students takes him approximately three hours. The students visibly enjoy the lesson, although he later realizes that he never touches upon the topics of food, music, and literature during the remainder of the unit. Mr. Jones also notices that his World History lessons do not go particularly well that day – all of his planning time had been spent on the stations.
What if Mr. Jones considers his situation with sustainable teaching in mind? He plans his third unit for the Global Studies elective, which is on China. This time, he considers learning goals for the unit in advance. In both of the first two units, gender, ethnicity, and education had emerged as concepts that the students found engaging, and Mr. Jones believes they are worthy of attention. Now, he is intentional about placing these concepts at the center of his planning. As he sets up an introductory lesson, he thinks back to the stations from the previous unit: he realizes that the food, music, language, and literature stations were not strongly connected to any course goals – nice to know, not need to know. He asks himself, “How will my introductory lesson help my students reach important learning goals?” He decides the unit’s first lesson needs to focus on the important concepts that have emerged and will be more explicitly applied in the new unit.
Mr. Jones then asks himself, “How will my practices help students do more of the classroom’s work?” His students are certainly not blank slates regarding gender, ethnicity, and education, and he determines that they can play a central role in defining and developing the concepts. He recognizes that he can indeed shift more of this class’s work onto the students. He has been responding to their enthusiasm by redoubling his own planning efforts, when he could instead be placing more responsibility with these highly motivated students. He decides that the students can be responsible for finding and bringing in materials related to gender, ethnicity, and education in China. Those materials will then be analyzed in groups, with the help of guiding questions developed by Mr. Jones.
Mr. Jones begins to develop these guiding questions specific to China, but he thinks, “How do the time and resources required for me to create these questions relate to the short and long term benefits for my students and for me?” He sees that creating questions that relate to the concepts, and can be applied in any unit, is a more effective use of his time. He will have a resource already developed for future units, and his students will benefit in the long term from the familiarity and reinforcement of the questions. Mr. Jones is now on his way to sustainable teaching; both he and his students will reap the benefits.
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Virginia Educational Leadership
Vol. 8 No. 1
Spring 2011
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