Insight #1: It is good to have structure in the classroom but also to be flexible in changing your curriculum or strategic planning according to unexpected circumstances.
Insight Approach
An effective way to plan and structure your curriculum as an educator is to implement the backward design method in curriculum building. This will help you identify your learning outcomes and how to get there.
However, as an educator, you will be faced with unexpected situations, no matter how structured your lesson or class. It is important to recognize that things might not go as planned and to be flexible and innovative in the ways you approach these situations.
Insight
Experience/ Research
Through my experience in guiding a middle school film club for an education class, I incorporated an approach to planning lessons, units, and whole courses, called backward design. This method focuses on building curriculum on learning objectives and outcomes that students must use and demonstrate in authentic, purposeful ways. Because this was my first time facillitating a semester-long class, it was helpful to identify what I wanted the students to learn by the end of the semester before making any lesson plans. Wiggins and McTighe introduce the method as "purposeful task analysis: Given a task to be accomplished, how do we get there? What kinds of lessons and practices are needed to master key practices?" Determining the end objectives allowed me to plan and structure each of my classes to teach parts of the objectives each week. See a sample of my learning objective below.
While the structured planning through backward design guided my experience, I also learned the importance of flexibility of the plan. For example, educators can’t control how students will behave on a particular day. Students may be having a bad day and are unwilling to participate. During my time at film club, I had a student whose behavior was unpredictable on any given day. One day, he was not feeling well to participate in acting and filming. Because he was one of our main actors, it was difficult to get much filming done. In this moment, I knew that I had to change what I had planned for the day in order for our time to be productive for all. We ended up filming other scenes that were planned for the following week as well as convinced the stubborn student that we are a team and needed him to participate. While that day did not go as planned, it taught me that a teacher's best resource is to be able to plan while adjusting plans on the fly.
Future Steps
This mindset is important to put in our educator's toolbox as it is useful in many situations, education-related and non-education related. For example, I continue to remind myself that while diligent planning is crucial to success in event planning, unexpected events can happen such as inclement weather or technology dysfunction. In these occasions, it is important to stay calm and look at different avenues to reach the same learning objectives. For example, if the weather is not conducive to the activities you had planned, make sure you have a backup plan such as doing a similar activity with adjustments indoors. As I continue to pursue my career in nonprofit management, event planning, and educating, I will expect the unexpected and learn from every unexpected "snapfus" that comes my way for the next time. I believe that it is important to treat every event, classroom lesson, and situation as a learning experience, no matter how many times you've done it in the past.