Adjustments to Practice

Being a good teacher means constantly adjusting your teaching practice. Even the most well-planned lessons often appear better on paper than they actually play out in the classroom. Knowing when and how to change a lesson in the middle of delivering it is key to ensuring that students are learning effectively.

The first step in effectively adjusting a lesson means recognizing when students are not connecting with the lesson. Paying close attention to student body language, asking if students are following, and utilizing formative assessments throughout the lesson to gauge student understanding are incredibly important practices to gauge if a lesson is working. It's important to recognize that in the classroom, anything can happen. A lesson might not work as planned because of poor planning, lack of student attention, or students simply not resonating with the lesson. So, when you do notice that students are lost, you need to switch tactics and communicate the content in a different way that your lesson may be lacking.

For example, during one of my classes, my students were having a difficult time grasping the concept of decomposition from my explanations. In that moment, I realized that they did not have a tactile representation of the concept, so I pulled out a piece of a deer skeleton. I asked the students what I was holding, to which someone replied, "Are those teeth?!" in disgust. I then described how I had found the bones when I was hiking exactly the way they looked currently and asked the students to try to figure out what had happened to the rest of the deer. Where did the deer's fur and muscles go? Instantly, the class excitedly began to shout, "Decomposition!" and explain how the decomposers broke down the rest of the deer.

From this experience, I learned just how valuable adjusting one's teaching practice can be. While the students were struggling with the lesson as I had initially planned it, one small tweak made the lesson memorable and engaging. Adjusting a lesson does not mean scrapping all of your plan or making drastic changes, as this is more likely to confuse students even further. Instead, simply introducing new conversations or providing other types of examples can effectively transform an initially unsuccessful lesson into a successful one.