Juggling Master

One of the things that I am becoming more and more aware of in my second full year of teaching is how many tasks, duties, and activities a master teacher juggles at all times.


Clubs, Grading, Lesson Planning, Blogging, Trolling for new ideas, Administrative responsibilities, Parent Contacts, Field Trips, etc...

The list could probably go on for quite a while. It can sometimes be overwhelming, thinking about all of the tasks and responsibilities that are on my plate from day to day. It makes me very impressed to see teachers who seem to have it all together. Obviously, nobody is perfect, especially in the teaching profession. However, one of the marks of a master teacher is juggling all of these teacher/education tasks that appear in our Inbox.

I will continue to blog about what makes a Master Teacher, although I know that I am an enormous distance away from being on of THOSE.

Understanding by Design

In our school staff development meeting on Monday, one of the more experienced and wise teachers talked to us about Unit planning. As I am a greenhorn, much of my lesson planning has been finding a book and trying to come up with a project that would be beneficial. This has not necessarily been the most rewarding and productive method of planning.

The idea behind Understanding by Design is that you first must figure out the theme/overarching idea behind your unit, then fill in everything around that. For me, the biggest learning point was that I need to relate every single thing that we do in class to the main idea of the story. That can be small writing assignments, unit tests, papers, projects, etc...Everything that we do in my class should relate to the overall theme and lend itself to the answering of one of the essential questions.

It means a decent amount of work for me, but reworking my units is going to be incredibly beneficial for both my students and for myself.