I find myself happy enough to complete the substantial part of my marking and planning on Sunday. Having two monitors makes my planning infinitely easier. It is not only faster to complete, but I can find myself completing more sophisticated planning.
The actual planning of what I want to do for myself is on a class-by-class basis. I plan the sequence of the lessons at a time. However, on the actual morning, the prompts required are best placed via a PowerPoint. Each of these has an entrance activity. Another PowerPoint develops the rubrics and standardisation (via pictures of the previous work) that supports my students’ assessment for learning. These are shared with the students at beginning of the lesson.
One thing that pleases me at the moment is how I am able to respond to every students on a weekly basis. In the case of three of my classes, this is for 30-odd students each. Like I have written before, this is down to my rubrics and my markbook (with the learning diaries support student awareness of what they have been doing).
This half-term, if not earlier, I intend to post examples of the kind of daily lesson planning I spoke about earlier, and exemplar standardisation of weekly work. It is in this that I feel progress can be short-circuited and motivation maintained. We’ll see!
Kudos this evening must go to Kristian Still. His superb post on learning objectives has inspired me to revamp mine. Having written mine as questions, I find such a technique increasingly clunky for linking learning objectives together. Kristian’s technique seems to have whole-school potential (as indeed he has implemented his whole-school). Read more about it here: http://www.kristianstill.co.uk/wordpress/2013/02/13/learning-aims-outcomes-or-objectives/
On another note, my form returns tomorrow. Two weeks without them has given me much time to catch up with the paperwork. By all accounts a lot has been learned, and they have some experiences to be harnessed. Time for some speaking and listening improvement I think…
