I have recently had several conversations with colleagues around the areas in which we are teaching regularly and the areas we were missing. Over the summer, my team sat down and made a schedule for our year. What subject areas did we need more or less time for? Where did we want to really focus on developing and mapping out a scope and sequence for the year? Two areas we knew have been lacking across our school in curriculum were social studies and science. We made out a schedule that had significant time to start teaching these subjects more often with the hope that we could integrate instruction across content areas. Sometimes it is so easy to get caught up in the content of social studies and science that you forget to teach the reading and writing concepts you planned within those subjects.
So, I decided to take a deeper look at my reading, writing, and language instruction. I first sat down and planned out all the topics I needed to cover based on the standards. Then, I created a chart that didn't just outline instruction by month, but week by week. Each line on my chart was one week of instruction. I added in topics for each week in informational text, literature, grammar, language, and writing. If I knew a topic might take more than others to cover fully, I gave that topic two to three weeks. As I completed this exercise, I found that I should not need all the time we often think we need to teach everything we want to fit in. We make time for the things we think are important. This is true in our personal lives, and it leads right over to our teaching lives. If we truly believe something is important for our students to learn, we will make the time to teach it. If we want to teach in specific content areas, we will set aside allotted time for that instruction. If we think fitting in an informational text lesson, a literature lesson, grammar, language, and writing instruction each day is important, we can make the time for it. Sometimes that means changing the way we teach those lessons, but we should find ways to get creative and think outside the box.
Too often we end up thinking exactly the opposite way we expect our students to think. We tell our students to think deeply, spend time going over your work, put in your best effort. We set high expectations for the students, but set lower expectations for ourselves. Imagine a world where we worked as hard as we expect of our students. If we send home a weekly reading assignment for our students to complete, why don't we also complete a weekly reflection on our reading instruction?
For some of us this planning comes more naturally. Our brains revolve around what we are teaching, why we are teaching it, and how we can do more. As I created my outline of reading and writing instruction for the year, I organized times that would work for a daily mini lesson on each topic. If I had only 90 minutes a day to fit in ELA, I could do it! I looked at my schedule and I have 90 minutes a day. I was just looking at the way I fit in particular topics with the wrong lens.
So here's to thinking outside the box and putting in the time. Did I do any of this reflection during the school day? No. I spent a few extra hours on my own time, but I believe I will save endless hours of my instructional time by planning what and how I really need to teach. I don't need a prescribed day-by-day curriculum, but I can explore ways for students to be more independent in some areas and set up routines that support students in engaging in more content on a daily basis.
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