Teachers Required to Submit Lesson Plans? Here's a Win-Win!
In my district, teachers who are not tenured are expected to submit lesson plans to their principal for review. To be quite honest, my likeliness for reviewing their plans has about the same chance as Prince Fielder staying in Milwaukee as a Brewer. I just don't have the time to delve into the weekly plans of my probationary teachers, plans that are submitted the Friday before the lessons start and won't reflect how their instruction has changed due to a one day lesson that lasted two days.
The solution? After observing my probationary staff for the first of two times this fall, I am requiring each of these teachers to submit five lesson plans to me between now and spring, when I will observe them for a second time. They get to pick the lessons, with the caveat that one of their lessons showcase an excellent example of instruction, and another lesson reflect a lesson that they know needs improvement. The other three lessons can be anything they want. For all five lessons, they have to reflect on how it went, what was successful and what they would do differently if they could reteach it.
I haven't tried this yet. I don't even have the template selected for the teachers to use. So why do I think it will be successful? Thinking as a teacher, I would find it more beneficial to take a lesson I actually employed, reflect upon it and evaluate the effectiveness of my instruction. This type of thinking requires much higher level thinking compared to the alternative. As a principal, I can see through their lessons how the teachers are growing as professionals, especially in their reflections. This information should be very useful to me when I observe them again in the spring.
What are your thoughts? Have you tried something similar? I'd appreciate your thoughts.
UPDATE: As my brain was still going while trying to get some sleep last night, I remembered a conversation I had with one of my reading teachers that day. We are in the process of planning the implementation of iPads with teachers, in an effort to provide tools for reading and math intervention in the classroom. She is the ying to my yang; I want to get devices in the hands of kids right away, while she cites studies about the danger of too much technology. These are good discussions. One thing she mentioned that stuck with me is the F pattern people use when reading text on the web. In a study by Jakob Nielsen in 2006, he found that people will read the top two lines of a website, then go down the left hand side of the screen to try and read the rest. This reading pattern is roughly in the shape of an F. The thinking is there is just too much information online for anyone to follow it all. Plus many web advertisements are located on the right side. Web readers are scanning information for what's important and avoiding the ads on the right.
So how is this related to reflective lesson plans for probationary staff? Mainly, these teachers are all in their twenties and are digital natives (I am an immigrant, digitally speaking). They have grown up reading on screens. Also, they may use the F patterns when reading not only websites but other text as well. Because I want them to type these lesson plans up on a computer so they can be dropped in a digital file, my theory is they will be more comfortable adding their most important thinking (their reflections) on the left hand side. When they go back to reread their reflections before the second observation in the spring, the template will reflect what their eyes prefer. As a bonus, the reflection box runs along all the steps of the lesson plan, so they can reflect even as they teach the lesson, or at least make notes in the part of the lesson they reflected upon.
Maybe I am way overthinking this, but I think it was worth trying out. Take a look at the template I made at https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B9IW4q_SnPUwZjZlOTZjM2EtYTE2OS00MTM3LTkxMmQtMGVkYjFjZTMwZmU0 and let me know your thoughts. The probationary teachers I shared this with really liked it, but I'd probably say that to my boss too! Also, here is the link to the research about the F pattern when reading online: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/reading_pattern.html
-Matt