Full day of Teaching (NMHS Week 1: Friday)

Thursday was a day off for the year 10 students, so I didn’t teach any classes, but today was a full day of teaching, I had 5 consecutive periods of teaching, a single of science, and then two doubles of maths. Luckily the two classes of maths were nicely synced at the same point so I could do the same lesson with both of them.

I did lesson plans for these as well, both for science and for maths, but much like before, I ended up changing the plan before I delivered the class and never updated the lesson plans. I think that from now on I will stop bothering to do lesson plans (although I will continue to plan lessons). My impression is that lesson plans may hold some value in terms of helping structure thinking about timings (how long certain things will take, planning for transitions that may occur, etc), but that the important thing to do is to plan lessons, not to write lesson plans.

Period 4: Science

In science I spoke a little about conservation of energy, and introduced the concept of gravitational potential energy, I then showed this video (which went down very well). I then gave the class the rest of the lesson to work on their inertia prac report, for which they also had a scaffold to help them structure their report.

Periods 5-6: Maths

I gave the students their summative task for the topic, a directed investigation on movie ratings to be collected from imdb. I showed them how to collect the data, and then went through a little on how to do the necessary calculations for the assignment.

Periods 7-8: Maths

Being able to deliver essentially the same lesson again immediately was so helpful, and I think I did a much better job this time. See the worked example below, which I provided to the students through Day Map for later reference as well.