Planning is essential in education, but it’s easy to fall into the habit of treating your session plan or presentation as a set of inputs for a machine: “If I do these things, and introduce this content, and prescribe this activity, this learning will result.”
But we know that groups of people, and especially groups of children, don’t work so predictably. The ‘perfect’ lesson plan a classroom is a Russian doll of one set of complex adaptive systems inside another inside another:
- The rapidly developing minds of children or teenagers…
- Nested in expectations and the social structures and groups-within-groups of kids-at-school culture…
- In the classroom culture shaped by a particular teacher – who is themselves a complex adaptive system of body, thoughts and emotions…
- Interacting with the wider culture of the school…
- All interacting with cultures local, national and international…
- And influenced by what’s going on at home, the weather, what they had for lunch…
In the face of this complexity, the first thing to do is recognise that what happens in our classroom is beyond our control, at least in the mechanistic sense of the word. Trying to impose precise control – of learning outcomes, of students’ behaviour – is a recipe for frustration and disappointment, if not damage.
The second thing is to start thinking about teaching and classroom management in terms of disposition and influence (and teachers can have a lot of influence):
- How can I make it more likely that the people I teach arrive on time and ready to learn?
- How I can I increase their disposition to be kind to each other, or to love this subject and to work hard?
- How can I make it more likely that they’ll do X, rather than Y?
Go to work. Take responsibility. Do the hard work of building a classroom culture that gets your students where they want to go (hint: you might have to start by showing them where it’s possible to go).
But don’t beat yourself up the next time it snows, and the lesson plan goes out the window as the kids pile up against the window to watch the world turn white.
A butterfly must have flapped its wings in New York.