Learning Targets & Targeting Teachers (Part One)
Educator Primer for Managing Lesson Plans & Related Doctrinaire Tedium
“The people who must never have power are the humorless. To impossible certainties of rectitude they ally tedium and uniformity.” —Christopher Hitchens
DISCLAIMER: No, I am not god’s gift to teaching, parading this column as proof of my stratospheric master educator status. However, after over 25 years in the cinder-blocks. . .
Another Actual Dialogue Scene at a Copier Machine
CAST: TEACHER KNOW; veteran teachers’ union rep surveying general staff anxiety, occasionally offering relevant advice. TEACHER NO MORE; younger, reluctant to share any frustrations boiling on the verge of burnout, until probably too late in short-lived career.
TEACHER KNOW: So, how did you like the latest semi-annual email decree for daily lesson plans?
TEACHER NO MORE (clearly agitated): I think everybody should do lesson plans. What’s wrong with that?
TEACHER KNOW: I agree with lesson planning, not lesson plans.
TEACHER NO MORE: There’s a difference?
TEACHER KNOW: Certainly. For starters, detailed daily lesson plans are almost always administrative-centered, while simpler lesson planning, such as unit plan outlines, trusts the professionalism of the educator in assessing their opportunity cost, to de—
TEACHER NO MORE: —I’m sorry, but we’ll have to talk about this at another time, I’m late for a meeting. Bye, now.
TEACHER KNOW: Oh. Ok. Ciao.
TEACHER NO MORE would exit the profession less than two years after our brief exchange. We never did get a chance to further discuss how to navigate the all-too common drudgery.
Educators across all disciplines wrestle with many internal conflicts, including on occasion, this vital question: “Should I be a good teacher or a good employee?”
Other reflections encompass, “What are so-called best practices?”
“When do different methodologies yield different results?”
“Is highly qualified teaching a science, an art or a complicated mix of both?”
Final Learning Target from another abandoned and dilapidated former Detroit school, circa 2010.
Educators across all disciplines wrestle with many internal conflicts, including on occasion, this vital question: “Should I be a good teacher or a good employee?”
When I began earning a teaching degree in the mid-1990s, more technical pedagogical jargon would not supplant goals or objectives with student evaluations until the next decade. “Success criteria,” with assessments subdivided into both “formative and summative” (a term elevated in the English lexicon very recently, since roughly 2018) would eventually dominate administrative lingo when observing teachers for their so-called efficiency.
Hardly surprising, when so many districts adopt business models in defining achievement.
Also not surprising, when so many contemporary educators (such as Robert Marzano and John Haitte) are still scrambling to re-evaluate why so many “best practices” have frequently failed since Covid-19 and the unforeseen rise of intensified screen addiction distractions, student truancies and teenage violence.
So these ever-common administrative fiats for daily lesson plans seem to be evolving to make our profession more esoteric, instead of more meaningful. These top-down requests (or worse, requirements) emphasize curriculum aligned detail to inform the evaluator more than the instruction.
If teachers can subtly resist this common irritation — the pedantry of lesson plans — we can gently grab the steering wheel of instructional delivery over unnecessary, routinized tedium to addressing more vital educational needs.
Before and during the Great Recession, closed Detroit schools revealed libraries often crumbling into impromptu landfills. A kind of snowy sadness?
DAILY LESSON PLANS
Whether an educator with a bullseye on their back (often the non-tenured newcomer) or just mildly annoyed with these bureaucratic detours, the opportunity cost of making daily Lesson Plans versus assessing the daily classroom work guided, observed and collected — can be a needlessly internecine conflict.
In addition, what if we’re faced with the dilemma of spending more time and energy completing administrative-designed lesson templates than, say, the after-school devotion to one’s own immediate family or significant others?
Well, here are a few quick tips:
There are many ways teachers can emphasize their dedication to lesson planning (which also allows for frequent contingencies) without the tedium of extensive lesson plans answering hierarchical directives.
In all likelihood, the administrators issuing such decrees do not have the energy and time to keep reviewing such tedious documents every day (there should be many more significant issues demanding their attention), which means;
Short-cut cutting and pasting assignments will often suffice even the most drudgery-determined bosses,
Where colleagues may be able to combine submitted efforts to meet the minimal requirements,
Where essential basic unit outlines can satisfy most at-a-glance bureaucrats. We can also reassure admin we’ll (eventually?) elaborate more if they insist on greater descriptions over our applied professionalism, while we review
How the delivery of the lesson remains much more important than any blueprint on blue-lined paper or online classroom files.
In other words, in this era of mass teacher shortages and increasingly disconnected students, do we dare to flip the switch of principals and supervisors asking, “Where are your lesson plans and learning targets?” to more pertinent questions of “What do you need to enhance student relevancy before increasing their achievement?”
. . . or quite simply, the shared inquiry, “How can I better support you?”