Matching My Lesson to My Students

In Skill vs planning from Seth Godin's Blog by Seth Godin talks about gardening and says,  

“But don’t beat yourself up just because the climate doesn’t match your seeds.

This has me thinking about how sometimes my lessons work in the classroom and sometimes they don’t. When it doesn’t work, I need to reflect and figure out why it didn’t. If I don’t try to figure out the cause, I may end up repeating the same mistakes and getting the same results.

I need to make sure that I’m not just teaching a lesson to teach the lesson. I need to make sure that I’m not teaching a lesson because “everyone else is teaching it!” I need to make sure there is a need for students to learn this material. If the students are not motivated to learn because of relevance, then it is my problem and not their problem. Sometimes the relevance may be the fact, that I am required to teach it and they are required to learn it in order to build on this skill for future lessons. I believe it is okay to tell students this. There will many times as adults that they will have to learn something they aren’t that interested in because it is a building block for another skill they will need.

I need to make sure that I’m teaching this lesson on the level of my student’s understanding. If I water it down too much, it will feel condescending and my students will tune me out. If it is too complicated and complex, then my students will shut down when they become frustrated. If my students are high school level, I should not have lessons that are babyish and make them feel humiliated. I also shouldn’t be teaching elementary school students a lesson that is geared for a high school class because their developmental level may not be at the same point as an older student.

I need to make sure that there are enough activities within the lesson that will keep my students engaged in the lesson. I find lectures and taking notes pretty boring and I’m sure most of my students do too. If it is boring for me to teach it, I’m sure that the students are even more bored. If I have activities that are fun and interesting, not only will be students be engaged but hopefully, they will remember what they learn.

By matching my lesson to the students’ needs and instruction levels, I will be more successful in teaching the lesson.

How do you match your lessons to your students? Please share.

Photo by Joshua Lanzarini on Unsplash