What Do You Do When your Great Plans Become Shambles?

A while ago we were invited by Dr. Geoffrey Rutledge MD, PhD to become members of Wellsphere, a health community knowledge that makes its approach personal. I was offered to be featured as Top Educational Blogger. Not that I am disappointed because I really like this place, but it's not our environment. However, what we ended being selected is as Top Healthcare Blogger. So, you will find our posts also in this great Wellsphere. Thanks Dr. Geoffrey.

When do we as teachers learn how to teach?

It is an interesting question that I asked myself after years of work in the classroom. Looking back at our first days in front of young students, we are immediately placed in situations where we are supposed to be teaching/educating both students themselves and junior teachers. Surprisingly, we are given this task without any clue on how to educate at this level.

I will try to convey some of the information I've learned. You will be in a room filled with people who are interested in the how of education; how do we teach the information so that the learner will learn and retain the information. We teachers/professors have our biases about what is important and what is not. The tools and techniques that we all use are slightly and sometimes vastly different.

A good way to start is reading Taran Fedor's experiences as we cited in this post yesterday. Now, remember that teachers don’t go into the profession because they have a desire to earn tons of money, no secrets, that’s why we think it is so helpful to share ideas about how to learn the art of teaching and how to live a life that fully utilizes the income teachers do earn.

Another great resource we will recommend is a place that have good lesson plans and background resource materials. It is curriki, an online learning community started by Sun Microsystems to develop education resources. There Mrs. P of The Prudent Classroom, found a great webquest that did work with her school firewall ( as many school districts have in place blocking firewalls) within minutes. While reading her blog, I came to conclude that Mrs. P forgot to mention her second finding. I still expect she can catch this post and complete what was promised.

Don't you think It's All about Balance? What it will the route you want to take when all your great plans become a mess?