Last week, I shared some of my daily routines that allowed me to be confident and ready to teach every day. One element of that routine that I wanted to talk about a bit more in-depth was the idea of lesson journaling.
Every classroom teacher, and especially newer teachers, know all about the importance of lesson planning. During my first two years of teaching, my daily lessons plans for each different subject I taught were detailed and extensive. Many ran 2-3 pages in length, as I planned out the estimated timing of each activity and transition, explictly stated my learning targets and aligned standards, outlined needed materials, and included commentary on strategies to check for understanding. In my initial years as a teacher, this level of daily detail was essential as I slowly internalized the instructional strategies and practices that would become my more natural and automatic repertoire.
By my third year, I began experimenting with different formats and templates for my daily lesson planning. I still felt that deliberately connecting each day’s lesson to the standards, drafting my learning target, and outlining my big instructional moves and assessment plans were all essential. Yet it was no longer necessary for me to outline the step by step instructions for the instructional practices I was using. These were things I had now done hundreds of times, and felt confident in my ability to deliver them with just a short reference to the general strategy in my plans. My lesson plans grew shorter, and soon enough I moved to a weekly lesson planner.
Lesson planning is all about your preparation before the lesson begins. I also felt that it was essential to take some time to reflect on lessons after I had taught them, thus my daily practice of lesson journaling. In both my daily and weekly lesson planners, I created a space for a short journal entry at the completion of each day. I would make general comments – “really enjoyed this lesson today,” or “the students responded very positively to this part of the activity,” or “the lesson totally flopped today – my pacing was all off.” I often made comments about the pacing of the lesson, whether I had over or under planned the activities. I also noted concepts that students seemed to struggle with, or on the contrary, those concepts that took less time than I had anticipated.
In my first year, the daily journaling was perhaps more cathartic than anything else. It was good to have a short space to reflect on how things were going each day. The real power of my journaling practice came in future years. You can imagine how much better my instructional practice was during my 2nd and subsequent years of teaching. Not only did I have a complete set of lesson plans already to work from, I also had my journal annotations to give me insights into how I could either adjust a lesson to make it better, or in some cases, scrap the lesson altogether and try something else.
Overtime, my journaling practice became more specific and analytical. Instead of comments like “this lesson went great,” my notes took on a much more professional and insightful tone. “About 1/3 of the students really struggled with the concept of stem-changing verbs today. I thought a single introductory lesson would be sufficient, but can tell I need to slow down to better practice and help student internalize how to do it.” My lesson pacing became more efficient and tailored to the needs of the students.
Of course as a high school teacher, I didn’t always repeat the same courses from year to year, and I wasn’t 100% consistent with journaling every single day. But looking back now, it seems remarkable to me just how often I did reflect and write, and how my journaling practice allowed me to progress and improve in powerful ways during those initial years of teacher.