Latest / New Teacher Talk / Ep 150: The WHY of Your Lesson

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Ep 150: The WHY of Your Lesson · New Teacher Talk

Welcome to the latest episode of New Teacher Talk where we
discuss issues that are important to aspiring and early
career educators.
Whether you are in a rural, suburban, or urban setting,
we are here to provide insights, advice,
and support to help you thrive in your teaching journey.
My name is Jesse Kraft,
and I am an executive principal in Fairfax County Public
Schools Virginia and a former principal and a former
teacher.
Today I'm going to talk about something that can really
make a lesson more compelling for students and honestly a
little more fun to teach is when you as a teacher establish
a very clear why for the lesson why WHY the purpose for the
lesson and not just establishing it for yourself but making
it really clear to your students that what I'm about to
teach you is really important to you and your life
hopefully to your life right now.
You know teachers are pretty good about naming a learning
target for today's lesson.
Always a good practice if you're not doing it.
I recommend it.
They'll even post a learning target.
This is the thing that we're doing today in math could be
learning order of operations.
It could be you know practicing poetic form.
It could be a number of things that are in your curriculum.
You lift out the main point.
That's the learning target.
That's the what we are doing.
The how we're going to learn about it is also fairly
obvious to students and we should even make that clear not
just implied.
Typically the assignments we give to students the questions
we ask them however we structure the lesson is the how but
we can often as teachers leave off the why for even
learning this particular skill or idea.
When I was a principal I remember observing a really strong
experience teacher.
She's in a room for an observation.
I'd return to her afterwards with feedback that was very
heavy on praise and I never had that much to offer her to
grow and this was a go-getter excellent teacher who I think
was wanting hoping that I could return and give her some
kind of like idea that would up her game and make her
instruction even more effective and I'd come up with
nothing.
It was always just so good.
I would validate her and that is pretty important,
but I couldn't give her growth producing feedback until one
lesson.
I was in a typically brilliant lesson in this teacher's
fifth grade classroom and I shifted my focus from observing
her teaching behaviors which was me taking notes on you
know what she said the questions she asked how long
transitions took in the room what were her directions you
know what was different about the small group she met with
and how she differentiated instruction. Those are all
teacher moves, and she was great at that.
So,
I shifted away from that because it was typically good and
I focused on the kids and what they thought about what they
were learning and how that looked was I pulled up on the
side of three different kids and I asked them,
you know one-on-one,
what are you learning? The what was pretty easy for kids to
answer because this teacher had the learning targets
posted. All they had to do was look up and read it,
and say oh you know we're uh learning about different forms
of poetry.
My next question,
well how you doing that like what are you up to again. This
is a pretty easy question for an engaged student to
answer. They pretty much would just say what the activity
they were doing you know Miss White taught a lesson earlier
and kind of modeled a couplets and we and we are like
reading this article and now writing our own. So that was
the how the what,
and the how pretty easy. And then I would ask why do you
think Miss White wants you to learn this?
And that was a really hard question even for really smart
kids. The reason it was hard is because the teacher had not
talked to them about it I got some pretty funny answers,
with that the typical ones you would expect you know why
are we working on this it'll be on the test on Friday or
it'll be on the standardized test at the end of the year or
I don't know. It's interesting something vague or broad
instead of something that was meaningful to them.
So the the thing I would like to advise you on is don't
leave that out when you're designing your lesson and you're
delivering it to students if there's a what there's a how
and there's also a why and if you want your kids to have a
little more buy-in to what they're about to learn and
engage in the lesson a little bit more establishing a
compelling age appropriate why for like why we would even
spend time learning about this will very likely get them to
a place of deeper learning better behavior and more
engagement in the lesson if you think about it as an adult
learner when you have to go to professional development
sessions if you don't see a purpose for it you're probably
not going to engage as much as you would if you knew this
was really relevant to your job and was going to help you
be a better teacher So if it's true for you,
it's true for them.
Establish that why, name it, start the lesson with it,
end the lesson with it in the reflection.
What do we do today?
How did we do it?
Why is a great go-to wrap-up to a lesson.
And there's other ones,
but that one will work great if you have nothing else.
So think about it and enjoy.
That's a wrap on today's new teacher talk.
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