The five planning techniques in this chapter are designed to be implemented
before you walk in the door of your classroom. They are a bit different from the
other techniques in this book in that they are not for the most part executed live
in front of students. Few people will see you do them. But they set the stage for
your success once you do walk in the door so they are inexplicably linked to the
rest of the techniques you’ll find in this book. To state the obvious, these five
specific types of planning are critical to effective teaching.
TECHNIQUE 2
BEGIN WITH THE END
When I started teaching, I would ask myself while I planned, “What am I going
to do tomorrow?” The question revealed the flaws in my planning method in
at least two critical ways—even without accounting for my sometimes dubious
answers to the question.
The first flaw was that I was thinking about an activity for my classes on
the following day, not an objective—what I wanted my students to know or
be able to do by the end of the lesson. It’s far better to start the other way
around and begin with the end, the objective. By framing an objective first, yousubstitute, “What will my students understand today?” for, “What will my students do today?” The first of these questions is measurable. The second is not.
The only criterion that determines the success of an activity is not whether you
do it and people seem to want to do it, but whether you achieved an objective
can be assessed. Instead of thinking about an activity, perhaps, “We are reading
To Kill a Mockingbird,” framing your objective forces you to ask what your
students will get out of reading the book. Will they understand and describe the
nature of courage as demonstrated in To Kill a Mockingbird? Will they understand and describe why injustice sometimes prevails as demonstrated in To Kill
a Mockingbird? Or perhaps they’ll use To Kill a Mockingbird to describe how
important characters are developed through their words and actions.
