Over/under: How much planning is really necessary? Part I: Over

It was September 2008. I was fewer than four months out of college, and a night away from beginning the teaching career I'd aspired to for years. I would teach three sections the next day: two of sophomore (Form IV) Humanities, and one of Form V American Literature....And I was going to be prepared.

The sophomore summer reader at this school was just a little book (only a poem, really!): The Aeneid. The juniors had "read" Huckleberry Finn. You know, a couple lightweight texts, no worries about leaving students alone with dense Classical allusion or satire on America's racist past...

I planned every five minutes of those classes: I knew, following a trip through the detailed syllabus, all the questions I'd ask, and everywhere I'd lead the discussion. I bet I even planned my jokes.

And then, of course, the kids hadn't read. Or they hadn't read well. And I adapted, and we all adjusted, and after a few weeks we got to know each other and started to learn.

I taught at that school for two years, and continued to plan heavily--but I'd learned I had to be just as prepared to improvise.

Fast forward two years. New school, new material--this time of my own choosing. I had let go of planning every minute of my classes, but I still knew everything I wanted us to cover and the order I hoped we'd cover it in.

The kids were so enthusiastic. It was going great!

...for me.

After a few weeks I got feedback that the students felt I was stifling them.

And they were right. As always, I'd known where I wanted the conversation to go; and as it turns out, I'd taken all that enthusiasm, that excitement over the vibrant texts we were reading, and I'd tried to wrangle it, to wrestle and shape it toward my ends, regardless of what the students really were thinking and wanted to say. I had them excited, and I was wasting it, because my excitement was more important to me than theirs was.

Fast forward another couple years, to now. Most days, I plan one question, and I give it to students for a blog reflection ahead of class. When it turns out to be the right question--it doesn't always--we spend long enough on it in the first part of discussion to send us in plenty of productive directions for the rest of the period. I can't help but have some ideas of where I'd like things to go, but I'm trying hard to let go of the reins and allow the students to follow their own ideas. On days when it wasn't the right question, I diagnose: where did I lose them? I try to find something that we all did understand, and build from there. This is an act of improvisation. It's harried, it's exhausting; but it's genuine. In that same spirit, I don't bother planning my discussion questions (except the unit's essential questions) weeks ahead of time, because they have to come out of the progress we've made recently, which can't be predicted.

I expect I'll write a great deal more in this space about leading discussion. There's so much more for me to learn! But I've learned for sure it's a waste of time--and worse, a pedagogical sin--to plan too much, and to prioritize the plan over the students' understanding.