I’m finding the lesson lengths to be problematic.
I am not one to try and be a special flower, but as I have encountered more and more lessons that are 65 minutes, 75 minutes, 105 minutes, it has become impossible to plan out classes. If my class was an hour, or an hour and a half, or the 50minute class that I have, few of the lesson match well, creating a need to assign the check for understandings as homework, or extend into the next class and transition into the next lesson, that also won’t fit into that time slot.
I don’ t know if there is a good solution for this, and I am not saying that having lessons that extend 2 class periods is a problem, but when a lesson is 1.2 classes, it makes for scattered transitions and weird down time.
I’m open to suggestions. I am currently on unit 5 (we skipped unit 4 and will be coming back to it after we do the App create task) which will conclude at the end of the semester if everything goes on schedule.
Yes, it’s a tough problem to tackle since there’s many aspects and variables.
I would take the posted times as more approximations and guidelines - as I’m sure the actual time taken depends on the students you have, your own style and pacing, whether you incorporate your own elements like notebooks or quizzes, etc.
I found when I first implemented a lesson, the time I take would rarely be close to the posted times. My ability to predict and adjust the actual lesson time definitely improved the more I implemented lessons (and in following years). I also incorporated some more “flexible” time like daily warmups, where I would take the first 5-15 minutes of class having my students work on something that either reviews previous days’ content or acts as a setup/preview of the upcoming content. I often created these warmups myself, but they also acted as opportunities for me to use the previous lesson’s reflection if I didn’t have time to get to that, or do end-of-lesson practice problems… basically a way to act as spillover time for the previous or upcoming lesson.
As for Unit 5, my students tend to get pretty spread out. There’s no way I’m waiting for everyone to finish all the bubbles in a lesson, as the time difference between the first and last student finishing would likely be more than an entire period. Instead, I look ahead to future lessons and get an idea of what’s the minimum bubble every student needs to reach, and as long as every student (as much as possible) gets there, I’m okay with moving on to the next lesson.