Lesson planning is one of the most time-consuming parts of this job, and (infuriatingly) you're expected to do most of that incredibly important work off the clock. I think a lot of teachers feel like it SHOULD be faster and easier, especially if you've been teaching for a while. It's frustrating to spend soooo long trying to nail just one lesson out of the hundreds you'll teach this year. I'm talking about this with Jennifer Gonzalez of Cult of Pedagogy on an upcoming episode of the Truth...

You've heard "activate prior knowledge" a million times. And, you're already good at it. You ask kids what they remember from yesterday, you do the KWL chart, you run the quick turn-and-talk. But there's a whole layer of behavioral science underneath that phrase that most teacher PD skips entirely. It's called priming, and it's happening in your classroom every minute of every day whether you plan it or not. Priming is when exposure to one thing changes how your brain processes the next...

As a student, I loved playing Oregon Trail in my high school's computer lab. To this day, I could still win at that game (and it's still playable, for free, at the link above!) I know when to ford the river, and which buttons to press to hunt. But despite dozens of in-school hours spent on the game, I didn't learn or retain much about the actual Oregon Trail. I didn't learn who followed the trail, why they went, or why dysentery was such a big issue (or for that matter, how dysentry even...