This week I par­tic­i­pat­ed in #edchatDe, a ger­man twit­ter­chat for educators.

One of the ques­tions was :

Q2: What rules and rit­u­als have you intro­duced to cre­ate a pos­i­tive atmos­phere? #EdchatDE

— EdchatDE (@EdchatDE) 19. novem­ber 2013

 

And my answer was:

@Lektoren I prac­tise that some­times. But — sur­pris­es and “adven­tur­ous lessons” own val­ues as well, espe­cial­ly for younger stu­dents #edchatde

— snufkin (@frandevol) 19. novem­ber 2013

 

@frandevol’s answer gave me food for thought.

This week one of my lessons sur­prised me. I was intro­duc­ing terms to poet­ry analy­sis; metaphors and so forth.

The lesson’s home­work was a par­tic­u­lar poem, and I had a sched­uled plan, with an out­line of the lesson’s con­clu­sions ready in the back of my head, when I went into class.

 

Then one of the stu­dents talked pas­sion­ate­ly about anoth­er poem, and I decid­ed to with her pas­sion. She googled it and copied it into a shared Google Doc.

Bum. New agen­da. Gamechang­er.  New roles.

I was­n’t mr. know-it-all any­more. The stu­dent was ahead of me as she had worked with the poem before.

I had to start ana­lyz­ing from scratch with the stu­dents. I did­n’t have a sug­gest­ed inter­pre­ta­tion of the text before­hand. And it was fun!

‘Moti­va­tion’ is a cur­rent top­ic in Den­mark’s edu­ca­tion­al debate. Some say that stu­dents are demo­ti­vat­ed by not hav­ing influ­ence on the agenda/curriculum. School is like a pre­dictable film rolling before their eyes.

How hard do you stick to your les­son plans and how do you leave room for spon­tane­ity in your planning?